“We’re heading to a place where we don’t have farmers; we just have food production.”
This.
I don't know what the solution to this is. I have a small farm, and raise meat sheep. But it's very much a hobby. The problem is, though, that almost all of the other farmers in my area, the ones I meet at the feed store or the livestock auction, they're also hobby farmers. There is exactly one “real” farmer (meaning that it's his full time job) in my area. He raises specialty row crops and runs an agricultural co-op, the kind where you pay a certain amount a month and get a box of fresh vegetables every week. But hobby farmers can't feed the country. We can't even feed ourselves, if it comes to that.
The problem is that these vegetables, which don't have to be shipped any distance and don't have the overhead of a grocery store, are still more expensive than the equivalent groceries in the local Safeway. The economies of scale in agriculture have become so strong that there's no way to compete on price any other way. And people understandably don't want to double their grocery bills just to buy local.
I grew up on a 300 acre cattle farm. Fifty years ago a family could make a living on a 300 acre, well situated east coast farm. Not any more. You'd have trouble just paying for gas, groceries, and medical care. Forget paying down a mortgage or god forbid buying new farm equipment. The only way to even stay on the farm, is to either walk into a situation where everything - land, house, barn, equipment, everything - is already paid for. Or to get a full time job in town and farm on the weekends. That's what my dad did. And it's what my sister and brother-in-law do now.
We have a situation where we've harnessed economies of scale so much that we have only a small handful of corporations producing our food. They mainly want to grow exactly the same small number of crops, to keep supply chains simple. We've wrung all of the redundancy, both financial and biodiversity, out of the system.
So what happens if someone figures out how to weaponize that against us? What happens if Chinese investors own half the farm land and we go to war with China? Or what happens if we encounter this generation's version of potato blight on corn or wheat? This is not just a human tragedy. It's a huge national security issue, and it looks like nobody is paying attention.
This is interesting, thank you for sharing. Is the main problem simply the reduced price of output (due to competition with large scale industrial agriculture), rather than other factors (such as potential increased costs of inputs, degraded soil quality, access to water).
> We've wrung all of the redundancy, both financial and biodiversity, out of the system.
I have similar concerns, not just about farming but other parts of a globalised economy. It is far more efficient to have everyone very specialised, with long-range dependencies. It is far less resilient to have one huge coupled economic system than a number of smaller, approximately independent systems. [+] Similarly, it's more efficient (in the short run, or the lucky case) to not leave any contingency or insurance against rare events.
> What happens if Chinese investors own half the farm land and we go to war with China?
I wouldn't worry about this one -- unless foreign investors have a means to enforce physical security of their ownership claims, there's always the option of the government with control over the physical assets to expropriate them, either by simply changing the law, or declaring special war time powers. For example, re: WW1
> the attack on enemy aliens and their property involved diverse institutions (governments, parliaments, the judiciary, armies and administrative bureaucracies) and actors (local businessmen and entrepreneurs, lobbies and interests groups but also ordinary people animated by patriotism or who saw in the attack on enemy property an opportunity to improve their own economic status).
edit: [+] to call myself out for claiming things based solely on intuition, it's not at all obvious that many smaller independent economies are necessarily always more resilient than a single arbitrarily structured large economy -- it might depend on the structure of dependencies, and how much choice there is for alternatives if subsystems fail, and how much slack is in the system, and dynamic factors. To argue in the other direction, smaller, isolated economies also tend to be at more risk of failure if any of their larger participants fails (see also: common wisdom about risk of buying real estate in small single company or single industry towns and so on...), so there's probably more robustness for those economies where the impact of failure of any single participant upon the overall system is roughly negligible. but i think there is usually a pretty strong conflict between efficiency redundancy.
“Is the main problem simply the reduced price of output (due to competition with large scale industrial agriculture), rather than other factors (such as potential increased costs of inputs, degraded soil quality, access to water).”
It's mostly the market price of outputs. As was stated in the OP, producing a gallon of milk costs $1.90 or thereabouts. The cost in the grocery store is $2.59 in my area this week. This price has to cover not just the farmr's costs, but the shipping, packaging, and grocery store overhead. The farmer is lucky to break even, and often doesn't. I've read elsewhere that to guarantee a dairy farmer a living wage, without government subsidies, a gallon of milk would have to go for closer to $5. If you want organic, non-feedlot milk, that cost is even higher.
In my sister's case, our 300 acre farm can support around 75 breed cows, which means you could expect about 65 heifers and steers born every spring and sold every fall. These will be around 1200 pounds, at a “dressing percent” of 63% which means you get a 750 pound carcass. 490 pounds of this will be meat - let's call it 500 as a round figure. So she could produce 32,500 pounds of beef a year. The vast majority of this, over 75%, is going to be ground beef. A small fraction of it will be filet mignon.
If you figure that her business expenses are going to be in the neighborhood of $150,000, which is going to include equipment upkeep, fuel, fertilizer, seed, feed milling costs, farm maintenance costs, vet fees, medication per animal, and so on. She is going to need $50,000 in income to support her family, so that means her price per pound of beef would have to be about $6.15. Not including the cost of butchering, transport, auction fees, and all of the upstream costs (packaging, grocery store overhead and profits, etc). Now if you walk into your grocery store you will find ground beef commonly going for $5 a pound or less.
The 4-H says it costs about $7 a pound to produce beef, so that's a pretty good estimate.
And note that this does not include buying new equipment. A new tractor of a size that would let her bale hay starts at $50,000. Paying to have the farm re-fenced would be somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 depending on specifics. It also does not count all of the horrible things that can and do go wrong farming. If she cuts hay and it gets rained on before it dries, she loses that crop. You get three hay cuttings a year. That's a third of your hay crop gone, which means you have to buy hay. If there's a drought, you might have to buy water by the ton and have it trucked. If you get an outbreak of hoof rot, you lose a significant number of your animals and a significant amount of your pasture has to lay fallow for years until the pathogen dies. The number of horrible things that can go wrong that are beyond your control means that the above prices don't provide enough financial cushion to make it through a bad year or two.
Farmers can make a very good living at much less than $5 per gallon of milk. Here in Canada with our supply management quota system that Trump rails against, milk retails for $4.29 CAD for four litres; $3.06 USD per US gallon. And it's so insanely profitable that farmers are willing to pay $20000 to $50000 for a single cow quota.
> I wouldn't worry about this one -- unless foreign investors have a means to enforce physical security of their ownership claims, there's always the option of the government with control over the physical assets to expropriate them
That isn't a good scenario. Foreign? There were no white men in america, no black men either, so everyone is a foreigner, and the natives should expropriate them all? Dangerous ideas. That's how a war turns into a nightmare.
If the US goes to war with China, if we're literally shooting at each other and dropping bombs, I don't think it's going to be all that big of a step to expropriate some farms on our own soil that they happen to own.
This is pretty silly. If China ever enters a shooting war with the US, their larger concern will probably be how to feed themselves, since they account for something like a quarter of all our food exports (80% of all US soybeans go to China!), and they import a comparable amount of food from our allies.
I have major concerns with how automation and interconnectivity have taken off faster than security efforts can keep up. It needn't be a state actor, even - a disgruntled worker at John Deere might push an update to a million tractors that burns out their motors, for example.
The next World War might just be us waking up one day and the lights don't work.
> He raises specialty row crops and runs an agricultural co-op, the kind where you pay a certain amount a month and get a box of fresh vegetables every week. But hobby farmers can't feed the country. We can't even feed ourselves, if it comes to that.
Is this actually true that small farmers can't feed the country? Farming productivity even on small farms is at an all time high. It's probably higher than the 1970's.
Gas will likely flatline as electricity takes over more and more. Health care is an issue for everybody that needs to get taken care of.
My math on farms always seems to tell me that labor is the primary problem. Why work on a farm which is really hard work when just about any job will pay better?
How far do food prices have to rise to reverse this?
> Or what happens if we encounter this generation's version of potato blight on corn or wheat? This is not just a human tragedy. It's a huge national security issue, and it looks like nobody is paying attention.
Maximally efficient is minimally robust. We learn that, painfully, over and over and over ....
I have just a few acres. I've actually done this math. If the End of the World came, I could probably just about feed my family on my land. I could put in two acres of corn, an acre of vegetables, and keep a few of my sheep for the occasional Sunday dinner with meat. We have sime chickens in the back yard which are self sustaining during the summer but have to be fed corn in the winter. The sheep would need corn and hay in the winter as well. It wouldn't be a pretty existence but we might survive.
But I'm surrounded on all sides by other families. There are 13 people in addition to my family of four within shouting distance of my back door. They aren't farmers. Some of their land is theoretically arable, if they knew how to do it and had the equipment, which they don't, and if they had already improved their soil to make it amenable to subsistence farming, which they haven't.
Small farmers could have fed the country fifty years ago, when there were a lot more of us and when many more people who weren't farmers nevertheless substantially supplemented their diets with family gardens. But there are far fewer farmers and far more people to feed now.
It could be done - it has been done in the past - but we are heading in the opposite direction and have been for several decades.
Quite a bit of US food production is going to produce animal feed, and some is exported. It'd take an amazing blow to cause actual starvation, given that could be diverted to feeding the population.
The main threat to agriculture in time of war used to be dependence on foreign oil, but the US has largely solved that.
“Quite a bit of US food production is going to produce animal feed, and some is exported. It'd take an amazing blow to cause actual starvation, given that could divert that back to feeding the population.”
Well, not really. Yes, it's true that a substantial fraction of current US food production goes to animal feed. Yes, it's true, theoretically, that you could turn all of that into human food production instead. Of course, that would mean we'd all need to become vegetarians, but of course that's better than starving.
But this elides two important points. First, humans can't survive on what is currently being grown. In other words, we can't just stop feeding all of that corn and soybeans to animals and give it to humans instead. We can't live off of a diet that is 75% field corn and industrial soybeans. We would have to change what is being produced, and that would be like turning a battleship. It's doable, but it would take time.
And second, without animals in the loop it's very hard to have a sustainable nutrient cycle. Animals, especially ruminants like cattle, sheep, and goats, can turn otherwise inedible vegetation on unarable land into manure which can be used as fertilizer. So if we do away with the animal agriculture, and turn entirely vegetarian, then we are as a side effect reinforcing our dependence on industrial fertilizers.
Of course, you can argue that that nutrient cycle is already broken in our current system, and you'd be right. But if you want to look at what a truly sustainable, environmental agricultural system would look like, it almost has to have ruminants.
Look, for example, at how Amish farms work. Those guys do it right. Their crop yields are on par with the best yields in big ag. It's a sustainable model.
>humans can't survive on what is currently being grown. In other words, we can't just stop feeding all of that corn and soybeans to animals and give it to humans instead. We can't live off of a diet that is 75% field corn and industrial soybeans.
Both feed corn and industrial soybeans yield their deliciousness to the power of the chemical engineers. Both are processed into food you and I eat every day. I bet you a dollar that your last piece of chocolate had lecithin in it, and you have to go pretty far out of your way to get lecithin that isn't from soy. And corn syrup. I'd bet a fair number of dollars that you've consumed some corn sugar product today, and that can be made from feed corn.
TVP is a common ingredient in meat substitutes, and it is a pretty heavily processed food made from what's left over after you extract the soybean oil from the industrial soybeans.
My favorite preparation is the "Morningstar farms" "Grillers Prime" vegieburgers... but you can also buy tvp bits at the health-food store, and I know people who use 1/3rd ground beef, 2/3rds TVP bits in their spaghetti sauce, and it pretty much tastes like your regular beefy spaghetti sauce. My mom used to make TVP sloppy joes that were sloppy joe sauce with TVP instead of meat. (I personally think meat greatly improves that recipe... but you can add a lot of TVP in with that meat without ruining the flavor, if you ask me.)
(To be clear, I'm not actually arguing that TVP is as delicious as actual meat. It's... usually not. But it can be quite palatable, and it is unquestionably nourishing, and it is made from the soybeans you grow for oil; stuff that would otherwise be used in cattle feed.)
Yes, but that's part of my point. You don't eat straight lecithin. Or high fructose corn syrup. You need a lot of other ingredients and a lot of processingto turn that corn into edible food products. That's one reason why it would be very challenging to double the number of calories we take in from corn — you would also need to double your production of all of that other stuff. I don't know all of the specifics, so I won't speculate on whether we could do that quickly, but if we were contemplating it we would need to make sure we had the infrastructure necessary to do all of that extra processing, and access to twice as many ingredients as we currently use.
> You don't eat straight lecithin. Or high fructose corn syrup. You need a lot of other ingredients and a lot of processingto turn that corn into edible food products. That's one reason why it would be very challenging to double the number of calories we take in from corn — you would also need to double your production of all of that other stuff.
I don't, but I would, if I were hungry enough. Most of the stuff we mix corn syrup with we mix in to make it taste better. If you've ever had straight corn syrup on your pancakes, (It's commonly sold under the brand Karo for this) you'd know it's fine. It's not maple syrup, but it's certainly something you could eat just fine, if you were hungry.
I think that's true of most of these things. If you are hungry enough, you'll take your macro-nutrients as they are.
I don't personally know how to make soy protein isolate, but I do know how to make tofu. If you gave me my 3000 calories a day in buckets of dry soybeans, I wouldn't be happy about it, but I wouldn't starve.
Choose this as an entry point to say something. I agree with the battleship analogy to a point but I don't think it would be very hard to turn around. Not when compared to building rocket ships or many other things we do at scale.
I grew up on a UK small holding sheep farm (2-400). In the 80s it was possible to raise a small family largely thanks to the benefit system.
As I see it hobby farmers are all we need for sheep production. I agree that we need a degree of livestock but we need to transition to reducing our consumption of meat hugely. Much of the land currently used for livestock should be converted to forest and forest garden communities as soon as possible.
There a problem with consumer awareness. If consumers cared about pesticides in their food, or food miles, or dependence on foreign imports (on an island nation) then the locally produced food would be more viable. However most consumers are so heavily hypnotised by modern consumerism there only desire what is persuasively advertised which means sexy new 'phones' and not poison free vegetables.
Control of food and water gives certain control of people. Only a small percentage of the population is really aware of what it takes to make enough food to stay alive. Large corporate forces now control policy and effectively the market condition in most respects so small scale passionate farmers are best of not trying to engage with the commodity markets. If the UK leaves the EU and there is a major global conflict people will quickly start to realise the value of local food.
I'm mostly interested in how we can reduce the labour overhead in the this kind of small scale farming. At EMF camp I saw an brilliant example of someone building their own open source horticultural robot. It will be at https://pretix.eu/farmhackwales2018/fhw2018/
> We can't live off of a diet that is 75% field corn and industrial soybeans.
Why not? Beans and rice, potatoes and milk, bread and peanut butter. Those are all nutritionally complete diets, as in you won’t get any deficiency diseases eating nothing else for a year. Feed corn and soybeans has carbs and protein. It might be nutritionally complete by itself. Add cabbage or some other leafy green vegetable and 100g of meat a week and you’ve got a monotonous, bland, healthy diet.
I’m not saying this is pleasant, feed corn tastes pretty awful but you absolutely could live off a diet that was mostly beans and corn.
You can only eat fresh corn when it's in season, and only within a week or so after it's been picked. To be a suitable year-round survival food, corn has to be processed into corn meal. This usually entails treating it with lye, drying it, and grinding it. This gets you corn meal, grits, polenta. Or hominy if you skip the grinding step.
We don't have the equipment to do this at the necessary scale. Corn just isn't used as a survival crop this way, so there's never been an economic need to invest in the machinery to do it.
We probably do have the infrastructure to keep producing wheat bread in mass quantities. Do we have the peanut production and processing infrastructure to handle peanut butter becoming our primary protein source? I doubt it.
And of course with soybeans... they would need to be dried or canned, packaged, stored, and shipped. Doable but different from what we are currently set up to do.
And of course there's the psychological impacts of all of that, which again are probably oreferable to starving but wouldn't be good. People fight wars (or gang wars)over this kind of thing.
> And of course with soybeans... they would need to be dried or canned, packaged, stored, and shipped. Doable but different from what we are currently set up to do.
As a soybean farmer, and one who has focused on IP soybeans for the human market for most of my career at that, unless I am misunderstanding you, that is exactly how we do it. The beans are harvested dry, packaged, stored, and then shipped (primarily) to the Asian markets who are interested in such product.
The trouble in North America is that few know what to do with them. To be honest, I have never even tried my own product. I also grow navy beans and have cooked with them. They are more of a common staple in these parts. But they are also a much more fickle crop. You're not going to easily replace soys with other edible beans.
It seems like our current economic system of capitalism is pretty bad at balancing slow-response externalities. Driving of short term prices below sustainable levels is just another kind of bubble. Financial bubbles become front and center because the system focuses on money, but sustainable food, sustainable wage/living quality, and a sustainable climate are all bubbles with equally or more serious consequences.
My understanding is that it was hydraulic fracking that made the difference.
See, the 'peak oil' people were wrong; turns out that if you are willing to pay more, there's a lot more oil you can extract (albeit at a higher cost)
I actually think it was a self-defeating prophecy in a way. The peak oil folks actually had some mindshare for a while, and there was a lot of investment in more expensive ways to get oil out of the ground that had the assumption of long term oil prices being over a hundred bucks a barrel. This, I think, caused over-investment in new ways of extracting oil, which drove up production and drove down prices. (I mean, there was also a lot of investment in renewables, and I imagine that is also putting downward pressure on oil prices.)
I don't think anyone disagrees with the idea that oil is a limited resource and will become more rare and thus assuming continued demand, more expensive as time goes on? That's not what 'peak oil' was about.
Peak oil was this idea that both supply and demand were largely inelastic. In that case, when those curves crossed, you'd have the figurative unstoppable force and the immovable object; the price of oil would climb out of control, the economy would grind to a halt.
The primary thesis of 'peak oil' was that we couldn't extract more oil from the ground than we already were extracting. Through fracking and the exploitation of oil shale and oil sands... we did, in fact, extract more oil.
Turns out, the supply of oil is, to some extent, elastic. Yeah, we're going to run out some day, but with our current tech... it's starting to look like we might have trouble dealing with the atmospheric carbon output before we have serious trouble with the supply of hydrocarbons.
> And people understandably don't want to double their grocery bills just to buy local
I think that could be the root cause. People are used to food not costing enough, a living animal should be costly. I don’t understand why food should not be important in a budget.
And since we need to eat less and better, it could even help making transformed products uneconomical and we would mostly stick to raw products, and get back some consideration for what we eat.
Poor people, which is significant part of population have food as important part of budget. They also eat less well, because for them the price and easy availability top pretty much everything.
The richer classes eat more well and buy more expensive food even when they have choice. They are also healthier and eat healthier.
>politically enforced sustainability and diversity
This is important, and politically difficult. I mean, we subsidize farms to farm in America because it makes us much more secure against all sorts of potential problems. I, for one, think farm subsidies, if well done, are a very good use of my defense tax dollar.
But it's important that we see those subsidies as a defense subsidy and not, you know, just a handout to a particular class of people; This means that we need sustainable farming practices and we need crop diversity, as those are the only way to defend against some of the threats we face.
(I mean, I personally see it as "you don't want a subsidy? do what you like. But if you want a subsidy? you have to follow these best practices." then you set the subsidy numbers based on how many acres you think we need for that sort of thing.)
what happens if we encounter this generation's version of potato blight on corn or wheat
Out of curiosity, how would you rate the quality of the soil in today's agribusiness farmlands? Seems food production now involves clones fed on ammonium nitrate derived from natural gas and mined potash. This suggests the crops of today are being raised on junk food.
On the one hand, I can't really comment specifically on the soil quality. I don't have first hand scientific knowledge.
On the other hand, it's certainly true that these producers are not implementing anything like a closed-loop nutrient plan. They're absolutely trucking in fertilizer from somewhere else to keep yields high. And they're producing monocultures, enforced with chemical pesticides and herbicides, to keep expenses low. Neither of those things strikes me as good in any possible way other than cost efficiency.
"Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm — which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems."
Not to mention the law of unexpected consequences: with all the nitrogen fertilizer used on local farms and lawns in SW FL with subsequent run-off into streams and bayous due to the heavy rain every day during the summer, the 'red tide' plague shows no signs of abating.
Exactly, we are eating oil and gas. Once the spigot slows down, things get ugly real fast. This is going to make the great depression and ww2 look small in comparison. Buckle your seat belt, and grow unusual edible species. I don't even eat grains, humans aren't equipped to eat that.
Humans are very much equipped to eat grains, we built agriculture, and thus the whole of civilization, on top of cereal grains like rice, wheat, and corn. Grains are the staples of most cultures.
What are you talking about? Some hand-wavy paleo theory that isn't scalable?
Eh, some folks sincerely believe that grains need to be consumed as sprouts or (some other mitigating form) because the phytic acid or whatever is hard on the digestive tract.
I wouldn't go so far as to say they're not edible, but criticism of grains doesn't seem like outright crazy talk either.
"Some folks" sincerely believe vaccines cause autism. "Some folks" believe the earth is flat.
I don't care what "some folks" beliefs are, I care about the ground truth.
It doesn't take a lot of equipment to deduce that billions of people eating grains consistently over the course of millenia means that people are in fact well equipped to eat grains.
how cereal grains—the world’s most abundant food source—can affect human behavior and mental health. We present the implications for the psychological sciences of the findings that, in all of us, bread (1) makes the gut more permeable and can thus encourage the migration of food particles to sites where they are not expected, prompting the immune system to attack both these particles and brain-relevant substances that resemble them, and (2) releases opioid-like compounds, capable of causing mental derangement if they make it to the brain. A grain-free diet, although difficult to maintain (especially for those that need it the most), could improve the mental health of many and be a complete cure for others."
His counterpoint appears to apply only to individuals and small bands; without density we never achieve industry, which brings us, well, the modern world and all its medicine, internet, refrigeration ... satellite-based forewarning of enormous storms and time to prepare against those and other existential threats to large areas.
People live to be 100 and happy and productive on largely grain-based diets, not thanks to the grain, but thanks to the modern world it allows. Pre-grain, we didn't live so long.
On balance I think grains are a no-brainer. Maybe there is some extraordinarily minor benefit to the individual not to eat grains, but, obviously, in light of the past 10,000 years of history, grains are fine for you and will keep you both alive and happy.
Good to meet a fellow hobby farmer in tech! I'm doing the same only I only raise meat animals for my family, some extend family and friends. Around me there's a number of folks that used to be full time cattle farmers(it's middle Missouri we have grass and land. too much rock for crops). Over the last 10-20 years all of the full time farmers, except one, have had to branch out into other stuff. Most took up construction or excavation or some other trade, and run cattle on the weekends/nights. The only full time farmer around raises heritage breed hogs for high end restaurants. Even a friend with ~500 acres of paid off land and 300 head of cattle has had to move to organic cattle in order to keep that part of his life from going too far in the red, and it still barely turns a profit most years.
The problems you mention are very real. I am not in farming, so a noob, but it is clear to me that significant change in food production is a requirement.
I see some positive trends (at least here in The Netherlands). On the one hand the awareness that industrial-scale production is unsustainable. There is a Guardian article on that today: 'Europe's meat and dairy production must halve by 2050, expert warns' [0]. Also there was talk on potato farmers getting only 0.09ct per kilo for their produce, while in the supermarket it costs $1.80 (this for local production, NL is quite small). Even large farmers are selling below cost price. Furthermore they throw small potatoes back on the field to rot, because they do not match supermarket criteria. Etcetera. NL is 2nd-largest food exporter (in a bunch of markets) in the world, after US [1]. A system under strain.
On the other hand - at the consumer side - there is growing awareness of the problem, more willingness to pay more for local and organically (eco) grown foodstuffs.
I think it should be possible for different models to be profitable. Besides the bartering communities mentioned by sibling, your small farmers could all arrange yourselves in co-ops, both to the supply-side (buy machinery together) as towards consumer-side (e.g. run/finance a co-op supermarket).
Regarding produce: Diversifying, and offering stuff that is not in supermarket can be a unique selling point. Good cooking with proper ingredients has become a hype in NL (stimulated by countless TV programs). Now take cucumber. The supermarket only has the long green, rather tasteless kind. But there are countless varieties. Different forms, different flavors, more tasty. Sell it as a specialty. Tell a good story with them (i.e. marketing storytelling), 'The good country life'-idea. Have people be willing to pay a premium.
I realize that in Netherlands this may be easier, because of population density, and production being always very near to consumers.
> NL is 2nd-largest food exporter (in a bunch of markets) in the world, after US [1].
No it's not, it's a relatively tiny food producer with high yield rates per unit of area. Take their best yielding crop, tomatoes, they're not even in the top 10 producers worldwide. Uzbekistan produces more tomatoes than we do.
We do have high yields, but that's mostly for food that are 96% water like tomatoes, as there's barely any solids to grow, you can just stack em in a greenhouse. Nothing too innovative going on there, in potatoes for example we're well below the number one in area-efficiency.
And even the high yields in things like tomatoes or cucumbers isn't special in any way, it just optimises for area. The US has about 30 people per square kilometer, the Netherlands has over 400. Some countries don't have a priority for production density because they literally have 10-15x as much land. Besides, the vast majority of agricultural land is used for livestock anyway, if you take meat out of the equation, we could feed tens of billions of people easily. That's really where the problem lies, in meats. The source of all issues in production really lies with us, in our diets. You could spend less money if you ate better food as long as we all cut your meat consumption, and to get there we need to start pricing in all externalities because right now we a high price pay for shitty food we shouldn't eat through our taxes, and then overconsume by paying a low price in the supermarket after subsidising it with said taxes.
What do you make of stories like this[1] talking about grossing six figures on a quarter acre? I know it's gross, but it still paints a much rosier picture than your claim that even 300 acres can't be farmed to a halfway decent lifestyle.
There are plenty of very positive stories about significant profits on less than five acres, even less than one acre. I'd like to hear your take on it.
I've heard about these $100,000 on a quarter acre claims, but I just can't see how they could possibly be true. Even pot farmers don't make that much, do they?
The guy across the road from me, the “real” farmer, has 90 acres. He seems to do ok. He runs old tractors, and he lives in a simple one story brick house, so he isn't living large. His land was placed in the local agricultural preservation program, which means it can't legally be developed, and hence cost him a lot less than what would otherwise have been the going price in this area.
He makes money by raising hyper-local, organic specialty row crops on a subscription basis to extremely wealthy households in the Washington DC suburbs. That's a sustainable business plan, but only for a very small number of farmers. It's only possible because he was able to buy a farm at an extreme discount in a rapidly gentrifying area that is now one of the wealthiest counties in America and is getting wealthier by the year. If he was in Iowa that whole business plan falls apart.
I have been involved with csas as both a consumer and a promoter. I see turnover but I also see csas succeeding. I think that farms are bifurcating into mega farms and local farms of under 10 acres close to cities and their markets that are willing to support local produce (truck farms).
This means that rural areas will continue to depopulate and that farming will either be industrial or bespoke.
The guy in that video is using a BCS walk behind tractor which costs ~$3,400 brand new [0]. That's a much different capital cost requirement than someone who needs a $50k+ tractor to farm 300 acres. He is also doing a bunch of other stuff like using a paper pot planter[1], and DIY walk in coolers [2] with cheap window AC units to keep capital and labor costs low. He also doesn't own any of the land he is using he rents people's unused back yards. I'd be surprised if an operation like that cost more than $15,000 total to get up and running.
China need not be involved. And anyway, in a national emergency the government would simply seize any foreign owned asset they needed.
It's the continued consolidation that will result in cartel/monopolies and their catastrophic outcome. That combined with unlimited finance in politics to protect these interests and we have a perfect storm. Unless anti-trust is zealously enforced and quickly, we are facing a future a lot rougher than today.
>The economies of scale in agriculture have become so strong that there's no way to compete on price any other way. And people understandably don't want to double their grocery bills just to buy local.
Isnt this the reason for barter communities; bater some of your meat for some other veggies... or farm products.?
I also own one of those hobby farms. My simple answer is, No. At my scale, barter is pretty useless. How many vegetables will you trade me for one pig? It better be a lot because I only have 6-10 pigs to barter every year. We have a lot of hobby farms around here. But they all raise animals. Nobody is doing potatos or cabbage. I mean we all do a few onions and tomatoes. But nobody is growing enough of anything that they could trade for half a beef.
When people want half a beef, they pay cash.
The old style barter systems require scale just like the OP said. That scale no longer exists. Everybody is either too small or too big. If you are small enough that I can barter with you, you don't have enough of what I need. If you are ADP, you don't have a human who can interact with me to execute a trade and you have no interest whatsoever in my goat.
This is very much the case to a large extent, I think certain communities such as the Amish are able to maintain their farming practices because they share resources and build up labor sharing through mutual aid. They also tend to be somewhat culturally insulated and also hesitant to become dependent upon outside technology which helps them maintain the incentives to work together. But they also adopt cerain technologies on a community by community basis for instance cell phones (for business use) and small solar panel setups are common. Farming isn't really an option for a lot of rural people outside of a network like this because they don't own much land and so they just have to travel farther if they want to get a pay check.
> The economies of scale in agriculture have become so strong that there's no way to compete on price any other way. And people understandably don't want to double their grocery bills just to buy local.
Doesn't sound like much of a problem to me. Those economies of scale mean cheaper food.
> They mainly want to grow exactly the same small number of crops, to keep supply chains simple.
Is there any evidence that variety of, say, produce in markets/grocery stores is less now than a hundred years ago?
> Or what happens if we encounter this generation's version of potato blight on corn or wheat?
Then we switch crops, like what happened to bananas before? It's not like we literally have no access to seeds and whatnot for other crops.
“Is there any evidence that variety of, say, produce in markets/grocery stores is less now than a hundred years ago?”
Not in markets, because a hundred years ago most people didn't get their produce from a market. They got it from their own gardens or the local farm.
The issue here is that back then, there were lots and lots of different varieties of a given crop, all of them grown regionally. There are thousands and thousands of varieties of corn. In 1915, 200 of these were grown commercially in Kansas. Today, Reid Yellow Dent, a type of field corn, has basically take over the market. 99% of all corn grow in the US is a subvariety of yellow dent.
Walk into your market. When it's in season you will find a bin of sweet corn (which is not field corn). There will be one variety. Thre will be one variety of broccoli. Three or four varieties of potatoes. Two types of summer squash, one of which will be zucchini.
At a high end market you will be given a choice between two types of beef: “beef” and “angus beef”. One type of lamb, and one type of chicken. But there are hundreds of varieties of beef cow, tens of varieties of meet sheep, and at least fifty different varieties of meat or dual-use chicken.
Look through a good heirloom seed catalog some time (I like Southern Exposure Seed Exchange). You'll find a hundred types of tomato, fifteen or twenty types of potato, ten types of sweet potato, twenty varieties of corn, ten varieties of broccoli. Plus some crops that you just can't find in a market.
It's not that any individual's food choices are more constrained now than they used to be; that's clearly not the case. It's that the total amount of genetic diversity in corn, potatoes, or whatever, as a fraction of the total acreage of those crops, has dropped precipitously.
Right, and what's the problem there? The old type of banana that was popular got wiped out, and we adapted. The current popular type is, IIRC, slowly getting wiped out as we speak. That sucks, but we'll adapt again. As long as the plants/seeds for other varieties exist somewhere, we'll find a way to adapt.
Heck, if anything, we're probably more flexible now since it's now possible to directly genetically engineer new varieties and we have massive seedbanks around with modern infrastructure for distribution.
> Not in markets, because a hundred years ago most people didn't get their produce from a market. They got it from their own gardens or the local farm.
For people in rural areas, sure, but in more urban areas I'm sure they had markets of some sort.
The Chinese investors would just lose access to their land. If it was much of a long war, they'd likely lose the title to it. It would inevitably continue to be utilized for food production.
If they owned half the land for anything inside the territory of a potential rival, they would definitely be aware of their advantage and keep some cards up their sleeve for the possibility of losing access to that land.
All of the massive 'at scale' operations are going to turn into dust bowls. 'Small operations' will mean those people do not starve to death. Vegetable prices will make gold look cheap. Grow food anywhere you can, we all have to become farmers now to avoid a very bad situation, where the only thing to eat is other people.
I have been wondering why there isn't a mandate that every tree on public land must be food-producing. In a day I must pass hundreds if not thousands of non-edible trees and shrubs just lining pavements, dotted about on business parks, on little bits of nowhere-ville grassland.
If they can grow so readily, why couldn't food producing plants grow like that, in their millions all over the country?
This problem is similar to what happened in Ancient Rome. As wealth and influence concentrates, farms get bigger and bigger. Instead of slaves we have massive machinery and migrant workers.
Disruption or destruction of key transit or water infrastructure in California would be a crippling blow to the US.
The infrastructure to farm is gone. I worked on a farm as a teen in the 90s. There were 10 active farms in my town then (down from dozens in the 70s). Now there is one. I don’t think there are more than a half dozen dairy operations in the county left.
> Disruption or destruction of key transit or water infrastructure in California would be a crippling blow to the US.
I doubt that the US is that dependent on California. For lettuce and strawberries, yes. Not for wheat, corn, soybeans, or cattle, though. We won't starve without salads or strawberries.
I know that I'm missing some of what California grows. Losing it would hurt. But it's not vital.
I’d agree with that. But GP’s point still stands if you specify the Midwest rather than California. In fact, that happened during the Great Depression, exacerbating hunger problems just as unemployment was peaking: a severe years-long drought in the Midwest (whence the term “dust bowl”) crippled the country’s grain production.
Look at the post Punic war period. So much wealth was transferred to Rome and it had to go somewhere. Land is always a place where capital goes to hide!
The money bought out smaller farmers and created the great latifundium slave estates. Some of these estates survived in various forms into the 20th century.
This.
I don't know what the solution to this is. I have a small farm, and raise meat sheep. But it's very much a hobby. The problem is, though, that almost all of the other farmers in my area, the ones I meet at the feed store or the livestock auction, they're also hobby farmers. There is exactly one “real” farmer (meaning that it's his full time job) in my area. He raises specialty row crops and runs an agricultural co-op, the kind where you pay a certain amount a month and get a box of fresh vegetables every week. But hobby farmers can't feed the country. We can't even feed ourselves, if it comes to that.
The problem is that these vegetables, which don't have to be shipped any distance and don't have the overhead of a grocery store, are still more expensive than the equivalent groceries in the local Safeway. The economies of scale in agriculture have become so strong that there's no way to compete on price any other way. And people understandably don't want to double their grocery bills just to buy local.
I grew up on a 300 acre cattle farm. Fifty years ago a family could make a living on a 300 acre, well situated east coast farm. Not any more. You'd have trouble just paying for gas, groceries, and medical care. Forget paying down a mortgage or god forbid buying new farm equipment. The only way to even stay on the farm, is to either walk into a situation where everything - land, house, barn, equipment, everything - is already paid for. Or to get a full time job in town and farm on the weekends. That's what my dad did. And it's what my sister and brother-in-law do now.
We have a situation where we've harnessed economies of scale so much that we have only a small handful of corporations producing our food. They mainly want to grow exactly the same small number of crops, to keep supply chains simple. We've wrung all of the redundancy, both financial and biodiversity, out of the system.
So what happens if someone figures out how to weaponize that against us? What happens if Chinese investors own half the farm land and we go to war with China? Or what happens if we encounter this generation's version of potato blight on corn or wheat? This is not just a human tragedy. It's a huge national security issue, and it looks like nobody is paying attention.