With US beef prices soaring to record highs, you might think that South Dakota cattle rancher Eric Gropper would be celebrating.
Yet while the cost of the meat in US supermarkets is now 12% higher than it was a year ago, a rise more than three times the rate of general inflation, Gropper says that he and all the other beef farmers aren’t making any more profit than usual.
Farmers are generally very wealthy people. That is the inevitable result of a century of farm consolidations. Most farmers are not true farmers in the traditional sense. They operate large “family farms” that are just family-owned businesses in the same was Johnson and Johnson is a family business. The large number of migrant workers and farm hands they hire do the real work. But the actual guy who owns the land, whose family has had the land for five generations? That is literally just landed gentry.
Some of them I guess. One of farmers south of here who does own six hundred acres was involved in a serious accident on the farm when he was in his 70’s Two weeks later he is back out there over the objections of his whole family working harder then you can get the average twenty something to work these days. Personally I disliked him but you couldn’t call him lazy or uninvolved. My experience doesn’t match your description. It may be different elsewhere but I don’t see it your way.