Farmers Best Strategy: leave land idle and preserve capital?

It will require approximately $ 375,000.00 for me to plant my crops this year. We are about 45 days from normal planting date. It’s getting pretty scary at the moment. - Dave Burt,
Burt Farms

NVDL: Interesting.

clipped from www.kunstler.com I am a relatively small farmer with about 1,200 acres of row crops including corn, wheat, soybeans, milo and sunflowers in SE Illinois. My biggest fear isn’t financing for 2009 crops. My biggest fear is the continuing collapse in commodity prices. Current price levels for grains won’t come close to breakeven. My biggest fear is that once I plant my crop, prices will continue to plummet and I’ll be left stranded with huge input costs for fuel, machinery, labor, land, fertilizer seed, etc. Our input costs have not dropped in synch with commodity prices. The other possibility I see is a systemic collapse of the banking system which would leave us with the counterparty risk of not having a viable end user to purchase what we grow. At the moment, my best strategy would be to leave my land idle and preserve my capital instead of throwing it on the crap table.