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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

#211

Post by triceratops »

xenocratus wrote: post #41
kebman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are saying is true, but a lot of people hate the thought, since a farm has historically been a family working within a small community or a village, first and foremost for their own benefit, with the surplus going back to the village or greater society through trade or cooperation (or later by force through taxation by the Lord of the land). This was a good and healthy life that produced strong people. For t…

> a lot of people hate the thought Source? > For thousands of years the farm was the producer of civilization and culture. The producer of "civilization and culture"? In what sense? Farms produce the goods we eat, how does that lead to culture and civilization? I'm not that knowledgeable at history - if that is the case, then I'd really like to read more about it. > Today, on the other hand, it has been reduced to a…

Without farming, humans were hunters and nomads, had comparatively very few possessions and left behind few artifacts. It's likely that writing was invented after humans settled down on farms, possibly for bookkeeping.

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

#212

Post by onecommentman »

bluGill wrote: post #131
javiramos wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leafy greens production is quickly being standardized and automated in a highly controllable format. e.g. [0] It would be reasonable to assume that the farming of many other crops will eventually transition to fully automated indoor formats. [0] https://infinite-acres.com/

Not really. Leafy greens are expensive in the store for what you get: a lot of labor required, and spoil quickly after harvest. It makes sense to automate indoors. Most crops need a lot more space, and a lot less labor. Indoor farming is not economical for these. Don't get me wrong: there are a number of crops where it makes sense. They are an important source of nutrients (and taste!), but a poor source of calories…

Or to grow in a small home garden. Leafy greens are the easiest crop to grow in a small plot, or even indoors. Greens, fruits and tomatoes/peppers are the easiest for home growers to become self-sufficient. The labor is credited as exercise and therapy.

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

#213

Post by onecommentman »

fotdutah wrote: post #119
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.

It seems an over-simplification to say that it's always good for the cost of food to go down, or the supply to go up. In the West, it looks like much of the rewards of intensification goes towards making people obese. And in societies where more people don't have enough to eat, it still isn't clear whether more intensive farming resolves that. The move to cash crops seems to lead to less local food security for examp…

To challenge the assumption that more food supply is always good, you need to address the issue of famine.

A recent narrative

https://fic.tufts.edu/publication-item/somalian-famine-narra...

As Gandhi said at a religious conference with global elites, it’s fine to be pontificating with well-fed faces, but to the majority of Indians, God looks like a loaf of bread.

India is at the forefront of addressing the complexities of modernization. They also have the greatest need to do so, with 200M malnourished in Southern Asia.

http://www.fao.org/3/ca9692en/online/ca9692en.html#chapter-1...

Some articles on pros and cons of modernization:

https://www.futurefarming.com/Smart-farmers/Articles/2020/4/...

https://www.dw.com/en/why-indian-farmers-are-angry-over-agri...

https://www.gisreportsonline.com/as-indian-agriculture-expan...

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

#214

Post by fouc »

Loughla wrote: post #115
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.

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…

Let's say you had the same piece of land, but you put a hard limit on how much time you'll spend working on it every year.

No time for make work. Bring in machines to quickly shape the land. Borrow some pigs or chickens to root through the ground and then sprinkle random seeds all over. Spend your time on observation, avoid working on the land for a couple of years, etc. See what comes up and where.

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

#215

Post by jehb »

There seems to be a damned lot of obsession with monetary efficiency in this thread, and very little concern with output per acre, output per ton of carbon spent in production, or whether the farming practice is one that will allow the land to be a farm and not an infertile wasteland in twenty years.

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

#216

Post by eru »

yorwba wrote: post #47
opencl wrote: post #38

Earlier 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.

That's right, but it's not necessary to aggregate small farms into large ones to maximize machine utilization. It's also possible to separate the machine-owning part from the other aspects of farming and aggregate only that, by forming an association of farmers who share equipment. (Shared ownership of the means of production, so to speak.) In German, that's called a Maschinenring. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masch…

There are transaction costs to these arrangements.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm for the broader question of why we have (big) companies at all instead of everything being organised on eg a project basis and people and equipment hired just as needed.

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

#217

Post by thinkingemote »

mainstreem wrote: post #200
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.

There are other comments in this thread about Pareto. Personally, I think it's a very different distribution because its basically misleading. The very vast majority the 608 million "farms" are the equivalent of a small house and a yard.

There may be more classic Pareto distribution if you change the statistics - basically the title and newspaper article are misleading in trying to point out inequality. Its a trap. Advocates of Pareto like to downplay inequality by invoking Pareto distributions as being "natural". Both points of view are flawed in this specific case (but are valid in other cases) because the statistics don't mean much - it's like playing a rigged casino game against a player where it's the house that wins.

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

#218

Post by alexpetralia »

dalbasal wrote: post #79

When looking at the current structure of agriculture, I think the context is long term undercurrents & cycles. First is the green revolution and its post credits. This is one of history's great undercurrents and it meant that fewer people worked in farming every decade for a long time. Urbanisation, industrialisation and their consequences are all underpinned by this centuries long undercurrent. Kind like Moore's law…

I found your comments on large-scale finance very illuminating. Thank you!

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

#219

Post by fsloth »

wreath wrote: post #39
fsloth wrote: post #25

James 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

Offtopic but this book changed the way I see things in many aspects of life. Funny how I came across it from a talk about abstractions in Clojure.

Yes, it suddenly brings so many facets of modern life into clear focus.

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

#220

Post by ryanmarsh »

nsp wrote: post #193
ryanmarsh wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes
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