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Family farms operate about half of America’s farmland and they are responsible for about 21% of production. Link: https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/01/23/lo

Family farms operate about half of America’s farmland and they are responsible for about 21% of production. Link: https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/01/23/look-americas-family-farms https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/01/23/look-americas-fam... Family farms grow commodity and fiber and not necessarily food calories. ‘Industrial farmer’ will toe the line of the inputs industry(feed, fertilizer and weedicides) and collect subsidies. Profitability doesn’t relate to good soil practices. Profit is extracted from all that ancillary to the food production industry. Example: There is no money in growing food. The profit comes if you own your truck lines and part of the supply chain. Or Agtech or inputs make more money than the proceeds of actual food. Subsidies make up most farm income and pushing more farmers into debt and bankruptcy. It’s not very rosy. Industrial farms have polluted our waters and poisoned our soils that habitat and eco systems are entirely decimated. And crop diversity is also severely compromised and we lose so much variety and cultivars. That’s why we get tasteless red delicious apples and Roma tomatoes because it’s easy to mechanize to feed billions cheap food. In my opinion, I think there should be two kinds of food. Cheap Soylent kind of nutritious goop to stave off malnutrition and starvation in industrial factory farms with strict protocols to deal with the environmental impact and then real food whose price reflects the true cost of growing food for billions cheaply. But all ag and food production should be termed industrial as it is the erasure of nature and habitat and eco systems. I am very much in favour of the late great E.O.Wilson’s Half Earth proposal and I think it should be considered in earnest to save our planet.

maxerickson 5y ago
From your link: Our research found that family farms remain a key part of U.S. agriculture, making up 98% of all farms and providing 88% of production. Most farms are small family farms, and they operate almost half of U.S. farm land, while generating 21% of production. Midsize and large-scale family farms account for about 66% of production; and non-family farms represent the remaining 2.1% of farms and 12% of production. My point was that the use of "family farm" with no additional context (as in the article), is very difficult to interpret. You've linked a description that includes several types of farm under the label "family farm" but elided the "small" that reflects the statistics you quote.
- jelliclesfarm 5y ago
  I am not sure I understand your point. Please clarify. In the United States, the average size of a farm is around 400 acres.
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    You wrote "Family farms operate about half of America’s farmland and they are responsible for about 21% of production". The resource you link identifies those as small family farms and gives much larger ownership and production numbers when larger farms that are also classified as family farms are included. The article linked for HN discussion uses the term "family farm", which we can see doesn't mean a lot in the US. Now you are discussing, probably, mean size, which the article you link makes clear doesn't mean a lot (because there are many many tiny, not very productive farms).
    - jelliclesfarm 5y ago
      ‘Farms’ can mean a lot of things and they are not all producing food calories. So what is your definition of ‘productivity’? A farm can be profitable not growing anything and collecting subsidies. Many ranchers have a small herd and use their ‘farmland/ranches’ for endangered mitigation purposes as there is a lot of federal dollars for conservation. There are ‘farms’ that have upto $250k/year tax write off for an alpaca farm.
0_____0 5y ago
Apples and tomatoes are not good examples for your point. There's a tremendous variety of apples available in standard grocery stores, most of which are significantly tastier than the red delicious. And bland tomatoes are a result of having to ship tomatoes, which is near impossible with ripe fruit, hence selecting robust varieties, picking early, and having them ripen in transit. There too, increasingly you can find heirloom varieties in stores, however they are understandably more expensive. Try canned tomatoes if you don't need a pretty fruit but are looking for flavor -- canning varieties are picked ripe and immediately processed.
- jelliclesfarm 5y ago
  Canned varieties use tomatoes grown specially for canning and they are picked unripe ..ripened with ethylene gas and immediately processed. With apples, old canopied orchards are destroyed and cannot be replanted again due to replant disease. United States is facing a huge problem with fire blight disease (that affects all pommes..pears and pecans too) and there is a new fire blight resistant foot stock..but dwarfing stocks and grafting takes time. On a side note, I tried pitching a rootstock grafting robot but never found traction. Agtech only funds tech that uses chemicals and fertilizers. We are losing tasty cultivars and will end up only growing the monocropped varieties at scale. It’s literally the same economics as factory production. But nature is not a factory. I don’t have the energy or inclination to effect any change anymore. I see the ground reality now and profit motives. I know I will eat well because I save seeds and grow old cultivars for taste and not quantity. I don’t think it’s my job to change the world anymore. Covid brought home a lot of realities. All the weak spots were exposed. I am looking at everything with a diff set of eyes than I did two years ago. Currently pears are going through a dimming phase due to thin profit margins. In the next few generations, pears will be a rare fruit. Meanwhile in this environment, Abundant robotics..the only American robotic apple harvester (and one that had done better than any of the other start ups and was also the first) was shut down and it’s assets auctioned off. I know exactly what went down and why it was shut down but it’s not something for public consumption. An American grown and funded fantastic tech had its patents and data ‘sold’. It was developed at SRI Menlo Park and entire annual budgets of Washington state university research Dept. And the company sold even shit like its compressors and furniture at an auction. Fully stripped and when it’s on the auction block, it becomes a undesirable acquisition. It was staggeringly shocking. That’s when I realized that this is all futile. Bigger forces planning bigger goals. I honestly believe that American ag is on its way down. We are fast going towards food insufficiency and higher reliance on imported food. I don’t know if it’s deliberate policy or if there are other motivations at work. But this is ‘above my paycheck’, as it were and I think we are looking at the eventual demise of American food ag. Having said that, I am 1000% sure that relying outside our borders for our food and not being food self sufficient is a terrible recipe for disaster. I expect high inflation of food prices and food shortages in the near future in America. Even more severe than in other parts of the world because we are already reliant on imports and most of the food we grow comes from the desert called California that is looking at decades of drought in the future. And its main growing areas in Central Valley and central coast is going to experience salt water intrusion and subsidence is already happening. I give it thirty years before all that land is sold to property development or open space because food won’t grow there anymore. Meanwhile we have done nothing to ensure food security. I will be dead by then and until then I am going to eat well. Nothing lasts forever.

maxerickson 5y ago

From your link: Our research found that family farms remain a key part of U.S. agriculture, making up 98% of all farms and providing 88% of production. Most farms are small family farms, and they operate almost half of U.S. farm land, while generating 21% of production. Midsize and large-scale family farms account for about 66% of production; and non-family farms represent the remaining 2.1% of farms and 12% of production. My point was that the use of "family farm" with no additional context (as in the article), is very difficult to interpret. You've linked a description that includes several types of farm under the label "family farm" but elided the "small" that reflects the statistics you quote.

jelliclesfarm 5y ago
I am not sure I understand your point. Please clarify. In the United States, the average size of a farm is around 400 acres.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  You wrote "Family farms operate about half of America’s farmland and they are responsible for about 21% of production". The resource you link identifies those as small family farms and gives much larger ownership and production numbers when larger farms that are also classified as family farms are included. The article linked for HN discussion uses the term "family farm", which we can see doesn't mean a lot in the US. Now you are discussing, probably, mean size, which the article you link makes clear doesn't mean a lot (because there are many many tiny, not very productive farms).
  - jelliclesfarm 5y ago
    ‘Farms’ can mean a lot of things and they are not all producing food calories. So what is your definition of ‘productivity’? A farm can be profitable not growing anything and collecting subsidies. Many ranchers have a small herd and use their ‘farmland/ranches’ for endangered mitigation purposes as there is a lot of federal dollars for conservation. There are ‘farms’ that have upto $250k/year tax write off for an alpaca farm.

0_____0 5y ago

Apples and tomatoes are not good examples for your point. There's a tremendous variety of apples available in standard grocery stores, most of which are significantly tastier than the red delicious. And bland tomatoes are a result of having to ship tomatoes, which is near impossible with ripe fruit, hence selecting robust varieties, picking early, and having them ripen in transit. There too, increasingly you can find heirloom varieties in stores, however they are understandably more expensive. Try canned tomatoes if you don't need a pretty fruit but are looking for flavor -- canning varieties are picked ripe and immediately processed.

jelliclesfarm 5y ago
Canned varieties use tomatoes grown specially for canning and they are picked unripe ..ripened with ethylene gas and immediately processed. With apples, old canopied orchards are destroyed and cannot be replanted again due to replant disease. United States is facing a huge problem with fire blight disease (that affects all pommes..pears and pecans too) and there is a new fire blight resistant foot stock..but dwarfing stocks and grafting takes time. On a side note, I tried pitching a rootstock grafting robot but never found traction. Agtech only funds tech that uses chemicals and fertilizers. We are losing tasty cultivars and will end up only growing the monocropped varieties at scale. It’s literally the same economics as factory production. But nature is not a factory. I don’t have the energy or inclination to effect any change anymore. I see the ground reality now and profit motives. I know I will eat well because I save seeds and grow old cultivars for taste and not quantity. I don’t think it’s my job to change the world anymore. Covid brought home a lot of realities. All the weak spots were exposed. I am looking at everything with a diff set of eyes than I did two years ago. Currently pears are going through a dimming phase due to thin profit margins. In the next few generations, pears will be a rare fruit. Meanwhile in this environment, Abundant robotics..the only American robotic apple harvester (and one that had done better than any of the other start ups and was also the first) was shut down and it’s assets auctioned off. I know exactly what went down and why it was shut down but it’s not something for public consumption. An American grown and funded fantastic tech had its patents and data ‘sold’. It was developed at SRI Menlo Park and entire annual budgets of Washington state university research Dept. And the company sold even shit like its compressors and furniture at an auction. Fully stripped and when it’s on the auction block, it becomes a undesirable acquisition. It was staggeringly shocking. That’s when I realized that this is all futile. Bigger forces planning bigger goals. I honestly believe that American ag is on its way down. We are fast going towards food insufficiency and higher reliance on imported food. I don’t know if it’s deliberate policy or if there are other motivations at work. But this is ‘above my paycheck’, as it were and I think we are looking at the eventual demise of American food ag. Having said that, I am 1000% sure that relying outside our borders for our food and not being food self sufficient is a terrible recipe for disaster. I expect high inflation of food prices and food shortages in the near future in America. Even more severe than in other parts of the world because we are already reliant on imports and most of the food we grow comes from the desert called California that is looking at decades of drought in the future. And its main growing areas in Central Valley and central coast is going to experience salt water intrusion and subsidence is already happening. I give it thirty years before all that land is sold to property development or open space because food won’t grow there anymore. Meanwhile we have done nothing to ensure food security. I will be dead by then and until then I am going to eat well. Nothing lasts forever.