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There are two kinds of optimum strategies for farmers, and there has been a long term shift from one to the other. The older strategy is for a farm to be no bi

• structural 5y ago
  This is absolutely true. A related trend is that many family-owned farms are no longer operated by the family: they own the land and lease the farming rights to an industrial-scale operation. The difference in efficiency means that the large operator can pay almost as much for the lease as the individual farming family would realize in profit if they worked the land themselves and still have a viable business.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• h2odragon 5y ago
  Well observed. My experiences include a lot of farms that operated with big yards of scrap iron; were always repairing / rebuilding something, and did contract construction work to keep the machines running when they weren't using them for their own concerns. There's very few operations running that way anymore, the "odd construction contract" market for them dried up before and faster than the farming side of those operations. USDA Soil Conservation flood control projects used to be a large source of work there.
• yalogin 5y ago
  In the US, isn't this the case for a long time now? I thought the consolidation towards bigger and bigger farms is the trend for a few decades now.
  • mistrial9 5y ago
    yes, quite a bit of consolidation after the 1980s in the farming sector. culture reference: Farm Aid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_Aid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farm_Aid
• akudha 5y ago
  Isn’t this generally true in other industries too? Small cafes can’t compete with Starbucks, there are no mom and pop pharmacies, small grocery stores can’t compete with huge/ugly chains… At this rate, the entire planet will be ruled by a few dozen mega corporations. This sucks, but I don’t know what can be done to mitigate the situation.
  • Beaver117 5y ago
    Well, shoplifting and other petty theft has been increasing
  • chillingeffect 5y ago
    (Most of) us don't have to work for them and (most of) us don't have to buy from them. If we mindfully shop looking at the big picture, we can support smaller operations.
    • akudha 5y ago
      When I lived in NY (upper east side) there were multiple pharmacies within walking distance. Nearly every corner had Starbucks (I used to give directions using Starbucks - not making this up). Number of small cafes or pharmacies within walking distance? Big fat zero. This situation will happen first in big cities, then proceed to smaller areas too (as long as there is profit). I was looking for an apartment. Guess what? Multiple buildings in the area I looked at, owned by the same company. Consolidation is not new. But the scale at which it is happening is, and it is terrifying. Just 4 companies control 80% of American meat supply, for example.
  • otikik 5y ago
    > I don’t know what can be done to mitigate the situation. Something about the means of production, perhaps.
  • perl4ever 5y ago
    >Small cafes can’t compete with Starbucks Why do you say this? I don't randomly change pharmacies for my prescriptions, so I can't think of a "mom and pop pharmacy" off hand, but non-Starbucks coffee shops are everywhere. This has been my experience everywhere I've been in eastern states in the US from Virginia to New York. My perception is that Starbucks is primarily a place to get milkshakes, and their coffee is undrinkable, and their food is worse. Most other coffee shops do much better in those two categories. Some are also chains, but many aren't.
• theptip 5y ago
  > The shift over years has been that the second strategy produces more crops with lower expenses I read an interesting book recently (Seeing like a State) that makes the claim that large-scale monocrop industrial farming is only actually “optimal” if you don’t price in the heavy subsidy, and if you ignore the non-revenue contributions of small-hold agriculture (e.g. the land might provide fuel, crafting materials, and otherwise support the farmers in a way that doesn’t show up on the balance sheet). Not to mention that the larger farms tend to be extractive, in that they are using up water from the water table and nutrients from the soil, and so they will eventually degrade the land to the point where it cannot be productive any more. I did some digging and the farm subsidies in the US are truly eye-watering, and particularly notable is that the biggest 10% of farms take 90% of the subsidy, so we are not even subsidizing “traditional working farmers” or anything like that, just shipping hundreds of billions to huge ag corps. I wouldn’t claim to be an expert nor to be certain about those economic claims though, and would be interested in others’ thoughts here, particularly other books you found useful on the subject.
  • toyg 5y ago
    > particularly notable is that the biggest 10% of farms take 90% of the subsidy This is the real problem. I wish somebody would come up with a simple mechanism to stop all subsidies to companies over a certain size. Yes, it will be gamed, but it's still better than the outright crony-capitalism we have today.
    • tastyfreeze 5y ago
      Just stop subsidies altogether. Subsidies distort the market and encourage farmers to grow crops the market doesnt actually want.
      • landemva 5y ago
        Start with removing corn subsidy. There is so much corn ovrrproduction that it gets processed into a bit of sweet and blended in to packaged foods like ketchup. And blended into gasoline. Corn subsidy is massive economic distortion which leads to monocrop farming and lack of diversity.
• im3w1l 5y ago
  Why can't the family farmers share a pool of highly efficient tractors?
  • AlotOfReading 5y ago
    Excepting unusual conditions, most nearby farmers needing the same equipment will need it at similar times. You can get around this by transporting machinery long distances as migrant workers do to hit multiple harvests in various parts of the country, but that gets expensive.
    • im3w1l 5y ago
      Well big ag was supposedly able to solve it right? Vertical integration helps coordinate I suppose, but I don't see how it should be impossible without.
      • structural 5y ago
        So there's generally an optimum time of year for each step, and being a couple weeks early or late can definitely lower yield a bit. Big agriculture can stagger planting so that a smaller number of machines can be used per acre, if that's more profitable overall, even accounting for the slight reduced productivity. A group of families can't do the same thing nearly as easily if it means that one family makes a large profit (they hit the optimal time), another family makes a small profit (a week or two late), and the unlucky family possibly makes no profit at all (even later/earlier). In order for this to work, they'd also have to share profits, and at that point they've basically just merged.
        • im3w1l 5y ago
          I think there could be other solutions than outright sharing profits. I'm thinking something like higher tractor-rent during more desirable weeks. I don't know a lot about farming but I think there is also a risk management thing that needs to be dealt with: Planting earlier or harvesting later than optimal means higher risk of crop failure. This could be handled with insurance.
• mschuster91 5y ago
  > The shift over years has been that the second strategy produces more crops with lower expenses than the first, and is taking over to the extent it is almost impossible to run a small farm without going bankrupt. There is value in small-scale farming. If there is one thing urban hipsters love to pay for, it's artisanal, high quality organic food. There are farms where you can see pictures and datasheets of all the animals living there and you can pre-order certain cuts of the specific animal once it is slaughtered and processed.
• foxhop 5y ago
  It's not impossible, you are thinking from the wrong paradigm. The industry is already shifting if you pay attention to the proper news sources. The chemical agriculture war on pests and nature is coming to an end. These chemicals are making us sick, these monoculture are collapsing the ecosystem globally. The good news is nature abhors a vacuum and will heal if we let it. The wu Wei. Small farms will rise, food is just too important for the economy and with rapid inflation there is no way around it. We are all going to have to become farmers or know our farmers. Ref: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC1eySW_9TiI5wnvTnIIw2Nw https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC1eySW_9TiI5wnvTnIIw2Nw
• cmroanirgo 5y ago
  I live on my family farm. We have a 50yr old tractor and your basic premise seems correct. All of my neighbors follow the same route. I would add that small farmers are typically not mono culture. We used to have various fruit varieties. One neighbor is mixed veggies, another cattle and flowers. Our farm has been forced out of fruit because of corporate mono farms who inevitably cause gluts in the market due to over supply. In my local experience, corporate farms are typically 5-10 bigger as a minimum than their surrounding neighbors. When a small farmer loses any percentage income, he must quickly change income stream. Hence, our fruit trees are gone, and we're now raising sheep, and are forced to be double income. Our tractor & other super reliable (but very clunky) machines remain.
  • oopsyDoodl 5y ago
    I think it’s great. It’s the story of humanity moving on from “I am my own industrial island” to inclusive effort at scale to automate away and normalize often dangerous logistical work (I am 41 and have limbless, digit less peers who had to work on family farms as teens.) Family farms are, to me, simply a legacy social and technical effort. The problem is old politics refusing to take reality seriously. Americans who carry on about their legacy of revolution, moving history forward, disruption!, exporting that mentality to the world, are all sad their lives are disrupted by others wanting the same agency. Moral relativism worked for Americans while we bombed the world, impeding other nations progress, but they caught up anyway. “There’s a warning sign on the road ahead; a lot of people saying we’d be better off dead. Don’t feel like Satan; but I am to them; so I try and forget it any way I can.” If you didn’t sign a contract to be a family farmer for life, oh well. America.
  • smackeyacky 5y ago
    Hey, sheep! If it would be OK can you try contacting me directly through my profile? I'd like to find somebody in the US who is dealing with sheep and what they are doing with them. I have a product we would like to export to the US but I am really struggling to get a handle on the market there, it's very different to Australia/NZ etc.
• nanomonkey 5y ago
  There is a third option, often called "Market Gardener", where a tractor is not used because it is a waste of space and resources. Tractors require a lot of extra turn around space, and area for the wheels to travel that can be utilized for planting. Instead rows are built at 3 ft wide and perhaps 60 ft long to utilize human scale planting and weeding techniques. In this case the soil is not tilled, but instead allowed to build up. Covers are used to suppress weeds when the row is not in use. Rows are more easily rotated with cover crops or nitrogen fixating plants to improve the soil nutrients. These are of course smaller family farms 1-10 acres.
• deleted 5y ago
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• shawn-butler 5y ago
  Large-scale family farms and industrial nonfamily farms account for only 4.8% of farms, but 57.4% of production (in $). Small-scale family farms represent nearly 90% of U.S. farms, but only 21.5% of production. Source is USDA (2020) America’s Diverse Family Farms.
• dehrmann 5y ago
  > The older strategy is for a farm to be no bigger than a single family can handle The problem with this is it works because it's socially acceptable unpaid child labor. I do think that there's value to the work ethic it can build, but I also worry about overwork, how it sacrifices education, and how it encourages larger families where all the kids end up being disadvantaged as adults.
• rgrieselhuber 5y ago
  Decentralization vs Centralization
• lettergram 5y ago
  > The shift over years has been that the second strategy produces more crops with lower expenses than the first, and is taking over to the extent it is almost impossible to run a small farm without going bankrupt. While true, you can lease the land making a decent income without effort. Which is the best case scenario as many older farmers retire and leave the land to family. On the other hand, if people still are looking to make a living, it's more focused on livestock such as cattle, chickens, pigs, etc often niche animals. I know several people who effectively support Tyson: https://www.tysonfoods.com/who-we-are/our-partners/farmers/contract-poultry-farming https://www.tysonfoods.com/who-we-are/our-partners/farmers/c...
• rapnie 5y ago
  > The shift over years has been that the second strategy produces more crops with lower expenses than the first, and is taking over to the extent it is almost impossible to run a small farm without going bankrupt. In the Netherlands there's renewed attention to stimulate small-scale farming and agriculture for various reasons. For many years large supermarkets have been increasing pressure on the entire supply chain to produce as cheap as possible. It has its effect on all products, where more processed foods gradually replace 'genuine' produce. The larger margins are at the supermarket top of the chain, while farmers are the ones getting squeezed the most. To the extent that they are almost forced to scale up, but even then may find it hard to earn a decent living. Now Netherlands farm industry is producing an insane amount of meat and vegetables. A tiny country and one of the larger exporters in the world. All this has had very detrimental effects on the environment. Our 'Green Heart' (the region circled by Dutch big cities) is basically a wasteland with little insects or birds, soil compaction. Only fertilizer and pesticides keep it all going. And we have a nitrate problem, caused by both farming and traffic, that is threatening the sparse natural reserves that are patched between argicultural lands. All this is entirely unsustainable. It is also dangerous. A new pandemic may well find its source in the intensive livestock sector with its mega-stables. As a result there's now a lot of political attention to doing things differently, scaling down farms, re-introducing old farming practices and experimenting with new ones. Small-scale farming is beginning to look more attractive again, and there's a growing consumer-base ready to pay a somewhat higher price for that as well.
• sershe 5y ago
  Interesting; I remember reading something similar on ACOUP about plow teams/etc. in the ancient world. According to ACOUP having access to plow teams and other expensive stuff due to trade/specialization moves the whole system into a better, richer equilibrium. Would the same apply to tractors? Not for individual farmers but for farming "system" as a whole?