Once upon a time there were two brothers who were lousy dairy farmers, at lesat when it came to producing crops. They planted the wrong corn hybrids, never limed their fields, had poor weed control, and chopped their corn for silage in late August, almost a month too early.
Then a young Extension worker appeared on the scene, and helped them solve a problem. They grew to trust this fellow, and he wound up overhauling their entire crop program including changing hybrids, herbicides, liming fields for the first time, and harvesting corn when it was ready, not to be done by Labor Day. (Turns out that the reason they chopped their corn in late August was because their father always did so, and that was so he could get some free labor from his sons before they started school in September.)
Aided by a couple of years with good growing seasons, just about everything the Extension worker recommended seemed to work; both crop yield and quality increased considerably, and the brothers soon became more prosperous. So much so that they bought at least one Cadillac and two Harvestore silos. Did these purchases overextend them financially? At any rate, before long they weren’t able to pay their bills in spite of continuing to grow much better crops than before the Extension worker appeared on the scene. Eventually they sold their cows and went out of farming entirely.
In trying to help the brothers did that young Extension worker really do them a favor? If he’d never set foot on the farm, would they have continued to muddle along as they’d been doing for quite some years? I wonder about this, because about forty years ago I was that Extension worker.