Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure
1.38.
Steve and Patti's home.
having obtained his livelihood solely from farming. The road leading to the farm is
shown in Figure 1.37.
After completing high school, Steve went to college and earned B.S. degrees in
agronomy and animal science from The Ohio State University. After college he
came back to the home farm and worked for 4 years before marrying his wife, Patti
(Fig. 1.36), who had graduated 4 years earlier from Wilmington High School. The
family lives in the farmhouse located along the road passing the farm; see Figure 1.38.
1.3.1 Steve's Farm
Steve Murphy farms about 1300 ha (3200 acres)
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half of which he owns and half he
rents from neighboring landowners. He pays cash to 6 landowners with areas of
from 30 to 81 ha (75 to 200 acres) to rent their land for farming. Land in Clinton
County sells for $9876/ha ($4000/acre), and thus the land he farms is valued at
$12,800,000 on an acre basis. The half he owns is thus worth $6,400,000. A picture
of one of his fields is shown in Figure 1.39.
Steve grows a number of different crops—maize, soybeans, winter wheat, barley,
and hay/pasture—that are rotated between fields on a regular schedule. Maize and
soybeans are planted to 486 ha (1200 acres) each in May and harvested in October
and November. Figure 1.40 shows one of Steve's sons planting soybeans. Maize
yields 9406.5 kg/ha [150 bushel (bu) per acre] and soybeans 3359.5 kg/ha (50 bu/
acre). Barley and winter wheat are planted to 243 ha (600 acres) in the fall and
barley harvested in May - June and winter wheat in June - July time frames. Barley
yields 6047 kg/ha (90 bu/acre) and winter wheat 5375 kg/ha (80 bu/acre).
Fields totaling 81 ha (200 acres) are used for pasture and hay and in some cases are
used for both purposes. That is, sometimes they are pastured and other times they are
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Amounts and values are rounded in some cases.
