It is a long, long time since 1980, and in some ways the world is completely different.
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Those with long memories may well remember the early 1980s as having a few years with too much rain, before the drought of 1988 pushed water levels back down.
Those with long memories may well remember 22% mortgages, and locking them in because of the fear they would go even higher.
The day after the Bank of Canada dropped the overnight lending rate to half a percent, I checked a news release from a company that regularly tracks such things and found the going rate for 30 year money is under 4.5%.
That being said the rate my bank would charge me is a little higher than that.
I found myself shaking my head in wonder, wondering why everyone who can, doesn't take advantage of those rates and simply invest the money in safe preferred shares that currently pay more than 5.5% and use the carry to pay off the loan.
If borrowing to invest worries most people, borrowing for a holiday or a car that is more expensive than you need is even sillier.
But it is likely a moot point because we are told Canadians are already hugely indebted, and therefore, there likely aren't all that many who can use their houses to finance a financial plan based on the carry trade in securities.
Some other things that have changed: crop expectations. We no longer debate whether we will get to the point where a corn yield of 100 bushels per acre can be sustained, and tomato contracts call for yields of considerably more than 20 tons per acre.
Oh and environmentalists are no longer calling for scientists to develop a corn plant that doesn't need to be sprayed to keep root worms away. A bit of irony there.
There is perhaps less reason to fear a letter from the bank now. There are still tough times on some farms but you just don't hear of people losing their farms despite never having missed a payment, just because the ratio between interest rates and the amount owing got out of whack.
I got thinking about insane lending rates because of the decline in Bank of Canada rates. This year they are down a half percent. How much of that did your bank pass along to you?
In many cases the answer is, about half of it. By only passing on a quarter point of their decline, they padded their bottom lines significantly. Maybe it's something people don't notice when 30-year money is out there for less than 5% but it says a lot about the way business is done and who has the power.
In the early 1980s faced with a lot of pressures a lot of farmers sat down and contemplated whether to stay on the farm. Many didn't. Those who did had to take a long hard look in the mirror and decide if the eyes looking back at them could handle the kind of radical changes that clearly were coming.
A yields rise, and the face of agriculture changes again, as it clearly is and will over the next few years, another generation of farmers is going to face those same questions. What will the operation look like in the future? What models will be successful and what ones will get you in trouble?
Because one gets the impression that what worked in the past may not in the future. That the farms of 2050 will look a lot different than the farms of today.
While 2050 seems like a long time from now. Always remember, 2015 seemed like a long way away, back in 1980.
