171–180 of 222 posts
His fund made a ton of money during the 2001 dot com crash, 2018 financial crisis, and now with land. #contrarian
More: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-09-07/michael-b...
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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.
The age of the variety is a red herring, it's the industrialization of farming that's important. Our access to food has improved significantly, but anyone with a small garden and some seeds from an online shop knows that the "quality" of everything from modern tomatoes to berries is suspect.
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The huge ones are also private, FWIW.
Sure, obviously these are not state-owned, but I meant it in a different sense - like when you compare a multinational hotel chain to a family-maintained hostel. I wish I knew a better word for this.
Then the discussion can focus on whether is K is surprisingly high or low compared to similar statistics (general land ownership, farm revenue, etc), not endless confused comments that seem to be coming to terms with something being a power law distribution at all.
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The Jevons Paradox would like a word. E.g., we spend 14 million acres on non-food corn ethanol, and 80+ million acres of corn is fed to livestock at terrible feed conversion ratios. We'd get the same amount of net calories on our plates for 8 million acres if we ate the corn.
The area farmed in the US has declined slowly since the 1950s, maybe down 20%? Am eyeballing graphs as google is failing me: https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/58267/farms_fig01_45... It would decline faster if we didn't subsidize stupid stuff like corn ethanol, for sure. Edit, a maybe a better graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-land-area-used-f...
For just one small but hot-button current example, see Napa. For a historical example, see Silicon Valley, which was once orchards.
Maybe the title for articles like this should be "farmland ownership conforms to power law as expected, exponent = K" Then the discussion can focus on whether is K is surprisingly high or low compared to similar statistics (general land ownership, farm revenue, etc), not endless confused comments that seem to be coming to terms with something being a power law distribution at all.
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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…
Probably the outcome of preferential attachment and compounding interest (rewards). I'll let others talk about economies of scale, financialization, regulatory capture, and so forth.
If society determines that winner-takes-all is undesirable, we'll have to choose otherwise. That means forfeiting economic efficiencies, adding friction to open markets, some kind of profit sharing (redistribution).
A policy of robustness over efficiency could make a lot of sense. There will always be shocks to the system. In vesting in resilience is a pretty good idea.
Note that I wrote "open markets". The taxonomy of markets includes open, closed, gray, and black. "Free markets" is double speak for pro-monopoly laissez faire winner-takes-all.
This article is the future for me. I’m a small farmer - I grow marijuana in Colorado. Federal laws have so far sheltered us and allowed us to grow (no pun) by keeping BigAg and Bank money outside. Now it’s an industry of small partnerships and family farmers and I am very happy. But it won’t last. When marijuana is finally legalized nationally there will be an immediate tidal wave of money and consolidating. Those th…
However I know how things in this state work, and the economics of Ag. If and when Texas legalizes there will be immense amounts of private equity involved (lots of money here) and it will go ConAgra-ADM-Monsanto overnight.
People here do business, and Ag, really big. Fuck even one of the grocery chains is vertically integrated. They own everything from farms to shrimp boats.
My chances of doing anything are shot, except maybe high-end boutique low-yield stuff with lots of marketing.