Here on our street in Middle Tennessee, where MacDougal Post World Headquarters is located, production of beans and corn has tripled this season, up from no production before last year. Beans are soybeans, but people look at you funny when you call them that, so we stopped and just say “beans” like everybody else.
The earth-moving equipment used to tear down and haul off the 100 year-old house and accompanying shade trees one morning this Spring was so impressive that, coupled with the equally astonishing 30 yard wide farm equipment used to clear and plant the 100 acre patch it stood on the next morning, got us thinking, and now that rows and rows of beans are turning all that brown dirt into shoulder to shoulder greenery, we‘ve got to key it into written word.
There are similar patches of land all over this part of Tennessee, and with the technology these people have today, what’s to stop bean and corn production from tripling on everybody’s street? And that’s just in this part of Tennessee. We don’t understand why bean and corn prices should ever stay up if new production can be added so quickly and massively once their prices spike. Three quarters of our crops are growing on previously idle land, the rest on what used to be a hay field right next door.
Maybe two years ago the guy with the farm equipment told us he can lease all the land people want to give him. There’s no capacity problem these days, unless Monsanto and them haven’t bagged enough seed.
We know nothing about any of this stuff, just what you can see with your own eyes. And that’s how fast this unbelievable equipment ramped up bean and corn production kind of out of nowhere all along our street.
Now pears, apples, and walnuts, that’s another story. We grow them right here at World Headquarters. On trees. Forget adding new crops overnight. But beans and corn, how can price hikes there have any chance of sticking? The way farming seems to be done these days, we‘ll be up to our ears in beans and corn by next year latest.
