Yeah... mega corporations have "vertically integrated" the industry which is why ag is in such sorry shape and farmers can barely make it now... They've "chickenized" the pork and poultry industries, now dairy, and they're trying desperately to do it to beef. They've done everything "off farm" to vertically integrate beef production, but the fact that a cow takes 9 months to have ONE calf (usually) and then another roughly 9 months to raise it to sale age/weight and needs at least an acre or two of pasture in the best grazing areas to do it, and MANY MORE acres to do it in poorer rangeland areas, PLUS needs a bull (or troublesome AI) per 25 cows or so, means there's no "economical" way to do it EXCEPT on pasture. Fattening cattle can be done in a feedlot or barn, as Jacob shows, but not housing momma cows and calves. Things were vastly different when I was a kid in the 70's... back then nearly EVERY corn/soybean farmer had a hog house and raised hogs, and WALKED their corn off the farm like Jacob is doing. Hogs, chickens, eggs, fed cattle, etc. was where the money was at! Instead of selling megatons of cheap corn to the elevators, they fed MOST of their grain to their own hogs, chickens, and feeder calves, and fattened them up to slaughter weight and then sold them at auction to processors. Back then, MOST of the processors were small operations, local packing plants, that bought livestock within a hundred mile or so radius and sold most of their meat produced locally or regionally, with certain areas well placed to support large export markets or long-distance shipping of meat to distant cities. There were THOUSANDS of packers back then. Then the 80's hit and the mega-corporations drove the price per pound for hogs down to pennies a pound, and farmer's couldn't make ANYTHING at those prices, so WHY DO IT? They sold all their hogs and now most of those old hog barns are either storage sheds or torn down. My BIL's old hog barn holds all their small equipment, mowers, skid steer, as well as seed boxes, chemical totes, etc. Of course people still wanted pork, and with a growing population more was needed, but the mega-corporations had successfully "vertically integrated" and "chickenized" the industry. The CAFO was born. All the pigs went to 100,000 hog mega-CAFO operations which produce as much manure as a human city of 100,000 people, became the norm. Farmers had NO CHOICE but to haul all their corn and grain to town and sell it at the elevator, which ultimately sells to the big mega-corporations, which make money on every bushel they touch. Can't make any money having those pesky farmers keeping their own grain and feeding their own livestock, now can we??! The farmers can't make any money selling cheap grain to the elevator, so they rent more acres trying to make it up in volume, "get big, or get out!" becomes the mantra... borrow the money to buy inputs to plant all those acres, pay more rent, buy bigger equipment, make the banker and equipment dealers rich, and the mega-corporations buying all that cheap grain, then selling it to their own contract CAFO operators raising 100,000 hogs or running feedlots with 60,000 head of feeders on hand. In the late 80's and 90's, the mega corporations set their sights on "vertically integrating" the meat packers, and started a "merger mania" and bought out all their competition, merging it all into just a handful of mega-corporations. "Concentration in the packer industry" they call it. OF course once you buy out all the competition, there's no money to be made running thousands of small packing plants supplying local/regional markets within a couple hundred miles (for most of them) so they started shutting them down as "uneconomical" and POOF there went all those jobs, local businesses, and taxes that the plants were paying into their communities, creating a ripple effect. The mega-corporations saw a buck to be made, and took it, and to h3ll with the communities. Now they have it SO "vertically integrated" that now just a handful of mega-plants handle nearly ALL the meat packing in the US... Of course concentrating all that production capacity into only a handful of plants makes the system FAR more brittle and susceptible to supply-chain interruptions-- say a major national disaster, war, PANDEMIC, etc. that destroys or interrupts operations at that handful of plants, it becomes a BOTTLENECK that grinds the entire system to a halt... which is EXACTLY what we saw in the pandemic, as livestock was being "euthanized" and buried in holes behind those mega-production barns because there was NO PLACE TO GO with them because the handful of mega-packing plants were shut down or didn't have workers due to the virus... even as store shelves were empty of meat! In the 70's, if a plant burned down or a virus shut down one plant, well, you could have hauled your livestock 100-200 miles in practically any direction to ANOTHER plant that was probably still operating, not "ethanize" them and bury them in a hole. OR you could hold onto them awhile longer til you could figure out where to go with them... NOW with "vertically integrated" and "Just in Time" production, the barn full of hogs is supposed to go to the processor on Monday, the barn cleaned out and sanitized, because another load of 100,000 pigs is coming in Saturday... one bottleneck in the vertically integrated operation stops the WHOLE MACHINE. NO flexibility... making the whole structure brittle. Now the supply chain "shortages" (which are all engineered as part of the faults in the system and are being taken advantage of) is upending the whole scheme; corn and grain prices are through the roof, so the feeders are driving down the price of calves to save money so they make a profit selling to the packers. So small cow/calf guys like us are feeling the squeeze. Grain farmers aren't being allowed to keep that money from those super-high grain prices-- the price of inputs has DOUBLED from last year and so all that money is flying right back out their doors to pay for seed/chemicals/fertilizer/fuel/parts/supplies. It's all going right back into the pockets of the mega-corporations that sell all those inputs and are buying all that grain to sell to their "contract growers" who raise their hogs and poultry and feeder stock to supply their packing plants. Meanwhile the CUSTOMER, the public, is left with grocery stores with half the shelves bare and sky high prices on what they DO have, while the farmers are struggling to make a living with sky-high grain and input prices, and the ranchers are getting squeezed as prices for calves fall precipitously. It's all about GREED... big, fat, GREEDY mega-corporations. Now you can't even grow poultry "commercially" without a contract with a mega-corporation. Hogs might as well be, and the cattle feeders are all in the big packer's pockets, which are all owned by mega-corporations. Now they're doing the same to dairy-- if you can't supply at least a semi-full of milk daily, the mega-plants owned by the big corporations don't want you. SO all the small family dairies are being squeezed out, replaced by 300+ cow mega diaries, most of which are owned by conglomerates running multiple farms, sometimes thousands of dairy cattle... Only space for small producers anymore is "niche" production-- producing your own cheese or milk for local sale, or producing your own livestock for local sale/consumption, but that entails a TON of regulatory hurdles and "compliance and inspection" to jump through... The big corporations are trying to stop even that, using their buddies they bought and paid for in gubmint to put more regulations and hurdles in farmer's way to do local sales... I've heard here in Texas they're trying to stop farmers selling "deer corn" unless it's tested and inspected to make sure it's not high aflatoxin or whatever, which would be rejected or severely docked so it was practically worthless at elevators... can't have deer getting bad livers from moldy corn! LOL:) No, can't have farmers having an ALTERNATIVE MARKET apart from the local elevator and selling it to the mega-corporations which can twist them around any way they like, and the farmer can't do anything about it! Same thing with artisanal cheese, selling whole milk, raising meat birds or livestock, etc... anything they can throw up as a regulatory hurdle to make "compliance" more expensive and difficult and therefore steal money out of the farmer's pocket, and small independent packers, they'll do, because THERE'S A BUCK TO BE MADE, and it "belongs to the mega corporations" in THEIR mind... Now they're also coming at it from the opposite end... you don't own your seed, you "purchase the RIGHT to use their technology" under a technology agreement-- h3ll you don't even own your own crop until the Boll Weevil Eradication Program SAYS you do with their "signed release letter" allowing you to sell your crop! You don't OWN your new tractor or equipment, even though you paid for it, because you cannot REPAIR it without the company's software and technician, effectively, their CONSENT. That's why they've been in a race to patent every crop, every animal, every sequence of DNA they can detect that might prove useful, and put all this electronic GARBAGE on everything that relies on their "intellectual property" in order to operate, so they basically have you coming and going-- jump through their hoops, sign their agreements, stay in their pockets, or "get out". Become a serf on your own farm... That's what "vertical integration" and "just in time" production has wrought... and then the system inevitably collapses eventually, there's gonna be a lot of people go hungry because of it. BUT, who cares?? THERE'S A BUCK TO BE MADE!!!! Later! OL J R :)

What'd she put malathion soap bottles for?? Sprinking in the garden or something?? Makes sense. Grandma's were smart that way LOL:) My Grandmother had the bad habit of grabbing a container based on its shape and using it, without reading the label. One time I came in from the field and grabbed lunch off the stove... threw a fried pork chop on the plate and scooped out some mac-n-cheese and green beans out of their pots, and tossed a slice of bread on top, poured a glass of tea, and went to the living room to watch "Buck Rogers" on the VCR while I ate before I had to go back to the field. I started eating, had a bite of chop, then grabbed a forkful of mac-n-cheese while my teenage self was watching Erin Gray wiggle around in spandex... Suddenly I was like "WTF??" as I had a mouthful of cheesy macaroni with an overwhelming flavor of CINNAMON!!! I jumped up and ran back in the kitchen to the sink and spat it out and was like, "What the h3ll is that??" Grandma explained with a sour look on her face, "I grabbed the wrong can-- I was gonna put pepper in the mac-n-cheese and it was the cinnamon can.... BUT I SCRAPED IT ALL OFF THE TOP!" LOL:) "NO, you didn't... when you put cinnamon in anything moist/wet, it goes INSTANTLY through the WHOLE POT... you can toss that out to the dog, that's ruined!" Scraped if off the plate back into the pot, and she was NOT happy she had to throw out a 75 cent box of Kraft mac-n-cheese LOL:) Oh well... I told her, "Ya know, it's a d@mn good thing they don't sell Coke in the same cans as Drain-O... or you'd have killed yourself LONG ago" (she did that mixing up cans stuff on a regular basis-- made for some interesting combinations at lunch... like mixing a can of frozen grape juice and a can of frozen orange juice in the same pitcher because she didn't bother to read the label, just grabbed it out of the freezer and dumped it in the pitcher and filled it with water... Later! OL J R: )

@@lukestrawwalker My grandfather died in an industrial accident when their six children were still in school. Grandma didn't throw anything away until it was absolutely necessary, and sometimes not even then. Between growing up during the Great Depression herself and spending her early adult years raising six children on her own in a very small house, I can somewhat understand it, even if I can't relate to it. She'd re-used the spray bottle so many times that every piece of masking tape she'd used to identify what was in the bottle had worn out as well :)

LOL:) Ol' Traitor Joe... would be funny if he wasn't about to kill us all... OL J R : )

That’s “Grain” not green

@@MrMagnum7220 Dam spell checl 😂

He just fills it normally, grain will pile up around/over the auger tube and bury it. He put a slide at the bottom over the auger bottom so it doesn't have to start with a full bin sitting on top of the flighting. Turn the auger on pull the slide and you're moving corn... My nephew's grandpa's family farm has basically their own elevator-- it's bigger than the one in town (they farm 14,000 acres or so) and they have some HUGE bins, VERY tall, and they have unload chutes that go up into the bin at about a 45 degree angle. They're square and the lower end is a few feet above the height of a semi, angle upwards through the bin wall, to the center of the bin. They fill the bins the same way-- grain pours is, and eventually covers the unload tube to the top of the bin. Pull a semi under, pull the unload slide door, and grain starts pouring down the chute by gravity into the semi. When the bin gets about half empty and is below the entrance to the unload chute in the middle of the bin, they switch to the auger which dumps into the leg which raises it up into a bulk bin that then unloads into the trucks... only takes a few minutes to fill a truck that way. Later! OL J R :)

fjf

Trust me, I know.

Not junk, "project parts"... and year relocate them to the other side of the bins LOL:) OL J R :)

Gotta be careful turning on the bin fan in an empty bin can blow the floor up and really mess things up! OL J R :)

Rodenticide... ie rat/mouse killer... Bins are fairly well sealed up, they have to be or they'd leak grain like a sieve... the floor is perforated for air to go up through the grain, at least in bins with drying floors, but the holes are far too small for rodents to get through. Corn cribs and stuff, not so much... Later! OL J R : )

Yeah farmer's get it... Haven't seen a mask yet that you couldn't smell a fart through, or if you want to test your mask, take a drag off a cigarette, pull the mask down, and blow smoke through it... if smoke particles go through the mask, virus particles can too... Haven't seen a mask yet that would hold in smoke, either. Only way a mask will keep virus out is a full NBC type setup like the military uses (nuclear, biological, chemical) filter mask. Those are DESIGNED to handle "biological" meaning germ warfare and viruses... All this mask stuff is just citiots fooling themselves into feeling better about it. If you want to wear it, fine, go for it, I don't care... but don't come at ME trying to make ME do it, because I know it doesn't work and don't waste time with it. Later! OL J R : )

frs

That one line about masks triggered you?

Always one critic in the crowd 🙄

Jacob finally revealed his true self......I am done.

@@anderleof good fvcking riddance... sick of morons. OL J R :)