Farmers' life

Farming is not a get rich quick scheme. Kathleen Smith is the CEO of a company called Life Essentials. She talked to me about some of the challenges modern day farmers encounter when they're trying to run their spread. Her message might bring some people to think, Why would I want to be a farmer or a rancher, particularly if I'm young “With all the technology that we have in the world today? A lot of these kids want to do something else, and they haven't yet learned that there is technology needed on the farms. Also, with all the new things they do with the GPS farming, the self-driving tractors and combines, and such that there's a lot of technology there that some of the older farmers have a hard time learning too, because they’re just not quite to that point where they want to even pick up a computer, let alone cell phone or anything else. Just a lot of things. I come from a small farm, we farmed near Lafayette, Indiana, for sixty seven years. My parents are both gone now and when. For my dad retired from farming, he ended up renting the farm out. I just have three sisters, so he told all of us girls that we should not farm. It's a non-profit organization. He struggled constantly with fighting the prices of grain, prices of fertilizer, the prices of everything else to do, and the equipment is just outrageously priced. So it's hard for young people even to continue on a farm because of the expenses that they have to incur. Speaker1: No question that it's challenging, but most farmers and ranchers absolutely love their life.