05/22/25 Afternoon CommStock Report – The Value of the Dollar can Mean whether we get to Farm or Not

My analog, following me on-line like a shadow, triggers what YouTube content that it wants me to see. It suggested an Iowa PBS documentary on the Farm Crisis of the 1980s. It featured some people that I knew and even a family that I grew up with here near Royal in Clay County Iowa. It brought back some memories that I have suppressed and surprised me with some statistics. Nationally, 300,000 farms were foreclosed upon which was a crisis, 250 per day and in 1983 there were 500 farm auctions per month. Subsequently, droves of farm families were lost during the Ag depression of the 1980’s. You break that down county by county and it was a serious population loss. For every 5 farms that failed, so did one local business. That means that 60,000 rural main street businesses failed along with the farms. For comparison, there were 86,911 farms in Iowa according to the 2022 census. It depends on how you define what is a “farm”. That statistic is misleading as there are fewer commercially viable farms than that suggests. These are dominantly family farms. There are 275,000 acres growing corn/soybeans here Clay County Iowa. The 2017 farm census…