18 ms·
1% of farms operate 70% of world's farmland
- thepangolino 6y agoSome farms are just hella big with ultra low land productivity.
- doikor 6y agoAnd a lot subsistence farming in the developing world where you basically just farm for yourself to eat which are very small. And even if someone farms for selling to others if they don't have reliable access to machinery the farms will be really small as that just does not scale up (just take a look at pre industrial world where something like 90% of people were farmers)
- bboygravity 6y ago> And even if someone farms for selling to others if they don't have reliable access to machinery the farms will be really small as that just does not scale up (just take a look at pre industrial world where something like 90% of people were farmers) You seem to assume/imply that small farms in the developing world cannot scale up due to economic/business reasons. However in some developing countries, farms cannot be scaled up due to legal reasons. Countries like The Philippines don't allow ownership of farmland over one or two hectares per person. For companies the maximum is 5 hectares if I remember correctly. Foreigner investors cannot legally own any land whatsoever there (not even through a company, because foreigners aren't allowed to be majority share holders). Is that good or bad? I don't know. Agriculture world wide is a highly regulated and highly subsidized non-free market that has very little to do with the concepts of capitalism and free market. This should probably be analyzed on a country by country basis with a couple of history books handy. Random facts that I like about farming subsidies in the West: if farming in the Western world wasn't heavily subsidized, it wouldn't exist in the Western world. The reason for the farming subsidies is to have internal food production in case a war prevents sufficient food imports.
- markdown 6y ago> Is that good or bad? I don't know. I do. It's good.
- qsort 6y agoI 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, agricultural subsidies are helping small businesses in sectors where they aren't really competitive (mostly by making the taxpayer or the consumer pay the difference, but that's another story...). Again, not to say subsidies are wrong per se, but I don't follow your reasoning there. > The reason for the farming subsidies is to have internal food production in case a war prevents sufficient food imports ??? Most Western countries (with the possible exception of the US, I don't know) aren't agriculturally self-sufficient, nor it is a goal for them to be. In case a war broke out, energy supplies would be a much more pressing concern, especially for Western Europe.
- oblio 6y agoHe's right. Western Europe heavily imports laborers from Eastern Europe, Turkey and North Africa for many crops. Germany opened its borders at the height of the first Covid-19 wave to allow workers from Romania to come, when Romania was a hot bed for Covid-19. Many Western countries are self sufficient agriculturally and they are huge exporters. Agriculture is a cornerstone of national security. Life sucks when you are rationing fuel or imposing lights out curfews but it gets dire (and dangerous!) when people starve.
- clawoo 6y ago> Germany opened its borders at the height of the first Covid-19 wave to allow workers from Romania to come, when Romania was a hot bed for Covid-19. Just a small correction, you've got your data the other way around. Early to mid April when Asparagus-Gate happened, Romania had at the very worst 500 new daily cases for a population of 19 million, while Germany regularly had 4-5000 for a population of 83 million. So in essence Germany was a hotbed.
- teraku 6y agoCurrently, EU subsidizes farms based on land area. Which is supposed to change, but the lobby is strong.
- mamon 6y agoEU also sets limits on how much farms can produce. No one cares about yield from unit of land, they care about keeping prices high, so that farmers get adequate profits. EU will even pay farmers a pension if they retire and stop production.
- secondcoming 6y agoFunny story, an aging local farmer used raise free-range a small amount of turkeys for the Christmas market. But she stopped because she thought the EU satellites would catch her doing it without permission. Those turkeys were far better than anything you would buy in a supermarket.
- jokethrowaway 6y agoRegulations and centralised governments kill small businesses. Don't worry though, it's for your health (oh and for those cheeky shareholders of big corporations). Similar story here: https://www.fwi.co.uk/livestock/poultry/other-poultry/turkey-producer-forced-out-by-health-and-safety-regulations https://www.fwi.co.uk/livestock/poultry/other-poultry/turkey...
- alecco 6y agoThey should subsidize by efficiency/yield, soil maintenance, and crop rotation.
- jabl 6y agoThe current CAP proposal for the 2020-2027 period basically, thanks to intense lobbying by the agribusiness sector, more or less the same as the current scheme. If adopted, it will more or less put a stake through the EU Green New Deal that they're supposedly also implementing. :(
- mikeyouse 6y agoAnd conversely, many “family Farms” are just subsidy hoovering hobby farms relying on land appreciation to build wealth.
- peteretep 6y ago> Anna Creek Station has an area of 23,677 km2 which is slightly larger than Israel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Creek_Station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Creek_Station
- Thev00d00 6y agoYet only capable of carrying up to 16,500 head of cattle during a good season
- refurb 6y agoThat's roughly 2 cattle per square mile or 1 head of cattle for every 1.5 sq km.
- rufus_foreman 6y ago16,500 cattle, so that's 450 pounds ground meat per head, a hamburger is a 10:1, so that's 16,500 * 450 * 10 = 74,250,000, that's only 75 million hamburgers.
- mrtksn 6y agoAfter the fall of communism in Bulgaria, land was to be given back to people(during the communism everything was owned by the government). Don't know the details but now we have small amount of farmlands and forests. Turns out, most urban people don't fancy to work the land by themselves and those in the villages really suck at the organisation. So my grandma is living in a town, she opted out to keep her land in a cooperative and simply receive some cash at the end of the year each year. Not much money but it's free money from her standpoint. My relatives that live in a village opted out to own and work the lands by themselves like most of the other villagers. The result? Villagers fail to organize the crop production, if one year potatoes turn to be very profitable, next year everyone do potatoes and prices tank, someone does tobacco and makes the bank. Cattle production also died out because they failed to integrate into a steady supply chain of a buyer. Companies would be collecting milk and some villagers don't hesitate to add water and the companies stop coming. One year everyone is in milk the other year no more milk, everything becomes meat since some construction business gives more money in short term so they need to get rid of the livestock. Tough luck, the milk buying chocolate factory. At the ends, most young people opted out to work in a EU country that pays very well during the season and stay jobless for the rest of the year. Those who managed to get good education completely moved out to the cities or even other countries so no one left to actually work their own farmlands with few exceptions of people who do speciality crops and work like beekeeping. Most of the farmland got sold to large companies and those who couldn't get good education become employees of the farms they once owned. What I am trying to say is, it's probably the way it is because the alternative is not viable. These things need large scale companies, be it private or governmental.
- truckerbill 6y agoI'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.
- mrtksn 6y agoIf 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 view, these things need to be done in huge scale. To achieve scale, owned by single company or governmental body or cooperative is all good by me. Probably proper regulations and governmental programs could be a solution too.
- Dylanfm 6y agoFarms 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/PIIS2542-5196(17)30007-4/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5... - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/12/124010/meta;jsessionid=2466C7EE2E851B482831E2CC0E38A7F1.c3.iopscience.cld.iop.org https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/12/1... - http://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/284666/ http://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/284666/ Small farmers need support, it's worth learning about local arms of organisations such as https://viacampesina.org/en/ https://viacampesina.org/en/, for example https://landworkersalliance.org.uk https://landworkersalliance.org.uk
- JumpCrisscross 6y agoIsn’t the solution to increase these farms’ economies of scale? So the same civilisation-enhancing forces that drove development 10,000 years ago can show their force more broadly?
- fsloth 6y agoWhat economies of scale specifically do farms have? A farm is not a factory where you can create a uniform process...
- opencl 6y agoEcen 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.
- yorwba 6y agoThat'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/Maschinenring https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maschinenring Not sure whether the concept is unpopular in the English-speaking world, or just not considered noteworthy enough to warrant its own Wikipedia article.
- zpeti 6y agoAnd if they didn't, food would probably be a lot more expensive.
- fsloth 6y agoDoes a strong argument exists for this? To my understanding agriculture was turned into big business in the beginning of 20th century because of political process, not because it was obviously a more efficient way to produce food at the time.
- mellavora 6y agoIf it does, we should also ask if that strong argument continues to hold on a 50-year plus time-line.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago> Does a strong argument exists for this? No. At that level of concentration the opposite is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly On top of that, massive multinational companies can have extremely influential lobbying groups and can demand subsidies from governments.
- dfee 6y agoAnd the remaining 19% surely fill out the remaining 10%. Power laws everywhere.
- argestes 6y agoIsn't this regular old Pareto Distribution?
- Guest42 6y agoRegular old is 20/80. Would be nice to have some data sets to see what it looks like.
- blanketwarrior 6y agoThe 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.
- fsloth 6y agoJames Scott's "Seeing like a state" makes a fairly strong argument why big agribusiness is not as obviously the optimal choice for best use of land as a technologist (like myself) might imagine on the first blush: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
- qwerty456127 6y agoThis doesn't surprise me: there are some huge industrial farms and the rest are small private ones, obviously.
- ovi256 6y agoThe huge ones are also private, FWIW.
- qwerty456127 6y agoSure, obviously these are not state-owned, but I meant it in a different sense - like when you compare a multinational hotel chain to a family-maintained hostel. I wish I knew a better word for this.
- joubert 6y agoCorporate vs family/sole proprietorship could be one way to describe.
- qwerty456127 6y agoIt still can be technically a corporation, even if the corporation is owned by a single person, a family or a small team of friends.
- bluGill 6y agoGiven the tax and liability laws in the US only a fool farmer isn't a corporation. Hobby farm is the most likely way to fall into that - if you are doing it for fun you don't really care that there might be a better way.
- joubert 6y agoYep. I was thinking of it more in a qualitative sense, similar to characterizing a phrasing/word choice as “corporate-speak” whether or not it is made by a corporation or not. But perhaps there’s a better descriptor that also travels across cultures and legal frameworks (e.g. not all jurisdictions use the “corporation” nomenclature). From Wikipedia: “ In American English, the word corporation is most often used to describe large business corporations.[7] In British English and in the Commonwealth countries, the term company is more widely used to describe the same sort of entity while the word corporation encompasses all incorporated entities.” Communicating ideas precisely yet with nuance is a fun challenge :-)
- cm2187 6y agoIndustrialisation 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.
- mastazi 6y agoI would like to know if that 70% of farmlands also correspond to 70% (or more) of the output. I am skeptical that is the case - but I might be wrong... I would like to see the output figures in any case.
- mellavora 6y agoMaybe 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.
- xenocratus 6y ago> Nutritional content of food is down significant levels from 30 years ago. Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an... > Currently, however, this promotes large-scale monoculture. This can be good or bad, depending on what is produced in a large scale, I guess(?) Especially at this point in time we should focus on foods that don't mess with the environment/don't fuel climate change.
- nemo44x 6y agoIt’s also dangerous from a national security point of view. Consolidating farming and relying on monocultures certainly has economic benefits but it also creates an increasingly fragile system. A new parasite or disease could easily destroy enough of a years harvest (or more) and now the nation has a food shortage. Because so much of our food is derived from or reliant on the monoculture it would have cascading effects. It would be a disaster on many levels. Of course this is preventable but who has the courage to stand up for something that could happen when the political capital is won dealing with the cleanup. Food diversity isn’t just a “feels good” thing or an “ought to be” thing - it’s very much important in creating a resilient food supply which in my opinion is a matter of national security.
- yenwodyah 6y agoThere's nothing wrong with that.
- andersha 6y agowhat a strong argument, could you please elaborate on your stance on this topic?
- WatchDog 6y agoThe guardian laying the groundwork for another Kulak genocide I see.
- jokethrowaway 6y agoWe're not that far, people are already rioting
- alecco 6y agoModern farming got extremely more sophisticated and more productive at a cost of making it hard to be competitive with small operations. Good things: much higher yield per area, economies of scale, better soil maintenance, more hydraulic planning. Bad things: inhumane feed lots and lack of biodiversity. Note these are the same journalists who would've praised catastrophic land reforms by Marxist governments, like Zimbabwe. The same journalists complaining of food costs and shortages (+yield, +supply). The same journalists complaining about deforestation (+yield). The same journalists complaining about global warming (CO2 sequestration). There is room for improvement on biodiversity and long term care of topsoil. But a hit piece on inequality gets more views and gets more subscriptions/ads.
- netpenthe 6y agoaustralia? One big farm in Australia is Anna Creek Station at 2.4 million hectares Total UK farm land is 9 million hectares.
- dalbasal 6y agoWhen 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.
- alexpetralia 6y agoI found your comments on large-scale finance very illuminating. Thank you!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- prepend 6y agoA few years ago I learned about the Matthew Principle [0] on an Econtalk podcast or something like that. Now I seem to see it everywhere and try to figure out if these types of winner take all are natural or just set up by interested parties to minmax. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
- dash2 6y agoA 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_vehicle_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_manufacturers_by_motor... [2] https://www.topspeed.com/cars/makes/ https://www.topspeed.com/cars/makes/ [3] http://www.oica.net/category/production-statistics/2017-statistics/ http://www.oica.net/category/production-statistics/2017-stat...
- pietrovismara 6y agoI'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.
- sfkdjf9j3j 6y agoThe headline doesn't really tell the full story in this case. The article describes increasing concentration of control of farm land via certain financial products (and direct ownership). It's more of a collection of quotes than an article I suppose but it touches on the effects of this on economic inequality, agricultural monoculture, land stewardship concerns, that sort of thing.
- MichaelApproved 6y agoIt’s important to prevent monopolies in any industry but there are degrees of importance. The food supply chain is more important than the automotive supply chain.
- dash2 6y agoBut 1% of even 2000 car firms is far from a "monopoly", and 1% of the world's farms is still probably thousands of farms, right?
- randrews543 6y agoThis is all going to change over the next decade with the rise of indoor farming. With increased and more predictable yield, indoor farms can be more hyper-localized and run by independent-operators in their community.
- birdsbirdsbirds 6y agoFrom where do you get the energy for indoor farming? Is it more efficient to turn solar radiation with photovoltaic cells into electricity to then turn it back into light before it reaches the leaves of the plants?
- bryanlarsen 6y agoFarm size isn't a useful metric. My father-in-law farmed 800 acres in Saskatchewan Canada, which I'm sure was large enough to qualify it as part of the 1%. It was a hobby farm, he had a full-time off-farm job. 800 acres in much of the world is a massive amount that can grow a massive amount of food. For Northern dryland wheat farming it's a very small farm. A more typical size for the area is about 10,000 acres.
- LoSboccacc 6y ago...and other common, unsurprising results from the power law distribution
- megiddo 6y agoScience article generator! Cut off data at 2.3 sigmas, apply shocking result to catchy headline!
- fbelzile 6y agoCommon, yes. There's bound to be some kind of disproportion between the number of land owners vs land area in capitalist societies. Though, the extent of the power law distribution is surprising, at least to me.
- d33lio 6y agoAnd where are all the city folk in a rush to get their share of farmland? I love farmers markets, but at the same time small farmers own less land. With mechanization and contracting out of harvesting "as a service" it's not all that surprising that "1% of farms" operate on this much land.
- thinkingemote 6y agoThis quote is from a report, which itself is based on a FAO report: http://www.fao.org/3/ca7036en/ca7036en.pdf http://www.fao.org/3/ca7036en/ca7036en.pdf Quote with context: The results show that, worldwide, farms of less than 1 hectare account for 70 percent of all farms, but operate only 7 percent of all agricultural land. Slightly larger farms between 1 and 2 hectares account for 14 percent of all farms and control 4 percent of the land. Together, farms of less than 2 hectares account for 84 percent of all farms, but operate only around 12 percent of all agricultural land. Farms in the range of 2 to 5 hectares account for 10 percent of all farms and control 6 percent of the land. Interestingly, the largest 1 percent of farms in the world (those larger than 50 hectares) operate more than 70 percent of the world’s farmland. (there are 608 million farms in the world)
- opinion-is-bad 6y agoThe profit share for those largest 1% of farms is even greater than 70% as well. I believe it’s around 93% of profits are made from the large operations.
- jtuente 6y agoFor reference, 50 hectares (123 acres) is a small farm for an ag community/family. It's not the least bit surprising that they are low profit. Several members of my extended family farm at and above that acreage and a majority of my grandfather's farmland is leased out to a larger family operation since he's retired. Those family members mostly have regular 40/week jobs, since they're just hobby farms.
- opinion-is-bad 6y agoAbsolutely, the cutoff to be a large farm is quite low. I am a farmer myself, but we have a very large plot compared to the cutoff point (~10,000 acres, half of them permanent and half row crops). There are enough difficulties to managing our operation, I would never advise someone to go into the business unless they had an almost religious calling to it.
- 6y ago
- kochb 6y agoThe inequality discussed by the article is a reduction to a popular political line. These popularized, almost mythical, portrayals of agriculture are uselessly far from reality. If you want to summarize a tremendously complex industry, it's more useful to compare in terms of the crop being produced and the region's level of economic development. For example, in the US, mechanized row crop farming over large numbers of acres is the norm (growing corn, beans, wheat, etc). These farms are all small head count family-run operations, sized between a few hundred to a few thousand acres, with a total somewhere in the low hundred-thousands of them. The worldwide number of farms then runs up into the hundreds of millions due to small landholders - subsistence agriculture, locally sold produce, etc. A farmer growing corn in a remote Central American village is completely different from the farmer growing corn in the United States. A produce farmer at your local farmer's market is completely different from a wheat farmer on the Black Sea. There's a living to be made at many points on the spectrum, and humanity needs each of them. Real problems certainly do exist. They have more to do with things like the market pressures of producing commodity products, baseline calorie and nutritional demands, distribution, and structural supply and demand inefficiencies.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoMaybe that's out of date. Iowa used to be run as described, but the 'family farm' is largely extinct. Now its all run by corporations in large blocks. This is an evolving issue, and its gone at least as far as the OP suggests.
- kochb 6y agoSpeaking as someone who provides services to the industry, your statement just isn't correct; as I originally stated it's a popular myth that is very different from reality. There are large corporations involved, but they come in at the points where inputs are supplied to the farmer and production is purchased. Production is still operated by family run farms. It's so capital inefficient that no corporation would dare bother.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
- nahuel0x 6y agoSay what you want about Marx, but his prediction about increasing concentration of Capital was right on the spot.
- disown 6y agoConcentration of capital is the essential point of capitalism. It's the ultimate end goal. Also, capital is a unit of power in a capitalist system and in all systems, power wants to concentrate. Power has a gravitation pull.
- pueblito 6y agoThis article is the future for me. I’m a small farmer - I grow marijuana in Colorado. Federal laws have so far sheltered us and allowed us to grow (no pun) by keeping BigAg and Bank money outside. Now it’s an industry of small partnerships and family farmers and I am very happy. But it won’t last. When marijuana is finally legalized nationally there will be an immediate tidal wave of money and consolidating. Those that remain independent will eventually become big corporate farms themselves or perish. I have been blessed by my god with a wonderful family and the land my ancestors tended to, so while the business landscape will change and this boom will bust my small American family farm will remain. I am also optimistic that BigAg will continue to look towards YOU for the tools I need to reduce labor and pests. Collectively, you guys are amazing and I get literally giddy thinking of the things you keep inventing
- ryanmarsh 6y agoI live in Texas and anxiously await legalization because I’d love to start farming it. However I know how things in this state work, and the economics of Ag. If and when Texas legalizes there will be immense amounts of private equity involved (lots of money here) and it will go ConAgra-ADM-Monsanto overnight. People here do business, and Ag, really big. Fuck even one of the grocery chains is vertically integrated. They own everything from farms to shrimp boats. My chances of doing anything are shot, except maybe high-end boutique low-yield stuff with lots of marketing.
- nsp 6y agoWhich grocery store? HEB?
- ryanmarsh 6y agoYes
- fedreserved 6y agoIf you can breed to turn high end low yield strains, into high end high yielding/fast finishing/naturally mold and pest resistant strains then you will be able to either license out your strain library, or compete the fold fashioned way. Get started the earlier the better to be ahead of the curve
- ph4 6y agoFor those interested in the subject, I encourage you to read Chris Smaje's new book, A Small Farm Future. Fascinating analysis of the existing state of affairs, and where we might be headed.
- aminozuur 6y ago“I believe that agriculture land -- productive agricultural land with water on site -- will be very valuable in the future," - Michael Burry in 2010 (the guy from "The Big Short"). His fund made a ton of money during the 2001 dot com crash, 2018 financial crisis, and now with land. #contrarian More: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-09-07/michael-burry-predictor-of-mortgage-collapse-bets-on-farmland-and-gold https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-09-07/michael-b...
- Aardappel 6y agoMaybe the title for articles like this should be "farmland ownership conforms to power law as expected, exponent = K" Then the discussion can focus on whether is K is surprisingly high or low compared to similar statistics (general land ownership, farm revenue, etc), not endless confused comments that seem to be coming to terms with something being a power law distribution at all.
- O_H_E 6y agoYes, I really think we (society) should be having disscussions like that. Judging statistics relative to each other not independently based on our life-veiws.
- specialist 6y agoWinner-takes-all is something like a natural law. That's just math, not a value statement or judgement. Probably the outcome of preferential attachment and compounding interest (rewards). I'll let others talk about economies of scale, financialization, regulatory capture, and so forth. If society determines that winner-takes-all is undesirable, we'll have to choose otherwise. That means forfeiting economic efficiencies, adding friction to open markets, some kind of profit sharing (redistribution). A policy of robustness over efficiency could make a lot of sense. There will always be shocks to the system. In vesting in resilience is a pretty good idea. Note that I wrote "open markets". The taxonomy of markets includes open, closed, gray, and black. "Free markets" is double speak for pro-monopoly laissez faire winner-takes-all.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoYeah. We have all the efficiency we need in growing food, and more besides. (At least in terms of output - maybe not in terms of sustainability and environmental damage.) But as you say, we really want resiliency, too.
- cute_boi 6y agosounds like strategy used in past [1] Collectivisation and the Ukrainian Famine - History Matters (Short Animated Documentary) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLlp-LmXm3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLlp-LmXm3s
- jehb 6y agoThere seems to be a damned lot of obsession with monetary efficiency in this thread, and very little concern with output per acre, output per ton of carbon spent in production, or whether the farming practice is one that will allow the land to be a farm and not an infertile wasteland in twenty years.