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What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

salon.com

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Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#21

Post by TeMPOraL »

SwellJoe wrote: post #7
TulliusCicero wrote: post #4

Duh. Do these people just forget about the principle of economies of scale? How do they think they can possibly compete against huge factory farms? I can understand if you're doing a small farm 'for fun', but don't understand how an otherwise intelligent person can think they can (or should be able to) make good money from it. > As the average age of the American farmer neared 65, I knew young farmers were badly need…

I think the danger in our agricultural policy is that large farms are favored (through subsidies, tax breaks, regulation, etc.) to an extent that small farms can't exist profitably, even charging higher prices at market. While there is a minimum viable farm size (given the need for modern machinery to automate the process), most likely, it probably isn't nearly as large as what our current set of incentives enforces.…

I don't think that small-scale farming can regain its position of a significant contributor to the food production. And even if it could, I'm not sure that it should.

Food production scales up nicely, and it has many other potential benefits than just being cheaper. Say we fixed incentives that promote low-quality food (we have to do it either way, since small farmers are as much incentivized to sell crap as big ones; a big part of "organic food" industry seems to be about that). The big AgriCorp, if incentivized to make good food, can actually care about it better. They have more money to get top-of-the-line tools, or build their own. They can use them more efficiently. They have enough resources to monitor and control the farm in much greater detail. They have more expertise on hands. Am I seriously supposed to trust a Joe Random Farmer more than a professional biotechnologist or agriculturist from Monsanto or DuPont? If so, why bother with this whole thing called "science" at all?

It seems to me that the work needed to restore the quality of our food makes big farms an even better option than they're now. The issues are, ultimately, with economic incentives that promote everything but health aspects of food.

Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#22

Post by CountSessine »

SwellJoe wrote: post #7
TulliusCicero wrote: post #4

Duh. Do these people just forget about the principle of economies of scale? How do they think they can possibly compete against huge factory farms? I can understand if you're doing a small farm 'for fun', but don't understand how an otherwise intelligent person can think they can (or should be able to) make good money from it. > As the average age of the American farmer neared 65, I knew young farmers were badly need…

I think the danger in our agricultural policy is that large farms are favored (through subsidies, tax breaks, regulation, etc.) to an extent that small farms can't exist profitably, even charging higher prices at market. While there is a minimum viable farm size (given the need for modern machinery to automate the process), most likely, it probably isn't nearly as large as what our current set of incentives enforces.…

through subsidies, tax breaks, regulation, etc

I'm genuinely curious whether this is actually the case. Can you cite some examples? My google-skills don't seem to be adequate.

Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#23

Post by CountSessine »

greggarious wrote: post #18
a2tech wrote: post #3

My grandfather ran a farm. Small farming isn't profitable. Full stop. Farming scales up really well but not down.

And if you can make back the costs of the equipment, own the land, and create enough food for your family, what value does money have?

Was that something that the article author managed to do?

Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#24

Post by zekevermillion »

Hobby farming can make sense if you want to own a lot of land as an investment. If you don't farm it, in most states it gets assessed at a much higher residential rate for tax purposes. So it pays to farm, even if the business is break-even.

Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#26

Post by TeMPOraL »

I just got bitten by not having an ad blocker installed on the current browser.

You know what this[0] looks like? That nice "You may also like" box? Like a fucking end of the article. Except it isn't. It's only a half of it. Seriously, fuck you Salon. I guess you don't care if people actually read the stuff you post.

EDIT Oh, I know why it tricked me. Because the rest of the article only loads when you scroll past that ad. What the fuck.

[0] - http://imgur.com/SMBtRkO

Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#27

Post by TeMPOraL »

greggarious wrote: post #18
a2tech wrote: post #3

My grandfather ran a farm. Small farming isn't profitable. Full stop. Farming scales up really well but not down.

And if you can make back the costs of the equipment, own the land, and create enough food for your family, what value does money have?

Participating in the rest of human civilization?

Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#28

Post by sjtgraham »

analog31 wrote: post #16

...we gained no equity because we didn’t own the land... Farming on rented land seems like the original Uber. You're workers, with no guarantee of even minimum wage. A couple of friends in the restaurant business have told me: Never open a restaurant if you don't own the building.

Feudal serfdom is the original Uber.

Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#29

Post by vonnik »

It's probably good to remind people yearning for the simple life that you can't make a living on most small farms, but it's not really surprising. The Green Revolution made it easy for a few people to feed a lot of people, fundamentally altering the ratio of farmers to consumers.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Green_Revolution

And despite concerns about food security, the US has consistently used agriculture as a bargaining chip in its trade agreements and foreign policy, opening our markets to countries that can produce food more cheaply than US operations can. Reagan, Hollywood's rhinestone cowboy, did a lot to destroy cattle ranching in the US by opening the market up to Canadian beef. Same dynamic.

Small farmers will only make money by focusing on cash crops that are organic, local, and other adjectives that Whole Foods customers are willing to pay for...

Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#30

Post by asuffield »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #4

Duh. Do these people just forget about the principle of economies of scale? How do they think they can possibly compete against huge factory farms? I can understand if you're doing a small farm 'for fun', but don't understand how an otherwise intelligent person can think they can (or should be able to) make good money from it. > As the average age of the American farmer neared 65, I knew young farmers were badly need…

> How do they think they can possibly compete against huge factory farms?

As with so many of these things, there's this idea floating around that the factory farms must be "bad" because they are big and wealthy, and that smaller, less efficient farms must be "good" because they are small and poor. Much like with all the other cases, this idea is somewhere between confused and blatant denial of reality.

Money is the unit of caring. The amount of money that you're willing to spend on something is how much you care about having it, as precisely defined by the point at which it's too expensive and you don't care enough to pay that much. The factory farms are big and wealthy because they provide what people care about: an efficiently produced, consistent solution to the problem of what to have for dinner.

If people really cared about their food coming from small, inefficient, "organic" farms then they would pay for what it really costs to produce food in that manner. The fact that people aren't willing to pay for it tells us that they don't actually care as much as they claimed. This is normal: most people will tell you they care deeply about something up until the point when you ask them to open their wallet, and then they remember that they don't care all that much.

It seems to me that what's really wanted here is better factory farms with modest adjustments to reduce pollution, antibiotics use, and improve animal welfare. That's entirely achievable. It won't be achieved by things like this article; it'll be achieved by somebody who sets out to make a better factory farm and builds a business around that.

This is already happening. http://spread.co.jp/en/ plan to have what could be a game-changing approach to vegetable farming up and running in 2017. Whoever gets that system to work well enough at scale seems likely to sweep the 1990s-style farms off the map. It's the exact opposite direction from what the "organic" farmers have been doing: no low-wage labour, no battles over land, no getting caught up in politics.

The next couple of years will be an interesting time for the food markets.

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