Jeff Miller wrote:
rw wrote:

The notion that the estate tax forces the breakup of family farms is a
myth:

According to the IRS, of the 2.3 million people who died in 1998, only
642 left farm assets equal to at least half the total estate. In 2001,
the New York Times reported that the pro-repeal American Farm Bureau
Foundation could not cite a single case of a family farm lost due to
the estate tax.

Many of the wealthiest "farmers" aren’t really farmers at all.
A significant number of the “farmers” who would benefit from estate
tax repeal are actually city-dwellers who own a ranch or horse farm as
a vacation getaway.

from http://www.faireconomy.org/estatetax/ETFarms.html

in nc, the loss of family farms has nothing to do with the estate tax.
urban development, the meager profit to be made, and the lack of
interest by farmer's children in farming seem to be the things
destroying farms here. nc never had the large number of huge farming
operations i've read about in some other states, but now it seems that
only the huge farms are surviving.

It's pretty much the same with the ranchers I know in Idaho. The land
gets passed down through generations, with more and more complicated and
competing interests. Some of the descendants want to continue ranching,
but more often than not they don't. They want to cash out.

Profitable farming and ranching is now big business. The "family farm"
is a myth.

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