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- Posted by: @jaccenPosted by: @norman-oklahomaPosted by: @holy-cow
@norman-oklahoma
Rating land use for livestock is based on an animal unit, standardized at 1000 pounds of live weight. Mature cows tend to run between 900 and 1400 pounds. In our area the standard is four acres per animal unit. In the arid regions of the West that number can grow to 100 acres per animal unit as much of the area does not grow much in the way of usable feed.
So something on the order of 1000 beasties on 4500 acres. Which, I think, take a couple of years to grow to a marketable size? And sell for $2500?-ish. Yielding a gross return of about $250-$300 per year per acre? If the profit margin is 10%, $25/acre net. Meaning an income of a little over $100k per year for a rancher with 4500 acres. That is, 4500 acres is a small family operation.
These are all costs and projections from a suburban lifer with some google-fu skills but little personal experience in the matter.
Side note from my own personal experience–family farms are only cash-rich/financially viable when:
1. they sell the whole operation (ie. no longer farmers)
2. expand to the size they need to incorporate (ie. no longer the “family farm”)
3. leverage their holdings to secure loans from the bank that take over 50 years to pay so that inflation helps them pay things off in the future (ie. so 10 to 20 years after the original farmer dies)
Or, in short, they usually are not cash-rich. The majority of farmers, in my area, also hold second jobs as the farm itself would just barely support a small family. Case in point–me.
I help run our family farm. My Dad went in full bore in the early 80’s cash cropping 13 other farms and expanded our original 50 acre farm to the ~200 acres we have now. We retired the old converted dairy barns and built 2 X 1000 head hog finisher barns around 2000 when the market crashed in 1998 and it was no longer financially viable to remain independent. We are now part of a co-op that delivers around ~100,000 market hogs a year to a local slaughterhouse. My surveying and engineering jobs are my secondary; my brother (my “coworker”) drives a truck for a living. My Dad paid off all of his loans a couple years ago (so a ~40 year payback). This was before land prices exploded from $5000/workable acre to the current $25000/workable acre in our area. All of our equipment is around 35 years or older and fixed by us. My dad’s truck was about the cheapest 2 wheel drive F-150 he could get back 12 years ago. We are extremely mindful of costing and doing everything within our power to keep things done by the family as exterior costs are huge to a small operation like us.
Current family farms will never be paid off in our area until the children do so or the farm is sold.
That pretty much sums it up. Here in SE MO, row croppers are trying to farm anything in the hills (Crowley’s Ridge) that won’t wash away before harvest. That puts pressure on ground that is better suited for grazing, but the cash row crop renters are paying what cow men can’t, so just finding a place is difficult. Farms in my area are not paying for themselves, I’ve went through a few pencils trying to make it work on paper. I am running a few cows on a farm my grandpa bought about six mo before I was born. I am fortunate to do so, it’s been a source of enjoyment for me all my life. I am just trying to hang on to it.
Unless you direct sale fat cattle (market is/was around 1.20/lb live for a 1300 lb steer is more common), or raise breeding stock for a production type auction, I doubt you will see much bringing $2500. As an example, I just sold some spring calves not long ago. Heifer wt averaged 571 @ 1.37/lb = $782
I am running around a cow per 4 acres consistently, plus backgrounding fall calves on part of it all summer. So, in the summer our ratio is about one grazing unit per 2.5ac. I keep it limed, but no yearly fertilizer application.
@aliquot I understand, but I have dozens of corners 10 feet away from where you might thinks the boundary corner would be. I don’t like to think how many might get pulled up because someone disagrees or thinks it to be inferior. The days of fieldwork and the thousands of client dollars spent for nothing.
you are absolutely correct sir. we never know who may have moved a monument previously found. i can move any monument laterally as to maintain the distances. heck go move the next five down line that would introduce an angular error.
that you could without noticeable error without a survey.
That is not what persons who love our profession would ever do. thank you sir.
@samlucy3874 we have files full of 1950s/1960s field notes and computations, not much in the way of narrative-what did you do and why?
I read through the old field notes. Have the filed Record of Survey??set conc mon, great??.series of bearings and distances set conc mon on 1/16th line. Pull out the notes, east end was a conc mon set 10 years to replace wooden post set by lumber companies decades before with 2 bearing trees marked with lumber company initials (2 of them). The conc mon is there but BTs are gone. None of this is on the filed map.
West end conc mon replaced wood post 10 years before with a big redwood stump faced and scribed with lumber company initials. That one was pulled and moved 14 feet, nothing on the map, no memos in the file, nothing. The stump is still there but the scribing has been erased. It??s only in the field notes, have to patiently leaf through page after page of deflection angle traverse notes to find what they did. I found the hole the conc mon came out of, still there after 50 years.
that was 5 years ago I found that.
Current project, there is a memo in the file and field notes complete with sketches. He found an 1883 stone mound in 1956. Stone mound is along side the stone (which side?), no marked stone found. So he used the stone mound for latitude (1/4s between 25 & 26) and moved it 3-1/2 feet west to line between section corners. The thing is the stone would??ve been on the east side of the mound. This is weird, never seen anything like it.
I was trained by one chief if I leave anything rebar as control give it a dimple.
Seems pretty simple.
@drakej6 I’m in CT….I can’t get my head around 4500 acres…
Was it 3/8″x4′ contractor’s stringline pin offset to the setback or easement line? Protruding, flush or buried? If you were going to document your survey and positions and make your survey of record, then what was the harm in leaving it? Don’t know where your at, but 10 feet is a mighty long ways away. Why were you even looking that far from the calculated position anyway when you knew that you and any other competent surveyor would accept an undocumented non original monument that was found to be that far out of position? Noting and referencing the unaccepted rebar by distance and bearing on the plat/report is a requirement of our state’s standards (KS). I guess if it is not there then there is nothing to note and reference! 😉
It’s in a remote area, I accepted all the monuments I’ve found from the surveyor that set it, except this one:
The bar was here, 10′ from my section breakdown calc. I turned it up with my metal detector when I went to look before setting mine.
I figured there might be a monument there and I’d been accepting all the ones I found, those were usually less than .5′ from my calcs, no big deal. But this one was out quite a distance and since there isn’t any occupation history for the property lines I set mine. I wasn’t going to leave another monument there.
Not that it should matter, but the neighbors property is SE of the pink line X, my clients owns the other 3 quadrants and the rebar was well into the SE quadrant so my client is losing with my position. I doubt the neighbor would care one way or the other, but since the rebar was set for a survey my client commissioned, it really needs to be placed correctly to a sectional breakdown. All 5 controlling corners are existing marked set stones.
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