Why do farmers destroy their crops when weather conditions are bad? Why bother going through the trouble? Why not just let them grow and get at least some harvest?
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Speaking to wheat: A late freeze can cause the plant to grow a ‘stint’ of sorts to protect itself…and said growth dwarfs the max height and fruit that the plant can achieve. The margins are already so thin that it will cost more to harvest it than what it will yield in bushels per acre for sale. And this is why crop insurance is a thing.
I remember hearing that if banana trees are destroyed by a cyclone/hurricane they can either take a long time to recover, or may not recover at all. But apparently if they’re deliberately cut off near the base before the cyclone arrives they can regrow and the farmers can get back to producing bananas much more quickly.
Because sometimes it will cost more than what taking the harvest to market will bring.
For example let’s say a crop left neglected of any irrigation, weed control, pesticide, fertilizer etc will yield $70 per acre. But the costs already spent plus to harvest might be $100 and doing so might not always trigger the crop failure insurance.
Plowing the crop back into the field recycles the nutrients for next year.
In the case of things like livestock. Culling the animals means things like feed, water and medicines don’t need to be spent. Like on the us southwest a lot of beef cow ranchers are selling the breeding herds because the feed costs are too high and the pastures they normally turn into hay are too dry
There is a substantial cost to harvesting. It costs the same to run a harvester whether you get 10 bushel or 10 tons. To harvest and get a small amount is throwing money down the drain. To just plow it under at least returns nutrients to the soil.
Sometimes it makes sense to harvest what’s left, but other times it’s not worth it to harvest it and it’s just left in the field. Crops are destroyed (plowed under), which costs money, only when there’s a reason to—often it’s because it means an early start towards planting the next crop, whether it’s a cash crop (sold) or a cover crop (grown to enhance the soil).
I think this question, with no offense to OP, highlights a very widely held misconception that farming is just large-scale gardening for profit… which it’s just not.
Being a successful farmer now requires in-depth understanding of plant biology, soil chemistry, commodity market prediction, storage engineering, and equipment maintenance, etc.
These aren’t “simple farmers”, they’re agricultural engineers.
The one thing I can contribute on Reddit, ha. I farmed for 10+ years and the answers here get soo close to the reason.
Once you accept a crop insurance payment for a loss that’s been proven by an adjuster, you must then disc the field that contains your loss (per the federally backed insurance company) in order to prevent the type of fraud where you would collect insurance payment and then put a little money into the crop and get it to produce a close to standard yield. You’ve got to understand that weather events on an immature crop that would provide a 40% hit to yields are a no brainer for an adjuster to mark as total loss – meaning a sneaky farmer could take a complete payout of government money (RMA) from a policy sold through a private insurance company, and then finish the crop out and sell 60% of his total expected yield sold off in secret – leaving him with 160% profit (and trust me if the rule about destroying crops wasn’t there, you would have a crazy percentage of farmers doing this – which would put a lot more stress on our federal crop insurance infrastructure.
Small farmer here, no crop insurance on my scale. Definitely agree with the comments about harboring disease and pests, though.
Another factor is weed growth. They are faster than vegetables. Letting a field go means taller weeds, which make harvesting harder, quality worse, and field clean up difficult, in addition to producing many more seeds for next year.
Turning in a failed crop gives you the oppurtunity to plant cover crops that hold the soil together more effectively than weeds, sequester nutrients, and are easier to turn in come planting time.
Not sure of all the ins-and-outs of crop insurance, but I know certain loans/aid are only available to farmers who insure their crops, whether as to yield or revenue. If your corn isn’t going to net you a certain profit, maybe insurance will only pay if the crop is destroyed. I’m sure it’s more complex than that, but I was surprised to learn a few years ago that such a thing exists. I grew up on farms, but they were the gentleman-farmer variety, not mass-producing.
Imagine a cup of juice that spills. You can’t just put it back in the cup and drink it (or at least you shouldn’t…)
But if you leave the spill on the floor, it gets sticky and then bugs come and it makes it hard to walk around, and it means you can’t use that part of the floor where the spill was.
If you clean up, at least you can use the floor again. Hopefully, you don’t spill more juice of course, but you should still clean up, right?
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