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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

#71

Post by andi999 »

mrtksn wrote: post #20
truckerbill wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that's the only conclusion that can be drawn. What you're describing is simply a lack of education on the matter - there could have been a program to help these people out rather than just assume a monopoly will do a better job in the long run.

If we had self alternating magnets we could have built motor that run without using energy. The reality is not ideal for our desires though, so we don't have free energy motors. Anyway, I don't know what courses will fix the disorganisation problems and make the farmers turn into MBAs while still accept to live in a village and do hard work but if there's an success story of this, I would support it. From my point of…

Yes. I think you cannot teach people these things fast, it takes decades (and is then actually a culture).

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

#72

Post by Retric »

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…

The overhead of transporting this equipment between farms makes the process significantly less efficient. The difference between harvesting 2,000 acres a day and 1,700 might not seem like a lot, but add in transaction costs and you can be talking 5+% higher food costs ignoring subsidies.

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

#73

Post by EdwardDiego »

refurb wrote: post #57
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/…

I think you lose a lot of granularity when you just measure a farm by size. A 20,000 acre “farm” that only grazes a few thousand head of cattle because it’s practically desert could be much less productive than a 100 acre farm in the most fertile region of the world. So it wouldn’t surprise me that the smaller farms feed an outsized proportion of the population.

Exactly, there's some rather large farms in the NZ high country, and they tend to measure stocking rates for their more marginal land as "hectares per head" - much like measuring an M1 tank's fuel consumption in "gallons per mile".

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

#74

Post by blanketwarrior »

Guest42 wrote: post #37
argestes wrote: post #21

Isn't this regular old Pareto Distribution?

Regular old is 20/80. Would be nice to have some data sets to see what it looks like.

The rule is repeatable though. According to it the top 4% have 64%, and the top 0.8% have 51.2%, which is already much closer.

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

#75

Post by yorwba »

Retric wrote: post #72
yorwba wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The overhead of transporting this equipment between farms makes the process significantly less efficient. The difference between harvesting 2,000 acres a day and 1,700 might not seem like a lot, but add in transaction costs and you can be talking 5+% higher food costs ignoring subsidies.

If you merge multiple small farms into a single big one, the overhead of transporting this equipment between farms turns into the overhead of transporting this equipment between different parts of the farm. The distance that needs to be covered remains the same. Sure, the hand-off between farmers needs to be scheduled, but is that going to make the difference between 2,000 acres a day and 1,700? Do tractor drivers on big farms never take a break?

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

#76

Post by fotdutah »

bboygravity wrote: post #29
qsort wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I agree with you that the EU is roughly self-sufficient, food security is not the only goal of EU farming subsidies. France has strongly supported these subsidies, which replaced domestic French subsidies, because of the effect on rural life and the rural economy. Subsidies are the reason that millions of small farmers can make a living, the reason that many French villages still exist, one of the reasons for that high quality local produce made in small batches is available cheaply all over France, and one of the reasons that retirees from the UK and Netherlands like to live in rural France (the much more intensive farming in those countries makes rural life quite different).

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

#77

Post by 3pt14159 »

refurb wrote: post #57
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/…

I think you lose a lot of granularity when you just measure a farm by size. A 20,000 acre “farm” that only grazes a few thousand head of cattle because it’s practically desert could be much less productive than a 100 acre farm in the most fertile region of the world. So it wouldn’t surprise me that the smaller farms feed an outsized proportion of the population.

I know a guy that set up a food operation in a sea container in Toronto. It was a whole ecosystem of food producing organisms. Fish in the water, herbs like dill, tomatoes, all sorts of stuff. He'd sell it at 4x grocer prices to pricy restaurants near-by. His reasoning in putting it in a sea container was that he could always find a spare place to park it / electrify it with all his friends in the construction industry.

Made enough to live in Kensington Market, which is a hipster / hippy part of Toronto.

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

#79

Post by dalbasal »

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, but slower.

The second one is more of a Hegelian pendulum swing. Dylanfm mentioned the nixon era "get big or get out" philosophy. Here in Ireland non viable farm sizes were the economic issue for over a century. Farm sizes that could not support a farming family. Viability increasingly became intertwined with non-land capital, machinery or whatnot. Besides not supporting the farmer, undersized farms couldn't afford modern farming methods and overall farm productivity suffered.

It's still an issue in much of the developing world.

But... big is a different beast at different scales. Economies of scale are not linear, scale isn't necessarily driven by economies (cheaper unit prices) especially past a point.

Speaking of undercurrents, a lot of them come from macroeconomics. The economics of money itself. Money in huge investment pools has to go somewhere. If there's a lot of money/demand coming from here, it competes with money/demand from small farmers. One or the other will own any given parcel of land.

Fungible ownership structure, complex financial arrangements such work only at gigantic scale. Also, financing at mega scale is more favourable... very impactful in a capital intensive game like farming. If demand for land/farms as an investment vehicle doubles...

You can sometimes think of such macroeconomics as normal economics in reverse. Normal economics: farms supply and consumers demand. A macroeconomic trend might mean the demand for suppliers (farms, companies) has gone up. When demand goes up, supply responds. Financial markets demand shares, bonds or other such instruments. These finance large corporations, not family businesses.

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