Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

This.

I don't know what the solution to this is. I have a small farm, and raise meat sheep. But it's very much a hobby. The problem is, though, that almost all of the other farmers in my area, the ones I meet at the feed store or the livestock auction, they're also hobby farmers. There is exactly one “real” farmer (meaning that it's his full time job) in my area. He raises specialty row crops and runs an agricultural co-op, the kind where you pay a certain amount a month and get a box of fresh vegetables every week. But hobby farmers can't feed the country. We can't even feed ourselves, if it comes to that.

The problem is that these vegetables, which don't have to be shipped any distance and don't have the overhead of a grocery store, are still more expensive than the equivalent groceries in the local Safeway. The economies of scale in agriculture have become so strong that there's no way to compete on price any other way. And people understandably don't want to double their grocery bills just to buy local.

I grew up on a 300 acre cattle farm. Fifty years ago a family could make a living on a 300 acre, well situated east coast farm. Not any more. You'd have trouble just paying for gas, groceries, and medical care. Forget paying down a mortgage or god forbid buying new farm equipment. The only way to even stay on the farm, is to either walk into a situation where everything - land, house, barn, equipment, everything - is already paid for. Or to get a full time job in town and farm on the weekends. That's what my dad did. And it's what my sister and brother-in-law do now.

We have a situation where we've harnessed economies of scale so much that we have only a small handful of corporations producing our food. They mainly want to grow exactly the same small number of crops, to keep supply chains simple. We've wrung all of the redundancy, both financial and biodiversity, out of the system.

So what happens if someone figures out how to weaponize that against us? What happens if Chinese investors own half the farm land and we go to war with China? Or what happens if we encounter this generation's version of potato blight on corn or wheat? This is not just a human tragedy. It's a huge national security issue, and it looks like nobody is paying attention.

But consider that many farmers only have a high school education, and are managing operations with millions in assets/debt, hundreds of thousands in revenue per year, and razor thin margins. A lot can go wrong.

Many understand the benefits and dangers of financing, but many don't.

> We've wrung all of the redundancy, both financial and biodiversity, out of the system.

I have similar concerns, not just about farming but other parts of a globalised economy. It is far more efficient to have everyone very specialised, with long-range dependencies. It is far less resilient to have one huge coupled economic system than a number of smaller, approximately independent systems. [+] Similarly, it's more efficient (in the short run, or the lucky case) to not leave any contingency or insurance against rare events.

> What happens if Chinese investors own half the farm land and we go to war with China?

I wouldn't worry about this one -- unless foreign investors have a means to enforce physical security of their ownership claims, there's always the option of the government with control over the physical assets to expropriate them, either by simply changing the law, or declaring special war time powers. For example, re: WW1

> the attack on enemy aliens and their property involved diverse institutions (governments, parliaments, the judiciary, armies and administrative bureaucracies) and actors (local businessmen and entrepreneurs, lobbies and interests groups but also ordinary people animated by patriotism or who saw in the attack on enemy property an opportunity to improve their own economic status).

https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/property_r...

edit: [+] to call myself out for claiming things based solely on intuition, it's not at all obvious that many smaller independent economies are necessarily always more resilient than a single arbitrarily structured large economy -- it might depend on the structure of dependencies, and how much choice there is for alternatives if subsystems fail, and how much slack is in the system, and dynamic factors. To argue in the other direction, smaller, isolated economies also tend to be at more risk of failure if any of their larger participants fails (see also: common wisdom about risk of buying real estate in small single company or single industry towns and so on...), so there's probably more robustness for those economies where the impact of failure of any single participant upon the overall system is roughly negligible. but i think there is usually a pretty strong conflict between efficiency redundancy.