Implement
We hit rural Kansas during the season when the farmers move all their farm implements around. That timing's not hard to manage, though; Kansas farmers are always moving their farm implements around. Farmers are busy people, but I wonder how much of their time is spent driving extremely slow vehicles great distances.
According to the Kansas Department of Agriculture, in 2017 (the most recent year listed on their web site) there were 58,569 farms operating in Kansas, cultivating a total of 45.7 million acres of Kansas, or 74,600 square miles. That works out to 66.3% of the land in Kansas being farm. The average size of a Kansas farm is 781 acres, and 84.6% of those farms are family owned and operated. In total, agriculture provides jobs for 254,000 Kansans, or about 13% of the workforce.
Trump's pointless trade war was particularly rough on Kansas farmers, and farm income dropped precipitously while bankruptcies increased by about 25% in both 2018 and 2019. According to a 2019 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, about 40% of what money Kansas farmers did make in this period came from Federal assistance programs designed to mitigate the trade war's effect. So, essentially, Kansas farmers were living off government welfare. In the recent Presidential election, loser Donald Trump got 56.5% of the Kansas vote, beating President-elect Joe Biden by 201,759 votes. Using the logic the Republican Party frequently employs to explain the votes on the other side, this is because Kansas farmers like getting free stuff.
Implement
We hit rural Kansas during the season when the farmers move all their farm implements around. That timing's not hard to manage, though; Kansas farmers are always moving their farm implements around. Farmers are busy people, but I wonder how much of their time is spent driving extremely slow vehicles great distances.
According to the Kansas Department of Agriculture, in 2017 (the most recent year listed on their web site) there were 58,569 farms operating in Kansas, cultivating a total of 45.7 million acres of Kansas, or 74,600 square miles. That works out to 66.3% of the land in Kansas being farm. The average size of a Kansas farm is 781 acres, and 84.6% of those farms are family owned and operated. In total, agriculture provides jobs for 254,000 Kansans, or about 13% of the workforce.
Trump's pointless trade war was particularly rough on Kansas farmers, and farm income dropped precipitously while bankruptcies increased by about 25% in both 2018 and 2019. According to a 2019 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, about 40% of what money Kansas farmers did make in this period came from Federal assistance programs designed to mitigate the trade war's effect. So, essentially, Kansas farmers were living off government welfare. In the recent Presidential election, loser Donald Trump got 56.5% of the Kansas vote, beating President-elect Joe Biden by 201,759 votes. Using the logic the Republican Party frequently employs to explain the votes on the other side, this is because Kansas farmers like getting free stuff.