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Why do they want to be a corn farmer? (Just curious. I don't know anything about the business of outdoor farming in Iowa.)

It seems like you could make the mortgage if you can grow specialty crops - http://www.profitableplantsdigest.com/10-most-profitable-spe...

Also, indoor growing is said to make certain crops grow 5x faster with 5x less resources. Here's one company that seems to be growing (they're opening a large facility in my state) - http://aerofarms.com/



Specialty crops depend on the availability of somebody to buy them. My brother tried that last, before he gave up.


An alternative to specialty crops is regular crops but higher up the value-add chain.

Corn -> corn mash -> fermented corn mash -> ethanol -> bourbon -> aged bourbon

40 acres of corn gets you nowhere. 40 acres of corn converted to bourbon gets you generational wealth.


Ha! This is what all Appalachian farmers did in the 1700's, with no roads and long distances to market. They converted corn to whiskey, concentrating the wealth. It was George Washington that ruined that with his regressive Whiskey Tax. Our modern caricature of the moonshining mountain yokel was created way back then, to marginalize poor farmers.


Aeroponics sounds interesting, but the fact is we have almost a billion acres of farmland. Maybe some distant day we'll convert that to 200 million acres of aeroponics facilities, but that seems unlikely.




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