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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

#191

Post by jcranmer »

thinkingemote wrote: post #137

This quote is from a report, which itself is based on a FAO report: http://www.fao.org/3/ca7036en/ca7036en.pdf Quote with context: The results show that, worldwide, farms of less than 1 hectare account for 70 percent of all farms, but operate only 7 percent of all agricultural land. Slightly larger farms between 1 and 2 hectares account for 14 percent of all farms and control 4 percent of the land. Together, farms of…

To put some numbers in perspective:

In the US, the sale of public lands for everything west of the Ohio River was on the basis of the Public Land Survey System. The smallest saleable parcel was a "quarter-quarter section", or 40 acres (~16 hectares) of land. The Homestead Acts would grant (at various times) 160, 320, or 640 acres of land to free for anyone who would farm out. In other wards, the "small" pioneer farms of American history are in the top 1% of all farms.

Put differently, the large number of small farms is driven by the size of subsistence farms in the intense rice-growing areas of Southeast Asia (rice being more productive per acre than wheat, especially if you're not dealing with industrial inputs). Then, you have the subsistence farms of less-productive crops like wheat, mostly in Africa.

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

#192

Post by AnimalMuppet »

specialist wrote: post #179

Winner-takes-all is something like a natural law. That's just math, not a value statement or judgement. 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 efficienci…

Yeah. We have all the efficiency we need in growing food, and more besides. (At least in terms of output - maybe not in terms of sustainability and environmental damage.) But as you say, we really want resiliency, too.

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

#193

Post by nsp »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #180
pueblito wrote: post #158

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…

I live in Texas and anxiously await legalization because I’d love to start farming it. 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. Th…

Which grocery store? HEB?

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

#194

Post by legulere »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #19
Dylanfm wrote: post #13

Farms have continued to grow, echoing Earl Butz' (Nixon's Secretary of Ag) "get big or get out" philosophy. However, there are several studies out there showing that a greater portion of the world's population is fed by small farms: - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5... - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/12/1... - http://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/284666/…

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?

Do you mean agricultural output per money or agircultural output per area? The latter one does not scale with bigger farms but shrinks.

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

#195

Post by fedreserved »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #180
pueblito wrote: post #158

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…

I live in Texas and anxiously await legalization because I’d love to start farming it. 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. Th…

If you can breed to turn high end low yield strains, into high end high yielding/fast finishing/naturally mold and pest resistant strains then you will be able to either license out your strain library, or compete the fold fashioned way. Get started the earlier the better to be ahead of the curve

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

#196

Post by svieira »

vram22 wrote: post #135
fouc wrote: post #96

Earlier 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.

Right. I had given a few examples of quite successful long-running permaculture / regenerative agriculture operations here - people like Gabe Brown (Brown's Ranch, ND, US, ~5000 acres), Richard Perkins (Ridgedale Permaculture, Varmland, Sweden, 25 hectares?), Geoff Lawton (NSW, AU, well-known permaculture pioneer, 66 hectares/acres - countries consult him, even): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24827234 Most of…

There's also Ernst Götsch down in Brazil and Joel Salatin in the Eastern Seaboard.

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

#197

Post by KorematsuFred »

pueblito wrote: post #158

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…

I feel for you and you have my sincere sympathy. I come from a family that has done nothing but agriculture to pay bills (despite being highly educated and skilled in many areas, I am not a farmer).

The problem with farming is that the total money you will make is fixed the moment land ownership is fixed. If you own X acres, you can make at max $$$ per year. Someone like my father is fine with that and lives his entire life on the farm. As time goes by other people sell their farms to larger farms and economy of scale makes the larger farms simply more efficient. They can get more $$$ from same acres for factors that someone like my father can not control.

Efficiency is a good thing that means less resources are used in producing per pound of the product which saves consumers more money and hence create more wealth. I still think it is possible for many of us to survive by doing things like co-operative farming. Basically many small farmers pool resources and land to act like a large company but while keeping the control of company and land still in your hands. These will not be billion dollar companies but still can survive the test of time.

Also, smaller farmers can survive by catering to different niches. For example there are lot of Hindus in bay area for whom cow is a holy animal and they like it to be treated well. A lot of them buy Strauss family farm's milk because the belief (I do not know it for a fact) among them that this farm treats cows much better than others. This milk is expensive. (Ancient Organics is a brand dependant on Strauss milk to produce some other times that Hindus in bay area seem to love like the Indian Ghee, which I am told is just as good as the home made one in India).

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

#198

Post by svieira »

bluGill wrote: post #124
ahelwer wrote: post #91

Earlier 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.…

Correction - the local system means that when the local system fails _for years on end_ then the remote part of society needs to step in to support those who are starving locally. But this is true, no matter how high you push things. If something kills all the okra (see Interstellar) then we'll have to fall back on spinach _as a society_ if we have one mega-farm. If everything on the planet dies off then we'll have to flee the solar system, or get support from neighbors in the local galactic cluster.

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

#199

Post by M5x7wI3CmbEem10 »

pueblito wrote: post #158

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…

Do you think it’s still worth going into the “recently legalized” business? May I ask how you got started and got the correct licensure?

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

#200

Post by mainstreem »

thinkingemote wrote: post #137

This quote is from a report, which itself is based on a FAO report: http://www.fao.org/3/ca7036en/ca7036en.pdf Quote with context: The results show that, worldwide, farms of less than 1 hectare account for 70 percent of all farms, but operate only 7 percent of all agricultural land. Slightly larger farms between 1 and 2 hectares account for 14 percent of all farms and control 4 percent of the land. Together, farms of…

Isn't this just pointing out that farms follow a Pareto distribution, like a lot of creative domains? It's a really common emergent pattern. It doesn't diminish from the observation the article makes, but it does make it somewhat less surprising when you're used to seeing Pareto curves all over the place.
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