Over the past few months, numerous ranchers in the Florida area have started selling their land to developers. Some are getting grief from the general public about selling out, but how can we blame them. A friend of mine has 200 head of cattle, and estimates he only gets about 20K in profit per year. Yet his 400 acres of land is worth millions! He doesn't plan on selling since he told me he has been around cows all his life, and wouldn't know what to do if he sold all his property. As we were talking, we got into the what-if scenarios of the long term future of ranching. I asked what would happen to the agriculture industry if all the large ranches were selling out. He estimates most cattle ranches would be under 20 acres, and large grazing areas would be a thing of the past. Does this mean the price of meat will go up? Will we be importing more South American meat to keep prices down? I know that Florida will most likely be importing more meat from the midwest, but that means prices have to change since there will be less ranchers. Or will some corporate giant get into the cattle business and run the small ranches into the ground since the corporate giant will mass produce poor quality meat? (No frills Wal-Mart steak?)

So what is the prediction? Are we going to have a global agriculture market too, and import all our food? Now that would be stupid! Outsourcing our food would allow other countries to control our destiny since starvation is a well known way of controlling people.

Sorry for the rant, but I wonder where we are going with our agriculture industry. A layman's point of view...

Joe