1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland • Hacker News Board

Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland

#101

Post by oblio » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:34 PM UTC

vagrantJin wrote: post #60

oblio wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a "Golden Age" perspective. At best it was true for a minority of people for a rather short moment in time, compared to the time agriculture has been around. Historically agricultural workers were slaves or at best serfs. In any case, a brutal lifestyle, generally for someone else's benefit. Well, what you're saying does apply to a category of countries, underdeveloped ones. Countries at very low levels of wha…

> Countries at very low levels of what we'd consider civilization. Industrialized.

Not even. Large farms first appeared in the Fertile Crescent more than 5000 years ago.

Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland

#102

Post by cmrdporcupine » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:35 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #83

Retric wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My old boss operates a 1,000 acre farm as a hobby due to that efficiency. Sure it was a “family farm” but it was a trivial portion of their income and involved 10-15 hours of work a week. It’s hard to argue that’s a bad thing.

When you say operate do you mean do all the work? Or manage the farm and hire people to do that? If the former, would you say what kind of farm it is, 1000 acre farm that’s easy enough to spend 15 hours a week seems interesting to me.

Probably the latter, but that said, a modern cash crop monoculture farm involves just a few high intensity bursts of activity a year.

During most of the growing season it's just sitting there without intervention. And all winter. A huge burst of activity in the spring with tillage / planting and/or seed drilling & spraying / fertilizing etc. Maybe a couple passes over for herbicide application. And then combine harvesting in the fall and maybe some tillage and planting of winter rye, etc. Then some machine maintenance, outbuilding maintenance, accounting / bookkeeping, seed and other inputs purchasing thrown in here and there throughout the year.

I can see it being as little as 15 hours a week if you averaged it over the whole year. But it would have moments of intensity.

But the reality is that most of these farmers around in my area are contracting out portions of this work, because owning the equipment ends up being a huge capital investment that only makes sense for very large plots of land.

Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland

#103

Post by Amezarak » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:35 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #30

Industrialisation of farming is a good thing more than a bad thing. You don't want the cost of food to go up, or the supply to go down. You kind of want large scale industrial farming. It's like complaining that large factories are taking over small artisans.

> You don't want the cost of food to go up, or the supply to go down.

Our economic and technological systems generally pursue what is approximately analogous to a greedy algorithm. This effect worsens as any sector becomes centralized. A small pool of large farmers is in the long run more likely to get stuck at suboptimal efficiencies than a large pool of small farmers.

But more concerning than that is continually optimizing any system for efficiency makes it more fragile. Some number of small farmers are more likely to survive system shocks than a large farmers. A system dominated by a few highly efficient large farmers is a system in extreme danger from systemic shocks and black swan events. That is, catastrophic drops in the food supply are much more likely with a few large farmers, not many small farmers.

If industrial production of smartphones collapses, who cares. Life will go on. We can forego many industries, if we really have to, so as long as we take care of the externalities (which we aren't doing with smartphones, but whatever), no big deal if they're oversized and over-optimized. This is not the case with food. People have to eat.

Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland

#104

Post by sfkdjf9j3j » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:36 PM UTC

dash2 wrote: post #95

A useful comparison from 5 minutes of googling: In 2017, the top 20 car companies produced 76m vehicles [1]. There "may be as many as 2000 car companies globally".[2] This page (admittedly it seems to have been "hacked by Javanese team") says total vehicle production was about 96m.[3] So, 1% of motor companies produce 80% of the world's cars. Is there a reason one statistic should alarm us more than the other? Is foo…

The headline doesn't really tell the full story in this case. The article describes increasing concentration of control of farm land via certain financial products (and direct ownership). It's more of a collection of quotes than an article I suppose but it touches on the effects of this on economic inequality, agricultural monoculture, land stewardship concerns, that sort of thing.

Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland

#105

Post by fennecfoxen » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:36 PM UTC

fsloth wrote: post #23

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t the solution to increase these farms’ economies of scale? So the same civilisation-enhancing forces that drove development 10,000 years ago can show their force more broadly?

What economies of scale specifically do farms have? A farm is not a factory where you can create a uniform process...

Others pointed out the economies of scale in terms of production. I will point out that a large farming operation also has more resilience against risk. If some minor disaster takes out one of the fields on this farm, a blight on the one field, there are many other fields that may still be intact. This is even more so when you are Big Ag and you have multiple farms in different states. You might lose 5% of your crop to a bad hailstorm or an early frost in Oklahoma, but 95% of it is intact, while the small time Oklahoma farmer has no such consolation.

Agriculture isn’t just a numbers game for production, but also for spreading risk.

Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland

#106

Post by MichaelApproved » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:37 PM UTC

dash2 wrote: post #95

A useful comparison from 5 minutes of googling: In 2017, the top 20 car companies produced 76m vehicles [1]. There "may be as many as 2000 car companies globally".[2] This page (admittedly it seems to have been "hacked by Javanese team") says total vehicle production was about 96m.[3] So, 1% of motor companies produce 80% of the world's cars. Is there a reason one statistic should alarm us more than the other? Is foo…

It’s important to prevent monopolies in any industry but there are degrees of importance.

The food supply chain is more important than the automotive supply chain.

Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland

#107

Post by randrews543 » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:38 PM UTC

This is all going to change over the next decade with the rise of indoor farming. With increased and more predictable yield, indoor farms can be more hyper-localized and run by independent-operators in their community.

Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland

#108

Post by stelonix » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:38 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #54

mellavora wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe true in glorious future where the industrialized farm can support increased biodiversity. Currently, however, this promotes large-scale monoculture. Which is inherently harmful on almost every level, including the ability to keep the cost of food down and and the supply up. Food diversity is much much less than it was 100 years ago. Nutritional content of food is down significant levels from 30 years ago.

>Currently, however, this promotes large-scale monoculture. Standardization is a hallmark of efficiency and humanity has lots of mouths to feed. I'm not sure you can really do it any other way.

Yes, we can[0]. For agroforests to work though, you need to change the mindset from demanding every fruit everytime of the year to something more in line with how crop cycles work.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agroforestry

Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland

#109

Post by bryanlarsen » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:39 PM UTC

Farm size isn't a useful metric. My father-in-law farmed 800 acres in Saskatchewan Canada, which I'm sure was large enough to qualify it as part of the 1%. It was a hobby farm, he had a full-time off-farm job.

800 acres in much of the world is a massive amount that can grow a massive amount of food. For Northern dryland wheat farming it's a very small farm. A more typical size for the area is about 10,000 acres.

Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland

#110

Post by dalbasal » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:40 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #30

Industrialisation of farming is a good thing more than a bad thing. You don't want the cost of food to go up, or the supply to go down. You kind of want large scale industrial farming. It's like complaining that large factories are taking over small artisans.

I think that frame was correct for a long time, but things that are generally true in one generation can be false in another.

Small, undercapitalized, under-industrialized farms were an issue for a long time... in some/many times and places this was the bottleneck on the green revolution.

That doesn't (necessarily) mean it's the case here. IE, the economies of scale when going from a $100k farm to a $10m may not apply to a move from $10m to $1bn. I think this is ultimately the question: Are there real economies of scale edriving this.

If/where the current transition is being driven by finance, it's a different kettle of fish. IE, If it's just cheaper/easier to finance megafarms... which I think is the case, it's not real economies of scale. It's securitisation.

As the article mentions, extreme scale and centralization has some serious side effects.

Industrial farming is the story of several centuries. It has major triumphs, like the feeding an extraordinary human population. It also has major dark spots. Slavery, and centuries of moral failures of the colonial "plantation" model. But it also caused several famines and other such collapses.

For an old analogy from the early days... Agribusiness that the British East India Company could profit from was often at odds with producing food.

Douglas Adams has a fantastic essay (section) about Dutch agricultural industrialization reforms in Bali.

If nothing else, there's a major "eggs in one basket" problem... an even bigger problem when it comes to ecosystems and biology than elsewhere.