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

theguardian.com

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

#141

Post by dash2 »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #106
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.

But 1% of even 2000 car firms is far from a "monopoly", and 1% of the world's farms is still probably thousands of farms, right?

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

#142

Post by gruez »

Retric wrote: post #98
prepend wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Operate as in he and his wife did 95+% of the work so it was more like 20h/week total. As to the type of farm, they had some beef cattle and mostly grew corn. The time spent is kind of an interesting question because they could spend either time or more money to solve many issues. It was enough time to break even, but not enough profit to live on. However, a pure corn farm would taken less work, so they chose to spen…

> It was enough time to break even, but not enough profit to live on.

AFAIK this describes most small-scale farmers. They're only doing it because of inertia (eg. they inherited the farm and they don't want to sell it), not because it's actually profitable.

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

#143

Post by xyzzyz »

fouc wrote: post #96
prepend wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

“Permaculture” is opposite of low effort. No tilling is not going to save me much effort, given that I can till 200 acres a day with a tractor. Sculpting the landscape of the same 200 acres will take incomparably more effort.

Permaculture is well suited for home gardens, where you want to maximize land use and fun involved. It is not going to feed the population.

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

#144

Post by kevindong »

fbelzile wrote: post #136
kanox wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Is there a good reason for agriculture to be less concentrated than industrial sectors, for example automotive?

Increased innovation created through more competition (eg: vertical farming). Also, all the issues associated with mono-cultures. I don't think comparing agribusiness to other industries is going to help. Yes, factory farming is more efficient, which makes it cheaper. But the price we pay doesn't necessarily reflect the actual costs to our health and the environment.

Having massive farms does not guarantee a lack of competition though. Lack of competition requires a very, very small handful of corporations to own most of the farmland producing a particular crop.

Additionally, large farms seemingly are more well suited for polyculture (i.e. small farms are more predisposed to do monoculture farming given their smaller scale).

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

#145

Post by kochb »

The inequality discussed by the article is a reduction to a popular political line. These popularized, almost mythical, portrayals of agriculture are uselessly far from reality. If you want to summarize a tremendously complex industry, it's more useful to compare in terms of the crop being produced and the region's level of economic development.

For example, in the US, mechanized row crop farming over large numbers of acres is the norm (growing corn, beans, wheat, etc). These farms are all small head count family-run operations, sized between a few hundred to a few thousand acres, with a total somewhere in the low hundred-thousands of them.

The worldwide number of farms then runs up into the hundreds of millions due to small landholders - subsistence agriculture, locally sold produce, etc.

A farmer growing corn in a remote Central American village is completely different from the farmer growing corn in the United States. A produce farmer at your local farmer's market is completely different from a wheat farmer on the Black Sea. There's a living to be made at many points on the spectrum, and humanity needs each of them.

Real problems certainly do exist. They have more to do with things like the market pressures of producing commodity products, baseline calorie and nutritional demands, distribution, and structural supply and demand inefficiencies.

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

#146

Post by JoeAltmaier »

kochb wrote: post #145

The inequality discussed by the article is a reduction to a popular political line. These popularized, almost mythical, portrayals of agriculture are uselessly far from reality. If you want to summarize a tremendously complex industry, it's more useful to compare in terms of the crop being produced and the region's level of economic development. For example, in the US, mechanized row crop farming over large numbers o…

Maybe that's out of date. Iowa used to be run as described, but the 'family farm' is largely extinct. Now its all run by corporations in large blocks.

This is an evolving issue, and its gone at least as far as the OP suggests.

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

#147

Post by bluGill »

ahelwer wrote: post #128
bluGill wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your small farm doesn't have enough surplus in the good years to pay for the transport cost to get food from farther away.

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

#148

Post by gruez »

nemo44x wrote: post #49
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.

It’s also dangerous from a national security point of view. Consolidating farming and relying on monocultures certainly has economic benefits but it also creates an increasingly fragile system. A new parasite or disease could easily destroy enough of a years harvest (or more) and now the nation has a food shortage. Because so much of our food is derived from or reliant on the monoculture it would have cascading effec…

>Consolidating farming and relying on monocultures certainly has economic benefits but it also creates an increasingly fragile system.

But everything you're describing is with monocultures, not with consolidated farming. If a particular crop breed is the most efficient I don't see why a diverse group of farmers wouldn't all go with that.

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

#149

Post by kochb »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #146
kochb wrote: post #145

The inequality discussed by the article is a reduction to a popular political line. These popularized, almost mythical, portrayals of agriculture are uselessly far from reality. If you want to summarize a tremendously complex industry, it's more useful to compare in terms of the crop being produced and the region's level of economic development. For example, in the US, mechanized row crop farming over large numbers o…

Maybe that's out of date. Iowa used to be run as described, but the 'family farm' is largely extinct. Now its all run by corporations in large blocks. This is an evolving issue, and its gone at least as far as the OP suggests.

Speaking as someone who provides services to the industry, your statement just isn't correct; as I originally stated it's a popular myth that is very different from reality. There are large corporations involved, but they come in at the points where inputs are supplied to the farmer and production is purchased.

Production is still operated by family run farms. It's so capital inefficient that no corporation would dare bother.

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

#150

Post by JoeAltmaier »

mellavora wrote: post #43
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.

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.

That nutritional argument seems very speculative. I don't know of any 70-year-old food that could be tested side-by-side with 'modern' food. And 'nutritional content' is certainly up per dollar, per man-hour. And its more available with modern refrigeration and transportation.

It seems overwhelmingly true that for most people, their food has improved drastically over 70 years.

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