Best advice you never paid for...

[toquark]

From a neighbour when i was considering a career in agriculture during FMD In 2001: “farming was the first industry and it’ll be the last”. I promptly pursued a career in commercial forestry and farm on the side ?

 

[db9go]

It's all been short statements so far, so here is a story which I hope will really help someone.

A farmer in his mid 30s confessed to a friend, who was a friend of his late father, that he was making no headway with the large debt that he took on when his father had died about 10 years before and he was thinking of throwing in the towel.
The friend gave him this advice.
"I wasn't from a farming family and started from nothing on a rented farm. I farmed for a few years and was just getting somewhere when the estate wanted the farm back to farm inhand (early 70s). They treated me fairly and paid me to get out.
I looked around for another farm and found one a few miles away for sale, it was pretty run down, but with what I had from the estate and could borrow from the bank and family I could just about afford it.
I milked cows, grew spuds, Christmas turkeys, arable on the rest and anything to earn a bit extra. I worked every hour god sent.
I spent a few years wondering what I had let myself in for, I had never a pound to go for a pint if I didn't sell a bag of spuds for cash, no money for kids school meals, let alone shoes etc.
WHAT HAD I DONE ?
Then came 1976, and I had a shed full of spuds !
I nearly earned enough that year to pay for the farm.
If you really want to farm, keep going, your '76 will come. If your hearts not in it don't waste your life, pack up !"

2008 was that younger farmers '76 when interest rates were slashed and the monthly payments were more capitol than interest.

Times change. You make your own luck !

100%

 

[Derrick Hughes]

Always have a back up plan
I remember going to get bales as kids . Two of us on the trailer . Little Dexa took of down the hill . My young brother picked up the rope and tried too Lasso a tree . Now that's a plan ! True story