Files
Abstract
Agriculture has seen several periods of both high and low farmer profitability. This has resulted in at least some farmers leaving agriculture because of financial difficulty. Other farmers, however, have managed to survive the bust periods of agriculture and are still farming today. This paper uses a 40-year dataset of farm financial data from the Kansas Farm Management Association (KFMA) to compare those farms that have been in the program the entire 40-year timeframe to the remaining farms in the dataset to determine if those long-term farms have any different financial characteristics that have helped them survive long-term. Results indicate that the long-term farms have put more of their profits back into the farm resulting in higher levels of equity and lower levels of debt.