1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by ahelwer » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:26 PM UTC

phpnode wrote: post #81

secondcoming wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure I've seen farmers in rural Ireland successfully ploughing fields that aren't 1 mile wide.

Definitely, but smaller fields are a lot less efficient unfortunately.

To be clear, when you say efficient, you mean percentage of profit (value produced/costs) is lower in aggregate than if that same patch of land were part of a much larger farm. I submit this definition of efficiency ignores the distribution of those profits, which currently support a group of people owning the fruit of their labor - as opposed to those people being locked into dead-end wage labor jobs working at a much larger farm, while the real profits flow to a single entity.

When people talk about the hollowing out of the middle class, this is exactly what they mean. Capitalism is very efficient at producing wealth but extremely inefficient in distributing it.

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

#92

Post by foxhop » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:26 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #83

Retric wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My old boss operates a 1,000 acre farm as a hobby due to that efficiency. Sure it was a “family farm” but it was a trivial portion of their income and involved 10-15 hours of work a week. It’s hard to argue that’s a bad thing.

When you say operate do you mean do all the work? Or manage the farm and hire people to do that? If the former, would you say what kind of farm it is, 1000 acre farm that’s easy enough to spend 15 hours a week seems interesting to me.

Any monocrop or one sufficiently subsidized is my guess. I grow a lot of food for myself and my family on less than an acre using hand tools. I don't focus on single crop because that would yeild a feast-or-famon phenomenon.

Grow what grows well in your context and locality, part time. Additionally, a focus on perennials will significantly chop the work hours needed to just reaping the harvest.

For more subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RussellBallestrini

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

#93

Post by iguy » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:27 PM UTC

mellavora wrote: post #43

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.

Maybe true in glorious future where the industrialized farm can support increased biodiversity. Currently, however, this promotes large-scale monoculture. Which is inherently harmful on almost every level, including the ability to keep the cost of food down and and the supply up. Food diversity is much much less than it was 100 years ago. Nutritional content of food is down significant levels from 30 years ago.

> Maybe true in glorious future where the industrialized farm can support increased biodiversity

While it certainly reduces on-farm biodiversity, higher yields also let us leave more land completely un-farmed. For example I think maybe 10% of France has returned to forest in the last 40 years, and more since 1900, but I can't seem to find a great link...

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

#94

Post by creato » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:29 PM UTC

mellavora wrote: post #43

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.

Maybe true in glorious future where the industrialized farm can support increased biodiversity. Currently, however, this promotes large-scale monoculture. Which is inherently harmful on almost every level, including the ability to keep the cost of food down and and the supply up. Food diversity is much much less than it was 100 years ago. Nutritional content of food is down significant levels from 30 years ago.

> Currently, however, this promotes large-scale monoculture. Which is inherently harmful on almost every level, including the ability to keep the cost of food down and and the supply up.

It's hard to reconcile this point with the strong trends over the last century of more monoculture, more production, and much lower prices.

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

#95

Post by dash2 » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:29 PM UTC

A useful comparison from 5 minutes of googling:

In 2017, the top 20 car companies produced 76m vehicles [1]. There "may be as many as 2000 car companies globally".[2] This page (admittedly it seems to have been "hacked by Javanese team") says total vehicle production was about 96m.[3]

So, 1% of motor companies produce 80% of the world's cars.

Is there a reason one statistic should alarm us more than the other? Is food production different from motor car production? Should we think of farms as factories?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_manufacturers_by_motor...

[2] https://www.topspeed.com/cars/makes/

[3] http://www.oica.net/category/production-statistics/2017-stat...

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

#96

Post by fouc » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:30 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #83

Retric wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My old boss operates a 1,000 acre farm as a hobby due to that efficiency. Sure it was a “family farm” but it was a trivial portion of their income and involved 10-15 hours of work a week. It’s hard to argue that’s a bad thing.

When you say operate do you mean do all the work? Or manage the farm and hire people to do that? If the former, would you say what kind of farm it is, 1000 acre farm that’s easy enough to spend 15 hours a week seems interesting to me.

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.

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

#97

Post by yorwba » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:30 PM UTC

phpnode wrote: post #84

Retric wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not just that, certain pieces of equipment (combines in particular) are needed at the exact same time in multiple different places, and a delay of a day or even a few hours can be ruinous (if you don't harvest wheat at exactly the right time it can be more or less destroyed by the weather)

How do big farms cope with situations where their equipment is needed in multiple different places at the exact same time?

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

#98

Post by Retric » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:30 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #83

Retric wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My old boss operates a 1,000 acre farm as a hobby due to that efficiency. Sure it was a “family farm” but it was a trivial portion of their income and involved 10-15 hours of work a week. It’s hard to argue that’s a bad thing.

When you say operate do you mean do all the work? Or manage the farm and hire people to do that? If the former, would you say what kind of farm it is, 1000 acre farm that’s easy enough to spend 15 hours a week seems interesting to me.

Operate as in he and his wife did 95+% of the work so it was more like 20h/week total. As to the type of farm, they had some beef cattle and mostly grew corn.

The time spent is kind of an interesting question because they could spend either time or more money to solve many issues. It was enough time to break even, but not enough profit to live on. However, a pure corn farm would taken less work, so they chose to spend more time than needed to make it more interesting.

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

#99

Post by bryanlarsen » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:33 PM UTC

mellavora wrote: post #43

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.

Maybe true in glorious future where the industrialized farm can support increased biodiversity. Currently, however, this promotes large-scale monoculture. Which is inherently harmful on almost every level, including the ability to keep the cost of food down and and the supply up. Food diversity is much much less than it was 100 years ago. Nutritional content of food is down significant levels from 30 years ago.

I'm willing to bet that biodiversity in large farms and in small farms is relatively similar. Sure, if we returned to the way the American Indigenous farmed, co-planting maize, beans and squash that'd be awesome for biodiversity. But that requires hand harvesting -- you can't even use a sickle or a horse to help, let alone any type of machinery.

Small farmers and big farmers both use monocultures.

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

#100

Post by pietrovismara » Wed, Nov 25, 2020, 1:33 PM UTC

dash2 wrote: post #95

A useful comparison from 5 minutes of googling: In 2017, the top 20 car companies produced 76m vehicles [1]. There "may be as many as 2000 car companies globally".[2] This page (admittedly it seems to have been "hacked by Javanese team") says total vehicle production was about 96m.[3] So, 1% of motor companies produce 80% of the world's cars. Is there a reason one statistic should alarm us more than the other? Is foo…

I'd say that food production is way more critical. Centralization of production at this levels could make the whole system much more fragile, and we depend more (and with more immediacy) on food than on private transportation. Plus I don't agree with the idea that food should be treated as a commodity.