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The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#41

Post by cyberax »

mikewarot wrote: post #16

There goes another possible experiment in regenerative agriculture, the only sustainable way for our great-grandchildren to avoid mass starvation. Industrial farming depends on oil as a chemical input , because the soil has been sterilized and turned into dirt in most places by ammonia based fertilizers. The process of tilling the land resulted in most of the remaining dirt being eroded over the past century. We're g…

> Industrial farming depends on oil as a chemical input, because the soil has been sterilized and turned into dirt in most places by ammonia based fertilizers. The process of tilling the land resulted in most of the remaining dirt being eroded over the past century.

What a piece of nonsense bullshit.

1. Ammonia can be produced without any oil. Natural gas (not oil per se) is simply used as an easy way to produce hydrogen and the heat energy needed.

2. Nitrogen fertilizers do not "sterilize" the soil. Not even close to it. They in fact can cause bacterial overgrowth, as nitrogen is often the limiting nutrient for anything. Soil with fertilizer is extremely fertile for both agricultural plants and for microbial life.

3. Nitrogen fertilizers are _essential_ to survival. Without them, quite literally billions will starve.

4. "Soil depletion" is typically caused by the lack of micronutrients such as potassium, and can be managed by (you guessed it!) adding fertilizers. Some other causes such as salt accumulation due to irrigation are more complicated.

> Without that oil to turn into fertilizer, the only other chance is to have ruminants actively managed on a regenerative farm growing both meat and produce.

Sigh. People should REALLY learn how the nitrogen cycle works.

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#42

Post by ROTMetro »

flangola7 wrote: post #30
randomdata wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From an economic standpoint, there is no sense in small scale farming. So long as there is residual value in the "hand-me-down" equipment, there will be economic value in operating it. At the same time it is not economically sensible for large scale farming to continue to operate old and outdated equipment, so the smaller scale farm actually fills a useful role in the economy.

Are there really that many innovations in how to harvest a wheat field?

Didn't they just recently start desiccating with Glyphosate at the end of the growing cycle to speed their harvest up by two weeks and putting glyphosate into food a few days harvesting it (causing a higher concentration in food than previously)?

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#43

Post by oh_sigh »

sokoloff wrote: post #39
fundad wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That close to Boston, they have an 8-figure net worth. That must be why they can't hire help and want to hold onto the land to bequeath to their daughter.

Harvard isn't particularly close to Boston. It's 25-30 miles outside of Boston and outside of even I-495, the outer loop highway encircling Boston. (Still River, where the farm is, is on the far end of Harvard.) Article says they used to farm two fields they owned and three they leased and have backing away from some of the leased land. From a quick search (unverified/fact-checked), it looks like it's a <20 acres of…

The farmers didn't need to farm for 60 years either, if they just let land till I follow, it would still be worth just as much to a developer.

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#44

Post by golergka »

crtified wrote: post #38

Low wage industries struggle in high wage countries. Globalization displaces natural local supply and demand outcomes. The above two factors result in some very complex status quos. For example, take the country of New Zealand, whose significant apple growing industry is largely for export purposes - ostensibly, sending good fresh highly-valued NZ apples to other countries, where they'll fetch max $. Problem: apple w…

Fault? The situation with apple producers you just described looks like a win-win situation both for consumers and immigrants. The only ones losing are New Zealand workers, but from all invoked groups, they're the only citizens who could theoretically vote out these politicians.

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#45

Post by canadiantim »

dauertewigkeit wrote: post #7

From an economic standpoint, there is no sense in small scale farming. From a personal standpoint, the sensible thing to do is to scale it down to subsistence gardening for yourself and your family. That is what my family does. I remember, when I was still young, they still used to sell some produce. Nowadays it is entirely consumed by the family or gifted out. The benefit of this, is that you are free from economic…

Depends on the type of small farm. Commodity crops? Sure there’s no sense in doing that small scale.

But a diversified direct to consumer small farm is actually significantly better than the commodity farm business model.

Not to mention commodity farm businesses are Very dependant on debt and the hurt is only beginning for these types of farms as interest rates continue to rise. Small direct to consumer farms? They’ll be thriving

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#46

Post by ROTMetro »

bredren wrote: post #10
m463 wrote: post #4

This is sort of sad, because - 350 years! I think the other side of the coin is the places stagnation and outright decay have set in, like many inner cities or rustbelt regions that have not thrived. The opposite would be places like tokyo where everything is turned over rapidly and the new is ousted to be almost immediately replaced by the newer and newest.

The length of its existence is interesting, but by todays standards, the farm may have been just as unsustainable as it was at its onset. Notably, the Smithsonian article only asks about recent changes affecting the farm. Slavery was common in Massachusetts through 1700s. If the farm was made sustainable through slave labor in its first 100 years, it would have avoided the same concerns that the article says are doin…

My Scottish male ancestors were forcibly shipped to Massachusetts and made to do forced labour when they lost the civil war to the English. Because they were prisoners of war they were not allowed to bring their families with them.

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#47

Post by ghaff »

sokoloff wrote: post #39
fundad wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That close to Boston, they have an 8-figure net worth. That must be why they can't hire help and want to hold onto the land to bequeath to their daughter.

Harvard isn't particularly close to Boston. It's 25-30 miles outside of Boston and outside of even I-495, the outer loop highway encircling Boston. (Still River, where the farm is, is on the far end of Harvard.) Article says they used to farm two fields they owned and three they leased and have backing away from some of the leased land. From a quick search (unverified/fact-checked), it looks like it's a <20 acres of…

Probably not even that expensive. I live a town or two further out. One of my neighbors has a small apple tree orchard and the other has a Christmas tree farm. It's pretty accessible to Boston for the day but not really close. My old farmhouse was the original property for about a 75 acre farm. It's been renovated but certainly not a multi-million dollar property. You can actually get out of Boston fairly quickly to reasonably priced real estate.

It's mostly a very Bay area thing to imagine that being a 60-90 minute drive from the city means you're talking multi-million dollar real estate. That mostly isn't true of even relatively expensive cities.

But yeah my neighbor has scaled down you-pick apples over the years as it's really not worth the effort.

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#48

Post by colechristensen »

cyberax wrote: post #41
mikewarot wrote: post #16

There goes another possible experiment in regenerative agriculture, the only sustainable way for our great-grandchildren to avoid mass starvation. Industrial farming depends on oil as a chemical input , because the soil has been sterilized and turned into dirt in most places by ammonia based fertilizers. The process of tilling the land resulted in most of the remaining dirt being eroded over the past century. We're g…

> Industrial farming depends on oil as a chemical input, because the soil has been sterilized and turned into dirt in most places by ammonia based fertilizers. The process of tilling the land resulted in most of the remaining dirt being eroded over the past century. What a piece of nonsense bullshit. 1. Ammonia can be produced without any oil. Natural gas (not oil per se) is simply used as an easy way to produce hydr…

The future of land management is going to be cultivating, curating, and generally taking care of the living, mostly fungal, part of the soil which will displace some or all of the straight up chemical additions instead enhancing the natural symbioses between root, fungus, and bacteria on an industrial scale... but until then chemical additions are fine. The issue going forward is going to be cost not an existential threat.

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#49

Post by colechristensen »

dekhn wrote: post #40
colechristensen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oil isn't "turned into fertilizer". Methane is used as a source of hydrogen to fix atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, but it's entirely possible but slightly more expensive to use hydrogen from splitting water. When natural gas prices go up, it'll be cheaper to use electrolysis on water so that's what will be used, no starvation involved. You don't know what you're talking about. The generational BS about not being a…

I believe the H from the oil (literally the hydrogen atom) is incorporated chemically into the resulting ammonia, which would be consistent with saying "oil is turned into fertilizer" in most worlds that I move through.

I mean, yes, this is what I explained, but in no way is the hydrocarbon necessary, it's just one of many alternative feedstocks for hydrogen.

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#50

Post by Maursault »

tsunamifury wrote: post #24
Maursault wrote: post #15

> the 17-acre Willard Farm This is a very small farm even for family farm-sizes. Article does not mention if it was once larger, but I have a suspicion that it was. > “Today, the cost of producing anything is way out of line,” Paul tells Harasimowicz. “A dollar gets spent almost before you earn it because of the cost of pesticides, diesel fuel, labor, insurance—everything has gone up. You can only get so much for a t…

I really want to know why entitled and toxic millennials forced your friend off his farm and into accounting…

His nephew feels the farm belongs to him, saw my friend, one of the three actual legitimate heirs, as a threat. It was not just toxicity, it was escalating violence. Though my friend is the strongest man I know and could literally tie his skinny nephew into a double knot, and I could tell you stories of his ridiculous physicality that I personally witnessed, he is a pacifist, nonviolent, quite gentle for someone with farm hands. His nephew barely has a HS education, though I would consider him extremely financially successful, as is everyone with a share in the business thanks to the farm's success. But he is young, thinks he knows everything but doesn't know anything, drives a $100K pickup and thinks a lot of himself, as success can have that effect. He drives a planter, and that is all he knows. He doesn't have any education in the sciences that would lend themselves to farming, such as agronomy, genetics, biology, ecology, meteorology, business, economics or engineering. I'd be very surprised if he knew algebra. My friend has a mechanical engineering degree from a high ranking engineering university, and he worked on that farm for 40 years under his grandfather, then his father. For the last 2 decades, though not a mechanic, he's fixed the broken equipment, which broke down all the time, and kept it running, saving the farm untold amounts for this alone, and ran the front office, and also handled sales, as well as driving a combine, harvester, delivering product with ten wheelers, or whatever else he needed to do. I don't think his brothers recognized his value, and I don't understand how they're getting along without him. He knew what he was leaving behind, actually got a fair settlement, but accounting, and it is controlling actually, is easy money to him compared to farming.

Farming is extremely lucrative, but there are far easier ways to make money. And if his nephew ever does get control of the farm, it will not last, because he is an uneducated moron that is mentally ill and abusive. That he is a Millennial is incidental. He's young, but also identifiably a narcissist, and I should have just said that and left what generation American he was out of it. I believe the children are our future. Millennials, as sensitive as they can be at times (if hn comments are any indicator), and maybe it is just that they get too much unjustified criticism, are going to save the world, I have no doubt about that. And I am and should be grateful to them.

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