Posted by: c1ue | May 14 2022 19:39 utc | 291

According to this: The US averages 0.05 workers per hectare. Converted vs. the 360 acres – that’s a little over 7 workers.

1 worker per 50 acres? BS. I know people who run 60,000+ acres with 2-3 and 4-5 people for seeding and harvest. That’s not year-round employment either. I don’t know what the average number would be, but it’s a whole lot higher than 50 acres/worker. Probably more like 4-5000 acres per worker. e.g. a typical farmer with 8,000-10,000 acres is gonna have 1 full time hired hand. Granted that additional temporary workers are hired for seeding and harvest, which brings that “average” down, but also makes the “average” useless for any logical calculations like you’re trying to do here.

And note farm workers are pretty damn low pay: average pay according to the BLS is $14.62 per hour – which is a bit over half of overall average hourly pay

Again, the “average” here is a useless number … $14.62 is a pretty livable wage in rural areas, and full-time farmhands typically are provided housing as well. But … farmhands aren’t paid by the hour, they’re paid by the month; and especially during seeding and harvest, aren’t working 8 hour day/40 hour weeks. So what’s the “average hourly wage” of a farmhand making $2000-2500 per month?
Given that just one of the tractors of the guy with the 60,000 acres has a 900 gallon fuel tank, you can imagine what the fuel costs might be, as well. So labor probably isn’t the biggest expenditure. (And you can see why current US policy is so destructive for farmers.)
Oh .. and those Iowa farms are more likely to be growing corn than wheat.
Your point is probably valid, but your means of getting there is based on flawed statistics, and flawed (though logical) assumptions that those statistics can be used to deduce operational labor costs.

Posted by: The Owl | May 15 2022 16:47 utc | 303

Posted by: Dr. George W Oprisko | May 14 2022 2:52 utc | 155
“I know one thing, and one thing only…. “Richard Stevens Hack” is not this poster’s real name…”
Search google for “Richard Steven Hack” “Infoworld” and you’ll see some letters to the editor, in his style, focused on Linux, starting in 2003. Search with spokeo.com and you’ll see he’s lived in San Francisco and Denver, as he claims on his web site. Search with ancestry.com and you’ll even see his yearbook photo (at 16 years old). He’s been consistent for 20 years, is 73 years old (b. March 1949), never hides his identity, posts with a consistent point of view, is intelligent and reasonable. A bit more libertarian/anarchical than me, but I can understand his viewpoints.

Posted by: ce | May 16 2022 11:40 utc | 305

Posted by: james | May 15 2022 17:27 utc | 304
Corn in everything: it is another Congressional/Corporate grifting operation, nothing else to it. Congress likes big, fat, corrupt businesses so they can ask for and get big, fat, corrupt “contributions”. This country has always been corrupt, but they used to think there were other things they were supposed to do too, besides corruption. Now it is the job.

Posted by: Bemildred | May 21 2022 14:07 utc | 307

Fundraising is big business in Washington, D.C. So big, in fact, that your newly elected Congressional representative is expected to spend half of his or her working hours dialing for dollars at a secret phone bank near Capitol Hill.
You read that correctly. Actually, more than half their time, sometimes 6-8 hours a day, is spent not working on legislation. Instead, they are essentially full-time telemarketers who are told that their top priority is to raise obscene amounts of money dialing for dollars. All this, during business hours when they are supposed to be working for you, the taxpayer.
David Jolly, a Republican Congressman from Florida, claims he was told that his responsibility, as a sitting member of Congress, was to raise $18,000 per day. While legislators and staff are prohibited by law from making fundraising calls from their offices, both Republicans and Democrats are free to do so at party owned call centers down the block. . .here
So approval of Congress is at 22%, about half of Bidens’s approval . . .here

Posted by: Don Bacon | May 21 2022 14:19 utc | 309