Isn't this regular old Pareto Distribution?
1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
21–30 of 222 posts
Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
#22And if they didn't, food would probably be a lot more expensive.
Does a strong argument exists for this? To my understanding agriculture was turned into big business in the beginning of 20th century because of political process, not because it was obviously a more efficient way to produce food at the time.
Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
#23Farms 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?
What economies of scale specifically do farms have?
A farm is not a factory where you can create a uniform process...
Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
#24After the fall of communism in Bulgaria, land was to be given back to people(during the communism everything was owned by the government). Don't know the details but now we have small amount of farmlands and forests. Turns out, most urban people don't fancy to work the land by themselves and those in the villages really suck at the organisation. So my grandma is living in a town, she opted out to keep her land in a c…
There is a niche for small scale farms, but those had to be run like a business. And let me tell you it is tough business to run with high capital costs and low margins.
Huge companies have many advantages in certain production areas, but there are many others like intensive vegetable production, wine grapes, poultry, rabbits (just to name some animal production) and some speciality crops that favor small producers. Farms just need to invest in building their own supply chain.
Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
#25James Scott's "Seeing like a state" makes a fairly strong argument why big agribusiness is not as obviously the optimal choice for best use of land as a technologist (like myself) might imagine on the first blush:
Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
#26Earlier 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...
Well, as a simple example, you can't efficiently plow or mechanically harvest lots of land which are very small or have a weird shape. If you aggregate them, it becomes much more efficient.
Same thing goes for purchasing equipment or supplies, you can buy in bulk for a large farm.
Modern farms ARE factories.
Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And even if someone farms for selling to others if they don't have reliable access to machinery the farms will be really small as that just does not scale up (just take a look at pre industrial world where something like 90% of people were farmers) You seem to assume/imply that small farms in the developing world cannot scale up due to economic/business reasons. However in some developing countries, farms cannot be…
I agree with most of your comment but the final paragraph is a bit ???? > if farming in the Western world wasn't heavily subsidized, it wouldn't exist in the Western world It probably would change, but it's weird to suggest it would stop existing without governmental subsidies. Most farming in the West is either intensive mass-production of commodities or sectorial, high-margin goods like wine. For the most part, agr…
He's right. Western Europe heavily imports laborers from Eastern Europe, Turkey and North Africa for many crops. Germany opened its borders at the height of the first Covid-19 wave to allow workers from Romania to come, when Romania was a hot bed for Covid-19.
Many Western countries are self sufficient agriculturally and they are huge exporters.
Agriculture is a cornerstone of national security. Life sucks when you are rationing fuel or imposing lights out curfews but it gets dire (and dangerous!) when people starve.
Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
#28This doesn't surprise me: there are some huge industrial farms and the rest are small private ones, obviously.
Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And even if someone farms for selling to others if they don't have reliable access to machinery the farms will be really small as that just does not scale up (just take a look at pre industrial world where something like 90% of people were farmers) You seem to assume/imply that small farms in the developing world cannot scale up due to economic/business reasons. However in some developing countries, farms cannot be…
I agree with most of your comment but the final paragraph is a bit ???? > if farming in the Western world wasn't heavily subsidized, it wouldn't exist in the Western world It probably would change, but it's weird to suggest it would stop existing without governmental subsidies. Most farming in the West is either intensive mass-production of commodities or sectorial, high-margin goods like wine. For the most part, agr…
> Again, not to say subsidies are wrong per se, but I don't follow your reasoning there.
The reasoning is that it is so much cheaper to produce food in some low income countries (less/no regulations, lower wages) that the Western world would never be able to compete with it without subsidies.
I'm not an expert on farming at all, but as far as I know at least in the EU, all farmers are dependent in some way or another on subsidies. In other words: it wouldn't make financial sense to farm in the EU without subsidies. I'm assuming it's the same in the US, but I might be completely wrong. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Hence my conclusion: if farming wasn't subsidized in the Western world, it wouldn't exist in the Western world and it would all move to low income countries that aren't as regulated and have cheaper production. Just like the production of the vast majority of the rest of our goods I guess?
> Most Western countries (with the possible exception of the US, I don't know) aren't agriculturally self-sufficient, nor it is a goal for them to be.
?? This looks pretty self-sufficient to me? http://capreform.eu/trends-in-eu-agricultural-self-sufficien...
Or at least enough production to survive a war or other crisis.
Being from The Netherlands I know that we export a ton of food (a tiny country that is the second biggest exporter in the world behind the US). We also heavily subsidize food production.
If self-sufficiency of food production (in case of crisis) wasn't a goal of the Western world then I have no idea why we would have any internal production at all? Why would you subsidize food production within a geographical region for any other reason than food security?
> In case a war broke out, energy supplies would be a much more pressing concern, especially for Western Europe.
Ah? I would think that both (food security and energy security) are dependent on each other, equally essential and pressing? I mean: you can't have one without the other in times of crisis.
It's a bit off-topic, but I can't think of many policies that are geopolitically dumber and more dangerous than European energy policies (with perhaps France being the only exception). Example: Germany is in the process of making itself voluntarily completely dependent on Russian gas for the vast majority of it's average energy consumption ( > 60 %) and for more than 90 % of it's base load production (when there's little wind and sun).
Re: 1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
#30Industrialisation 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.