rz:....OT: Your question >>>>What's a crop loan?<<<< amazes me, if you are sincere. However, I suppose I need to personally review that it's been the better part of 40 years since I had to worry about qualifying for a crop loan.
Briefly, my experience in those days (and I assume even now) was that extremely few farmers could put in a crop (of cotton, soybeans, wheat, or whatever he planned to grow) without taking out a loan from a bank, or some processing company dealing with the production of the farmer's crop in order to cover the costs of plowing, planting, cultivating, fertilizing, watering (irrigated crops), insecticides, and harvesting such crop....a program that usually encompassed a period of 6 months or more of cost outlays before receiving any income from the sale of the harvested crop (that is, if he was fortunate enough not to have the crop hailed out, severely damaged by insects, losses from severe droughts or floods, or delayed harvesting from labor strikes, or rain).
I'm so glad that my current activities in trading these stocks incurs so little risk compared to the gambles that we took as farmers, and maybe it's easier to understand why there were "subsidy" programs, though I generally disagreed with the principles concocted by the government programs at that time. However, it's doubtful the farmer would be able to so readily qualify for the "crop loans" had there not been those price support programs.
Hope this satisfies your curiosity, rz. Best regards,
Buck |
