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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

#81

Post by mikrotikker »

WoahNoun wrote: post #37
harshaw wrote: post #28

This farm is in Harvard MA - e.g the exurbs of Boston. Harvard is one of these communities that has large minimum lot sizes and restrictions on commercial property so it retains its rural feel. It's pretty, possibly not the best use of property in Boston these days, kinda snooty, and is certainly not a cheap place to run a family farm. A couple towns south where I live there are many active small farms. They either s…

[flagged]

Its practically indebted servitude (to the bank) at that point isn't it?

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

#82

Post by mikrotikker »

harshaw wrote: post #28

This farm is in Harvard MA - e.g the exurbs of Boston. Harvard is one of these communities that has large minimum lot sizes and restrictions on commercial property so it retains its rural feel. It's pretty, possibly not the best use of property in Boston these days, kinda snooty, and is certainly not a cheap place to run a family farm. A couple towns south where I live there are many active small farms. They either s…

NZ dairy farming become very intensified. Less than 200 acres is not worth it I heard. The effect on our environment is not good.

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

#83

Post by jessmartin »

Wendell. Appropriate name, given the situation. Wendell Berry has written beautifully on this subject, in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Highly recommended, if you want to dive into the nuance and heartbreak.

Suffice to say the situation is complex and irreducible and does not yield to armchair quarterbacking.

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

#84

Post by colechristensen »

maxerickson wrote: post #75
colechristensen wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Abundant solar means you can just rip the nitrogen right out of the air. Sounds like the cost is in the ballpark already: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/01/19/pulling-fertilizer-ou...

It all just comes out of the air. High temperature, high pressure, air, hydrogen, and a catalyst. Methane is just a cheaper source of hydrogen than water.

Hard to tell if this startup is really something because all you can find is articles built from press releases.

The part about transportation is mostly moot, in the Midwest the fertilizer plants are local, there was one like twenty miles away from the farm i grew up on.

Decoupling from the energy markets would be nice, but it’s doubtful anybody really wants to become a pricecutting commodity here. Farm inputs have the tendency to be as expensive as farmers can afford.

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

#85

Post by randomdata »

ROTMetro wrote: post #42
flangola7 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Recently like in the past 30 years or so? It has certainly been common practice for at least that long.

I have vague recollections of our farm still pulling whites in the early-to-mid 80s, so perhaps not that far back. But that may have simply been a product of our farm being hesitant to try new things, which wouldn't be out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, I was a bit too young at that time to understand the motivation.

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

#86

Post by aklemm »

mikrotikker wrote: post #79
ajmurmann wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see it being eliminated right there in the post. Globalization is moving money to the people who are more needy by giving them the chance to earn a relative fortune by harvesting apples in NZ. It's a fabulous success! We see this all over the place. Many manufacturing jobs moved from China to cheaper places where people are more needy because so many Chinese were lifted out of poverty. The best way out of poverty…

But the effects globalization has had on the environment has been disastrous

This has to be reckoned with. Downvotes expose some kind of twisted biased I’d be curious to learn more about.

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

#88

Post by rgmerk »

thelastparadise wrote: post #5
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.

It's interesting to see that the same thing has been happening on the other side of the Atlantic. I grew up in a farming community in County Clare, Ireland (~1980 - 1999) and many farms there have been abandoned due to the low returns from agriculture.

The same thing has been happening pretty much everywhere in the world for a century.

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

#89

Post by judge2020 »

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…

This is why farming subsidies exist - it's advantageous for both national security and economic security to have at least some crops grown within a nation's borders. Not so great if the nation specifically has a lower minimum wage for their agriculture workers, though.

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

#90

Post by pfdietz »

whatshisface wrote: post #23
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…

The biggest fertilizer is ammonia. It's made from nitrogen that comes from the air and hydrogen that comes from methane. Conveniently, methane can be burnt to create the high temperature environment in which the reaction must take place. The other major fertilizer is potash. It is mined, but can also be extracted from underground brines, both natural and those produced from water pumped into deep wells and brought ba…

Potassium can also be obtained from seawater.

The limiting element is phosphorus. It cannot be substituted for and phosphate ores will not last forever. Eventually, it will have to be extracted from very low grade rocks at a concentration just above 0.1%. This probably sets a lower limit on how much rock global civilization will have to process each year. Phosphorus recycling will likely become more profitable.

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