...and other common, unsurprising results from the power law distribution
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1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
121–130 of 222 posts
Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
#122...and other common, unsurprising results from the power law distribution
Common, yes. There's bound to be some kind of disproportion between the number of land owners vs land area in capitalist societies. Though, the extent of the power law distribution is surprising, at least to me.
Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
#123Industrialisation 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.
Uncapped and unbounded it’s a bad thing. The measuring posts are moving every day, they’re constantly getting bigger. Small farms are bought out by bigger farms. You sure you want a handful of multinational conglomerates growing all of our food?
Yes. Is there a good reason for agriculture to be less concentrated than industrial sectors, for example automotive?
Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely, but smaller fields are a lot less efficient unfortunately.
To be clear, when you say efficient, you mean percentage of profit (value produced/costs) is lower in aggregate than if that same patch of land were part of a much larger farm. I submit this definition of efficiency ignores the distribution of those profits, which currently support a group of people owning the fruit of their labor - as opposed to those people being locked into dead-end wage labor jobs working at a mu…
Your system means that when your local garden fails your family starves to death. With the large farm we have insurance so that when (WHEN not IF) there is a crop failure we just buy something from a farm far away. Distance is important here: crop failures tend to be because of a situation that affects your entire village so you can't fall back on a local safety net, you need a large one with a distribution network. The distribution network in turns requires a lot of people not working the farm but instead distributing things around. To make this work you need large farms with surplus.
In short your ideals sound good, but they just don't work out. Too many people are needed off the farm to pull it off, but you put them on their little farms.
Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Which is why historic small farms tended to be a lot of small fields. You didn't only only one patch of ground you had several. If the wheat field failed, maybe the barely elsewhere did okay and so you can at least survive until next year.
Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ecen a pretty basic set of modern farm equipment and facilities will run into the millions of dollars, and will have very low utilization on small farms. A single modern combine can harvest >100 acres per day. With multiple big fields of crops that have different harvesting times your equipment will spend much less time idle.
But there's only so much farmland. Those super efficient machines increase the efficiency of its operator, not the efficiency of the land.
they increase the efficiency of the land too. By doing perfect spacing between plants they ensure optimal growing conditions for each which in turns increase yields greatly. Two plants in the space of one shade each other and the net result is a lot more than half the harvest is lost since each needs to put the same amount of energy into making a plant before they can put any into creating the crop. Too far apart and sunlight reaches the ground uselessly (or worse a fast growing weed that will shade your plants!).
Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
#127Earlier 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?
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.
Had an old teammate who would talk about his "family's farm" back in Kentucky. Got the impression he meant some 500 acre plot of land they were just getting by on.
Oh no, it's 8,000 acres or so and they have a staff of workers to maintain it.
Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be clear, when you say efficient, you mean percentage of profit (value produced/costs) is lower in aggregate than if that same patch of land were part of a much larger farm. I submit this definition of efficiency ignores the distribution of those profits, which currently support a group of people owning the fruit of their labor - as opposed to those people being locked into dead-end wage labor jobs working at a mu…
Your system means that when your local garden fails your family starves to death. With the large farm we have insurance so that when (WHEN not IF) there is a crop failure we just buy something from a farm far away. Distance is important here: crop failures tend to be because of a situation that affects your entire village so you can't fall back on a local safety net, you need a large one with a distribution network.…
Does not follow. I'm not talking about subsistence farming. Nothing stops you from buying food from small farms further away that didn't experience crop failure.
Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's definitely lots of low effort options for farming. Look at permaculture farming for example, key ideas behind it involve no-tilling, sculpting the landscape with various shapes like berms, which create microclimates, arranging rows of trees to retain moisture, etc. There's a lot of ways to make the land work for you, but can take a few years to get it to a highly productive state.
Just for reference, I've lived on our current place for 20 years or so, and it has taken absolutely every one of those years to get to a point that our 'permaculture' farm is anywhere near running efficiently. The amount of work involved in that process is simply staggering. There are principals that can be effectively integrated to a backyard garden. But, to have as close to a self-sustaining cycle as you can, you'r…
We have a great permaculture farm near us, they run classes, tours etc. (Apparently a popular joke in the permaculture world is that the only way to make money off permaculture is to run permaculture courses).
Everything I've seen there echos your sentiments. An incredible amount of work - and knowledge - to achieve a rather peasant-level existence.
That said it's amazing seeing anyone live a genuinely sustainable lifestyle. I always think that if everyone lived and thought like these guys, our environment would be recovering nicely.
Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
#130Earlier 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…
> Historically agricultural workers were slaves or at best serfs. This was certainly common, but e.g. England hasn't really had serfdom for 5 centuries (after a gradual decline). Quite a lot of the labor was hired servants, perhaps a majority, although (IIRC) the median servant worked alongside only one or two others. So not family, but still a lot of family-sized groups.
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