re: #111 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

Farmers everywhere, apart from maybe subsistence farmers digging at the ground with a stick, have always been businessmen (and women too, often enough). They hopefully grow more food than they need and trade the surplus for other things they don’t have. They employ labour when needed, rent properties, purchase services and so on.

Someone I used to know was the last farming member of a Lincolnshire family which had grown grain for over 150 years in England. According to the farm’s accounting books (another sign a farm is a business) they had never actually owned all the land they farmed at any time, it having been mortgaged or rented or used as security for bank loans for the entire period. In the good decades they cleared off some of the debt, in the bad years they accumulated more, that’s all.