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That's not true. Small farms are more efficient and productive per area. Therefore also more "green". I've read much about it but here's one link [1]. However

by lqdc13 9y ago

That's not true. Small farms are more efficient and productive per area. Therefore also more "green". I've read much about it but here's one link [1]. However, it is more efficient in terms of farmer-hours to have large farms and that's what really counts financially. [1] https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/21085/1/sp06le03.pdf https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/21085/1/sp06le03.pdf

roel_v 9y ago
No, that's not what that paper says. It even says "in the United States, non-family corporate farms control 1% of agricultural land and generate close to 7% of output (USDA, 2004)." What that paper says is that 'large, corporate' farms perform worse than 'small, individual' ones. And it explicitly says "The different behavior may be understood if we recall that in our samples scale is a proxy for farm type.". What performs better are individual-run farms, i.e. not collectives (which is pertinent in the paper because that style of farming is a holdover from Communist times) and not what is called 'corporate' farming in the paper where you have a bunch of MBA's and agronomists hiring cheap labor. Essentially (going beyond the numbers of the paper), farms that are run by individuals who have (presumably) more 'skin in the game' and who know the land, the history and local conditions better than hired guns is what makes those farms more productive. But that also puts a cap on the maximum amount of land you can manage, hence the correlation between farm organizational type and its size. So, to tie that back to the GP - it's true that it's not necessarily the 'megafarms' that he's at a competitive disadvantage to (depending on what market you're looking at - I mean a farm as small as that isn't competing for big Cargill contracts), but his mostly tradition-based management style (looking at the description of the ground egg shells) did put him at a disadvantage to the point that such farmers can't survive today. Today's farmers are agricultural engineers (more often than not literally - many farmers, and a growing percentage, have some sort of university education). Keeping a farm profitable today is about leveraging technology, keeping data very accurately and making the most of it. That includes local-scale sensor networks, microdosage of nutrients ('fertilizers'), very fine-grained crop rotation schemes. And in lifestock and dairy farming even more so. It's all romantic that GP's grandfather had bunch of chickens and some cows that he could milk by hand if he wanted to, but the economic reality is that no dairy farmer today can survive that way, regardless of farm size.
- lqdc13 9y ago
  I think we're just talking about different things and my link wasn't very relevant. If you actually visit the farms you can immediately tell the differences. When you visit a large farm, there is always things like tons of wasted space and water not covering some plants while others getting drowned. None of the plants are taken care of nearly as well as small farms (tomatoes usually aren't pruned for example). Overall, from what I've seen, large farms try to compensate for lack of individual plant maintenance by chemical treatments. Here's a link to some "urban farming" that I think scales basically to other sizes: http://www.farmlandinfo.org/sites/default/files/Philadelphia_Harvest_1.pdf http://www.farmlandinfo.org/sites/default/files/Philadelphia... Specifically, if you look at table 3, yield per crop area only decreases with size (1.2 for the largest farms and ~1.42 for the rest): https://seafile.entervice.com/f/175b18396c774698b6d2/ https://seafile.entervice.com/f/175b18396c774698b6d2/ Then there is recent greenhouse indoor farming survey: http://stateofindoorfarming.agrilyst.com/ http://stateofindoorfarming.agrilyst.com/ Here is comparison of revenue per square foot for large and small farms from that survey: https://seafile.entervice.com/f/c0a224916e6742ef9873/ https://seafile.entervice.com/f/c0a224916e6742ef9873/ It really depends on the crop but in this case everything but cannabis had higher yields in small farms. Finally, if you're not convinced, here's some prose from cgiar regarding farm sizes and yields: https://wle.cgiar.org/thrive/2017/03/20/precision-agriculture-bigger-yields-smaller-farms https://wle.cgiar.org/thrive/2017/03/20/precision-agricultur... select quote from there: "In some ways, precision agriculture takes us back to the future. In some developing countries, very small farms tend to have marginally higher yields than somewhat larger farms. This can in part be explained by the relatively higher labor input on small farms, which can rely largely on unremunerated family labor. Under these circumstances, it is possible to check on every corner of the field on a daily basis, pull out weeds individually, and fertilizer precisely." But here they're talking about very modern high precision farming which isn't actually taking place in many large farms. When it does take places it almost matches small farms.

by lqdc13 9y ago

roel_v 9y ago

No, that's not what that paper says. It even says "in the United States, non-family corporate farms control 1% of agricultural land and generate close to 7% of output (USDA, 2004)." What that paper says is that 'large, corporate' farms perform worse than 'small, individual' ones. And it explicitly says "The different behavior may be understood if we recall that in our samples scale is a proxy for farm type.". What performs better are individual-run farms, i.e. not collectives (which is pertinent in the paper because that style of farming is a holdover from Communist times) and not what is called 'corporate' farming in the paper where you have a bunch of MBA's and agronomists hiring cheap labor. Essentially (going beyond the numbers of the paper), farms that are run by individuals who have (presumably) more 'skin in the game' and who know the land, the history and local conditions better than hired guns is what makes those farms more productive. But that also puts a cap on the maximum amount of land you can manage, hence the correlation between farm organizational type and its size. So, to tie that back to the GP - it's true that it's not necessarily the 'megafarms' that he's at a competitive disadvantage to (depending on what market you're looking at - I mean a farm as small as that isn't competing for big Cargill contracts), but his mostly tradition-based management style (looking at the description of the ground egg shells) did put him at a disadvantage to the point that such farmers can't survive today. Today's farmers are agricultural engineers (more often than not literally - many farmers, and a growing percentage, have some sort of university education). Keeping a farm profitable today is about leveraging technology, keeping data very accurately and making the most of it. That includes local-scale sensor networks, microdosage of nutrients ('fertilizers'), very fine-grained crop rotation schemes. And in lifestock and dairy farming even more so. It's all romantic that GP's grandfather had bunch of chickens and some cows that he could milk by hand if he wanted to, but the economic reality is that no dairy farmer today can survive that way, regardless of farm size.

lqdc13 9y ago
I think we're just talking about different things and my link wasn't very relevant. If you actually visit the farms you can immediately tell the differences. When you visit a large farm, there is always things like tons of wasted space and water not covering some plants while others getting drowned. None of the plants are taken care of nearly as well as small farms (tomatoes usually aren't pruned for example). Overall, from what I've seen, large farms try to compensate for lack of individual plant maintenance by chemical treatments. Here's a link to some "urban farming" that I think scales basically to other sizes: http://www.farmlandinfo.org/sites/default/files/Philadelphia_Harvest_1.pdf http://www.farmlandinfo.org/sites/default/files/Philadelphia... Specifically, if you look at table 3, yield per crop area only decreases with size (1.2 for the largest farms and ~1.42 for the rest): https://seafile.entervice.com/f/175b18396c774698b6d2/ https://seafile.entervice.com/f/175b18396c774698b6d2/ Then there is recent greenhouse indoor farming survey: http://stateofindoorfarming.agrilyst.com/ http://stateofindoorfarming.agrilyst.com/ Here is comparison of revenue per square foot for large and small farms from that survey: https://seafile.entervice.com/f/c0a224916e6742ef9873/ https://seafile.entervice.com/f/c0a224916e6742ef9873/ It really depends on the crop but in this case everything but cannabis had higher yields in small farms. Finally, if you're not convinced, here's some prose from cgiar regarding farm sizes and yields: https://wle.cgiar.org/thrive/2017/03/20/precision-agriculture-bigger-yields-smaller-farms https://wle.cgiar.org/thrive/2017/03/20/precision-agricultur... select quote from there: "In some ways, precision agriculture takes us back to the future. In some developing countries, very small farms tend to have marginally higher yields than somewhat larger farms. This can in part be explained by the relatively higher labor input on small farms, which can rely largely on unremunerated family labor. Under these circumstances, it is possible to check on every corner of the field on a daily basis, pull out weeds individually, and fertilizer precisely." But here they're talking about very modern high precision farming which isn't actually taking place in many large farms. When it does take places it almost matches small farms.