15 ms·

The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

220 points by ilamont 3y ago

kasey_junk 3y ago
It’s important to remember that this was a specific policy decision. Earl Butz[1] famously said to our farmers “Get big or get out”. I don’t have the background or inclination to prove it but my conviction is the death of the small town, and the ancillary costs like the meth and opioid epidemics can be traced directly to the “fence row to fence row” approach he pushed forward and still exists today. [later] thanks nickt for pointing out I left off the footnote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz
- nickt 3y ago
  [1] Earl Butz - Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (1971 - 1976) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  How much farming do you need if you cut out biofuels and some feed corn for industrial scale meat production? Lots of poor ag policy decisions over the last century, but also I think a a bit of make work in certain circumstances. When speaking to opponents of utility scale solar on vast tracts of farmland, you see this when they’re upset about the land no longer being used to farm, but the farmer can make more from solar or wind than farming. Lots of emotion from tradition and history to make peace with. Change is the only constant, and everything dies eventually.
- msla 3y ago
  The death of the small town seems like it was fore-ordained by simple economics. In big cities, you can afford to have businesses like restaurants that aren't Sysco retail outlets, movie theaters that show more than the five most popular films on Earth at the moment, libraries that have books beyond romance novels, bestsellers, and out-of-date nonfiction. Moreover, cities are the economic drivers, even in the agricultural world: https://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html https://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html > But don't cities arise from and depend on agriculture? No: all economic progress originates in cities, [Jane] Jacobs tells us; and cheekily adds that all agricultural progress originates in cities. Great advances, such as mechanical reapers and electricity, were invented and adopted in or near cities before being applied to agricultural regions farther out. Productivity improvements in agriculture always begin near the cities and spread out. > What we think of as purely rural activities often began in the cities. In premodern Europe, the quintessential cottage industry was weaving; but before cloth was woven in cottages the art was rediscovered and practiced in cities. Dark Ages peasants lived on gruel; the art of breadmaking was recovered first in cities (and based on city-grown bread; a medieval city had its own fields). In our own rural areas there are vast ranches where animals are fattened before slaughter; they are transplants from the city stockyards of Kansas City and Chicago. > Driving the nail in the coffin of the spontaneous generation of cities from farmland, Jacobs describes the inability of Ireland to turn itself around after the disastrous famines of the 1840s: >> There were no ports to receive relief food... There were no mills for grinding relief grain. There were no mechanics or tools and equipment to build mills. There were no ovens for baking bread. There were no ways to spread information about how to grow crops other than potatoes. There was no way to distribute the seeds of other crops, nor to supply the farm tools that were indispensable for a change of crops... >> To be sure, the Irish had reached this pass because they were held in an iron economic and social subjection. But the very core of that subjection-- and the reason why it was so effective and had rendered them so helpless-- was the systematic suppression of city industry, the same suppression in principle that the English had unsuccessfully tried to enforce upon industry in the little cities of the American colonies. > Closer to home, here's a report from one Henry Grady, speaking in 1880 about a funeral in Pickens Co. Georgia, some years before. >> The grave was dug through solid marble, but the marble headstone came from Vermont. It was in a pine wilderness but the pine coffin came from Cincinnati. An iron mountain over-shadowed it but the coffin nails and the screws and the shovel came from Pittsburgh. With hard wood and metal abounding, the corpse was hauled on a wagon from South Bend, Indiana. A hickory grove grew near by, but the pick and shovel handles came from New York. The cotton shirt on the dead man came from Cincinnati, the coat and breeches from Chicago, the shoes from Boston; the folded hands were encased in white gloves from New York... That country, so rich in undeveloped resources, furnished nothing for the funeral except the corpse and the hole in the ground and would probably have imported both of those if it could have done so. > Grady is eloquently describing the circumstances of a passive economic region: despite all its resources, it makes nothing. So blaming it all on Nixon, which has an obvious appeal I admit, is a bit ahistorical.
  - throwway120385 3y ago
    I understand that these quotes are poignant symbols of how dependent rural areas are on cities, but you can't expect to base an argument about economic change on some quotes that you liked from books.
    - msla 3y ago
      Do you have anything to add?
  - kasey_junk 3y ago
    Again, I have no business commenting on this as I have no idea what I’m talking about. But it’s striking driving through WI and MI vs IN, IL and IA. In the former, where the agriculture is dominated by less commodity agriculture (dairy & fruit) small towns exist and thrive. In the latter dominated by the most commoditized crops in the world (feed corn & soy) they don’t.
    - maxerickson 3y ago
      Lots of timber industry in Wisconsin and Michigan. The paper mill in my town directly supports several hundred jobs (like the on site jobs) and is a gaping maw consuming wood fiber from the region. (several hundred jobs doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a big deal in a small town) Oh oops: It's not several hundred on site, it's ~1,000.
    - JackFr 3y ago
      You can store grain 10 years. You cannot store milk or fruit (even with the best inert gas refrigeration) more than a year at most without noticeable degradation. That has significant implications.
- frogblast 3y ago
  Did he make that true via policy changes, or was it an astute observation of what was going to be true given economic realities?
m463 3y ago
This is sort of sad, because - 350 years! I think the other side of the coin is the places stagnation and outright decay have set in, like many inner cities or rustbelt regions that have not thrived. The opposite would be places like tokyo where everything is turned over rapidly and the new is ousted to be almost immediately replaced by the newer and newest.
- thelastparadise 3y ago
  It's interesting to see that the same thing has been happening on the other side of the Atlantic. I grew up in a farming community in County Clare, Ireland (~1980 - 1999) and many farms there have been abandoned due to the low returns from agriculture.
  - rgmerk 3y ago
    The same thing has been happening pretty much everywhere in the world for a century.
- samstave 3y ago
  Thanks for introducing me to that concept, enjoyed that. We need a new New Deal w/ UBI and just invest in ourselves.
- bredren 3y ago
  The length of its existence is interesting, but by todays standards, the farm may have been just as unsustainable as it was at its onset. Notably, the Smithsonian article only asks about recent changes affecting the farm. Slavery was common in Massachusetts through 1700s. If the farm was made sustainable through slave labor in its first 100 years, it would have avoided the same concerns that the article says are doing it in now: dependable and low cost labor.
  - ROTMetro 3y ago
    My Scottish male ancestors were forcibly shipped to Massachusetts and made to do forced labour when they lost the civil war to the English. Because they were prisoners of war they were not allowed to bring their families with them.
dauertewigkeit 3y ago
From an economic standpoint, there is no sense in small scale farming. From a personal standpoint, the sensible thing to do is to scale it down to subsistence gardening for yourself and your family. That is what my family does. I remember, when I was still young, they still used to sell some produce. Nowadays it is entirely consumed by the family or gifted out. The benefit of this, is that you are free from economic demand. You grow whatever you please, because you want to have it at the dinner table.
- flerovium 3y ago
  Is that true? Small farms benefit from greater attention and incentives of their owners.
- zwieback 3y ago
  That and maybe specialty farms. Where I live you can't throw a rock without hitting a small farm or nursery that does very specific things and they seem to do okay in their niches.
- randomdata 3y ago
  > From an economic standpoint, there is no sense in small scale farming. So long as there is residual value in the "hand-me-down" equipment, there will be economic value in operating it. At the same time it is not economically sensible for large scale farming to continue to operate old and outdated equipment, so the smaller scale farm actually fills a useful role in the economy.
  - flangola7 3y ago
    Are there really that many innovations in how to harvest a wheat field?
    - btilly 3y ago
      Yes. https://www.geoforce.com/how-can-gps-be-used-in-precision-farming/ https://www.geoforce.com/how-can-gps-be-used-in-precision-fa... https://wheatfoundation.org/innovation-to-feed-the-future-a-case-for-biotech-use-in-wheat/ https://wheatfoundation.org/innovation-to-feed-the-future-a-... https://www.corteva.us/Resources/graininnovations/grain-innovations-library.html https://www.corteva.us/Resources/graininnovations/grain-inno... And a whole lot more.
zwieback 3y ago
It's hard to support the idea of inefficient farming just out of pure nostalgia but I think there's something else lost when these small family farms die out. I imagine large commercial farms aren't going to experiment as much or adapt to changing conditions.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  They aren't going to take any chances on growing unusual crops, perhaps. But big farm operations are constantly experimenting to improve yields and reduce expenses.
  - zwieback 3y ago
    Yes, definitely. Working on a mature product in a big corporation I'm very familiar with the concept of continuous optimization and it can actually be quite interesting. That's how I see the division: small companies invent and experiment, large ones scale and optimize, both are critical.
Maursault 3y ago
> the 17-acre Willard Farm This is a very small farm even for family farm-sizes. Article does not mention if it was once larger, but I have a suspicion that it was. > “Today, the cost of producing anything is way out of line,” Paul tells Harasimowicz. “A dollar gets spent almost before you earn it because of the cost of pesticides, diesel fuel, labor, insurance—everything has gone up. You can only get so much for a tomato.” At 17 acres, the farm would not be able to take advantage of economies of scale the way a one man show of, say, 530 acres would. My friend, a farmer that left his family farm (of about 5000 acres now) after decades to become an accountant (due to the toxic behavior of the uneducated and entitled next generation, Millennials fwiw, not insolvency) was just talking to me about smaller 1000 acre farms around his family's farm that "were basically one-man shows," that they would hire seasonal help only during harvest, and the reason they were not wealthy (they're not unsuccessful though) had nothing to do with farming, per se, instead poor crop choices and bad timing in planting.
- Infernal 3y ago
  The author states that a nearby historical building was on what used to be Willard land. It’s likely that what remains is a very small fragment of the original whole.
  - Maursault 3y ago
    That was my feeling, but thanks for spotting the evidence.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  I really want to know why entitled and toxic millennials forced your friend off his farm and into accounting…
  - fundad 3y ago
    That's easy, he hated being a boss and probably underpaid the farmhands.
  - jacobsenscott 3y ago
mikewarot 3y ago
There goes another possible experiment in regenerative agriculture, the only sustainable way for our great-grandchildren to avoid mass starvation. Industrial farming depends on oil as a chemical input, because the soil has been sterilized and turned into dirt in most places by ammonia based fertilizers. The process of tilling the land resulted in most of the remaining dirt being eroded over the past century. We're going to run out of oil. I know that's a minority opinion here, but the facts will bear it out over time. Without that oil to turn into fertilizer, the only other chance is to have ruminants actively managed on a regenerative farm growing both meat and produce. Doing so would build soil, capturing and fixing large amounts of carbon in the process, improving drought resistance (through improved ability to hold water without runoff, and reduced ground temperature and evaporation due to cover crops).
- cm2012 3y ago
  Scientists will figure it out. Much more likely than everyone switching to artisan, labor intensive farms.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Or, like many things, the labor intensive parts will be automated by ever more autonomous farm devices allowing more biologic processes to grow food and less chemical intervention. The cost an autonomous drone that uses electricity to zap pests and weeds, charged off panels in the fields, over time will be significantly less than applying mass amounts of synthetic chemicals over a large surface area. The biological processes that yield soil are very efficient and essentially free at extreme scales, so long as the labor isn’t so expensive. And I think most people are wagering on automation taking over an awful lot of tasks. There have been plenty of HN postings of companies proving the basic techniques out, which work but are too expensive today. That will change. I think this is more likely than vertical farming or that we can continue to blast the environment with chemicals that interfere with fundamental biological processes at extreme scales.
- nordsieck 3y ago
  > Without that oil to turn into fertilizer, the only other chance is to have ruminants actively managed on a regenerative farm growing both meat and produce. False dilema. There are probably more options, but one that immediately comes to mind is that we could synthesize petroleum from the atmosphere. It'd probably be the only sensible way to do long-range air travel in your scenario anyhow.
jmyeet 3y ago
Here's what I find funny: many of the people who extoll the virtues of capitalism also bemoan the death of small businesses and family farms. Or at least they pay it lip service. Why is this funny? Because small businesses and family farms are inherently more socialist than capitalist. Why? Because it is closer to owning the means of production and capturing the excess value of labor by those who are, well, laboring. These are socialist principles. Many (including in these comments) will repeat the propaganda that small farms (or businesses) can't survive. Yet farmer's markets, which many people like, can offer better prices and products than those that come out of agribusiness and go through distribution chains to end up on supermarket shelves. Again, the value has simply shifted to many layers of capital owners instead of the farmers. This is a myth because it's been artificially created. Agribusiness is predatory in nature. Things like seeds are now a subscriptio model. Modern farm equipment often can't be repaired. It requires another predatory subscription. Yet, those large agricultural conglomerates also operate their own farms and don't have to pay those predatory prices.
- randomdata 3y ago
  > Why is this funny? Because small businesses and family farms are inherently more socialist than capitalist. Why? Because it is closer to owning the means of production and capturing the excess value of labor by those who are, well, laboring. These are socialist principles. But why is it funny? You're not wrong that family farms are socialist in nature. Farmers have traditionally, at least here in Canada, even been socialist in political view. Our socialized healthcare system, for example, was a product of the work of farmers. The NDP, our closest answer to a socialist party, was born out of the older United Farmers party. Bemoaning the death of that socialist legacy is like bemoaning the disposal of an Apple II, Commodore 64, or whatever legacy computer system is to your fancy. Being sad to see that history go isn't at odds with extolling the virtues of our modern technology, nor is it unusual to have a place in one's heart for the past while also embracing the present.
- jkepler 3y ago
  I'm not sure how you can say that an owner-operated family farm is socialist. The family owns the capital in the farm, and profits from its use. That's pretty capitalistic. What seems far more socialist is the crony capitalism of large agro-business that prices small, family-owned capitalist farmers out of the market by taking taxpayer-funded federal subsidies and using them to capture regulators and buy out their competition.
harshaw 3y ago
This farm is in Harvard MA - e.g the exurbs of Boston. Harvard is one of these communities that has large minimum lot sizes and restrictions on commercial property so it retains its rural feel. It's pretty, possibly not the best use of property in Boston these days, kinda snooty, and is certainly not a cheap place to run a family farm. A couple towns south where I live there are many active small farms. They either specialize in CSAs or have farmstands that sell a mix of their own produce and imported (e.g California) produce. It certainly is possible to farm - but you have to adapt to the times I guess. My family also has a large commercial dairy farm in upstate NY. Very different farm then when I was growing up. Went from milking 70 cows to 1100+. From what my cousin's say - the only way is to go big or go home.
- fundad 3y ago
  That close to Boston, they have an 8-figure net worth. That must be why they can't hire help and want to hold onto the land to bequeath to their daughter.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Harvard isn't particularly close to Boston. It's 25-30 miles outside of Boston and outside of even I-495, the outer loop highway encircling Boston. (Still River, where the farm is, is on the far end of Harvard.) Article says they used to farm two fields they owned and three they leased and have backing away from some of the leased land. From a quick search (unverified/fact-checked), it looks like it's a <20 acres of owned farmland, which would fetch close to $3M in all likelihood. Add $1M for buildings and equipment and, assuming no debt, it's a modest 7-figure estate, seemingly split two ways. Many regular employees on this board have more in investments than each of the owners of this farm and didn't have to farm for 60 years to get there.
    - oh_sigh 3y ago
      The farmers didn't need to farm for 60 years either, if they just let land till I follow, it would still be worth just as much to a developer.
crtified 3y ago
Low wage industries struggle in high wage countries. Globalization displaces natural local supply and demand outcomes. The above two factors result in some very complex status quos. For example, take the country of New Zealand, whose significant apple growing industry is largely for export purposes - ostensibly, sending good fresh highly-valued NZ apples to other countries, where they'll fetch max $. Problem: apple workers are minimum wage jobs. Over recent decades, the minimum wage in NZ has risen by a great deal more than the price of apples has. Profitability slumped. The powerful industry, rather than cede ground or change crops, instead loudly complained and politically lobbied to have special conditions put in place for their industry: since 2007, they can 'temporarily import' hundreds of foreign labourers from the islands of Tonga and similar - a special workforce of large muscled young men for whom any NZ wage is a fortune back home, and to whom the powerful orchardists and their cronies are like little gods. The natural local market forces that-would-be are being manipulated for commercial purposes, with significant and complex environmental, economic, and cultural side effects. Whose fault is it? What should we do instead?
- golergka 3y ago
  Fault? The situation with apple producers you just described looks like a win-win situation both for consumers and immigrants. The only ones losing are New Zealand workers, but from all invoked groups, they're the only citizens who could theoretically vote out these politicians.
  - crtified 3y ago
    I acknowledge that win/loss is arguable. It invokes ethical cans of worms that I'm reluctant to open here. In theory, the dominant demographic at HN are from affluent countries, so the maxim that there are endless folk from poorer countries who'd be willing to come and do our work for a lot less - could apply to most of us, in similar fashion. Would we call that 'a win'? Highly subjective, obviously. And dependent upon other factors such as opportunity cost, the question 'is there something economically better we could be doing instead'? I suppose my point could be construed as highlighting the significant factors of power and inertia in regulatory systems, as pertaining to environmental and economic setups. Regarding your point about Voting Out - it assumes that the major political parties differ in their stance on this one matter. If both/all are subject to the same lobbying, then whichever is elected will see the status quo remain.
jschveibinz 3y ago
I’ll suggest that farmland is even older, like thousands of years old, and it belonged to other people who lived there before Europeans showed up. So it’s important to keep that in the conversation.
- linksnapzz 3y ago
  The land has been above-water since the middle Triassic. So yes, much older than thousands. The most recent non-European owners didn't leave much in the way of title (they took possession of it by conquest); so it is important to keep that in the conversation.
itissid 3y ago
I was reading Matt Levine commenting on how the oil industry would have to figure out how to get "out" while making wild profits as recent as this year. It sounds poetic: the elements of man's destruction and food salvation are both rended from earth and yet both might end up being undoable, on almost the same time scales of technological evolution.
vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago
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pentagrama 3y ago
If you feel moved by this story, I am going to recommend the Spanish movie Alcarràs. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcarr%C3%A0s_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcarr%C3%A0s_(film) Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av7xGRiXe0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av7xGRiXe0M
photochemsyn 3y ago
This 17-acre farm was enough to keep about eight humans alive if it had been the sole source of agricultural production to feed them. That's the fundamental equation, and it generally assumes a vegan diet as well. Nobody has ever been able to reduce this value, it's related to the solar input and the ability of plants to capture carbon into a human-digestible energy source. It'll be worse on Mars, of course, due to the reduced intensity of sunlight.
- gknapp 3y ago
  I'm not quite sure where you got that figure from, but some quick research cites numbers vary between 0.1 and 1.2 acres per person. In any event, 17 acres could theoretically supply food for an enormous range from 15 to 170 people, depending on how intensively it's farmed. [1] 4000 sq ft bio-intensive farming (http://www.growbiointensive.org/ http://www.growbiointensive.org/) [2] 0.44 acres permaculturism (https://permaculturism.com/how-much-land-does-it-take-to-feed-one-person https://permaculturism.com/how-much-land-does-it-take-to-fee...) [3] 1.2 from a 1994 study (and further discussion in this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1aozn1/how_much_land_does_it_take_to_support_one_human/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1aozn1/how_much...)
- somenameforme 3y ago
  China has around 330 million acres of farmland and, until relatively recently, they were a net food exporter with a population of 1.4 billion. That's around 4 people fed per acre, and that's not especially remarkable. Even urban homesteads are also able to match this. Here's [1] a heavily commercialized one that is/was operating on a fifth of an acre for a family of four. And meat also provides an excellent nutrient:calorie ratio with extremely low upkeep. You can sustain around 50 free range chickens per acre, and they're ready for harvest in 6 weeks. That's more than a whole chicken per day, on a single acre. If you want to get real crazy you can also get into things like vertical farming/aquaponics [2] and more, where the densities are limited really only by cost. Though on the still very reasonable end, you can do things like potato boxes where you can get hundreds of pounds of potatoes in tens of square feet. [1] - https://www.urbanhomestead.org/ https://www.urbanhomestead.org/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming
Incipient 3y ago
Family grown, wholesome produce is a great product, and definitely just better than mass produced. However, as furniture, building, etc has all shown...people just want cheaper and easier. Is the family farm just a victim of our move to mass production?
- cujaneway 3y ago
  The majority of people don't just want for cheaper goods, it's a necessity.
chevman 3y ago
If you find this story interesting, I would encourage you to travel to central and south america. There are farms there with 1,000+ year traceable, verifiable histories.
- Nicholas_C 3y ago
  Source? Sounds interesting.
jessmartin 3y ago
Wendell. Appropriate name, given the situation. Wendell Berry has written beautifully on this subject, in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Highly recommended, if you want to dive into the nuance and heartbreak. Suffice to say the situation is complex and irreducible and does not yield to armchair quarterbacking.
nn3 3y ago
So all the trillion+ of the farm bill are going somewhere else?
tlear 3y ago
There is a lot of discussion about prices, weather etc. but the key here is that their family died out. Being 80 and 74 and the only ones running the farm..
- SenHeng 3y ago
  The young don't want to farm. My neighbour is 84, his children in their 40s and 50s. They moved to a small regional town to work in factories. Same story for the several other farmers in this area. He has offered to let me use the land for free. I moved here for the scenic views. I don't want to farm. There's over 10,000 square metres of farm land right outside my window growing weeds as I sit here in climate controlled comfort in a HM chair, typing away. edit: math is hard
- ricardo_nh 3y ago
  The same is happening in many places in Europe: young people are leaving rural areas and the only ones left to tend the farms are the elderly who eventually give up and sell their land to a big company. There is a huge lack of incentives for young people to stay in the farming business, or just to live in the countryside
frank_bb 3y ago
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sgt 3y ago
> The question of what will become of the farm is a very complicated and painful one for Eleanor. They are an academic and a writer, and their family wants them to pursue their passions. Eleanor has no interest in farming themself, but they don’t want to see the farm disappear. They now live in New York State and miss home all the time. The family wants to hold on to the property, if at all possible, so they can live out their days here and leave it for Eleanor to do with it as they wish. This is getting pretty old. Is it one person or several? Confusing readers just to be politically correct is not surprising coming from Smithsonian Magazine, but I just can't help rolling my eyes at this nonsense.
- joseph_grobbles 3y ago
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- klodolph 3y ago
  These things only become familiar with continued usage. Give it time.
  - aintgonnatakeit 3y ago
    It may become familiar, but it is no less confusing. I had to read that paragraph several times to understand who “they” were.
    - klodolph 3y ago
      Yeah, you have to give it time. That said, the particular paragraph has some problems with antecedents. It could equally have those same problems if you were using other pronouns, like he, she, or it.
      - boringg 3y ago
        It would seem that if there was another word that was gender neutral and that people like to use instead of they would reduce the plural confusion reading problem. I realize that isn’t likely to happen but would solve the technical issue.
ThorsBane 3y ago
Could investing in more automation keep this legacy going? Also, huge thanks to Smithsonian Mag for writing a quality piece on something this important and beautiful. Very amazing legacy and photos and writing to capture. It causes me to consider a subscription or at least an account. More content like this in general would not be reproducible by AI for a long time yet - not until AI can walk and are indistinguishable from humans. The media organizations that scale into the future and take the existing market share are going to be the ones that invest in deep relationships with communities and bringing quality stories like this to light.
giantg2 3y ago
This really isn't anything new - costs and lack of scale forcing out small farmers has been going on forever.

220 points by ilamont 3y ago

It’s important to remember that this was a specific policy decision. Earl Butz[1] famously said to our farmers “Get big or get out”. I don’t have the background or inclination to prove it but my conviction is the death of the small town, and the ancillary costs like the meth and opioid epidemics can be traced directly to the “fence row to fence row” approach he pushed forward and still exists today. [later] thanks nickt for pointing out I left off the footnote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz

nickt 3y ago
[1] Earl Butz - Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (1971 - 1976) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz
toomuchtodo 3y ago
How much farming do you need if you cut out biofuels and some feed corn for industrial scale meat production? Lots of poor ag policy decisions over the last century, but also I think a a bit of make work in certain circumstances. When speaking to opponents of utility scale solar on vast tracts of farmland, you see this when they’re upset about the land no longer being used to farm, but the farmer can make more from solar or wind than farming. Lots of emotion from tradition and history to make peace with. Change is the only constant, and everything dies eventually.
msla 3y ago
The death of the small town seems like it was fore-ordained by simple economics. In big cities, you can afford to have businesses like restaurants that aren't Sysco retail outlets, movie theaters that show more than the five most popular films on Earth at the moment, libraries that have books beyond romance novels, bestsellers, and out-of-date nonfiction. Moreover, cities are the economic drivers, even in the agricultural world: https://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html https://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html > But don't cities arise from and depend on agriculture? No: all economic progress originates in cities, [Jane] Jacobs tells us; and cheekily adds that all agricultural progress originates in cities. Great advances, such as mechanical reapers and electricity, were invented and adopted in or near cities before being applied to agricultural regions farther out. Productivity improvements in agriculture always begin near the cities and spread out. > What we think of as purely rural activities often began in the cities. In premodern Europe, the quintessential cottage industry was weaving; but before cloth was woven in cottages the art was rediscovered and practiced in cities. Dark Ages peasants lived on gruel; the art of breadmaking was recovered first in cities (and based on city-grown bread; a medieval city had its own fields). In our own rural areas there are vast ranches where animals are fattened before slaughter; they are transplants from the city stockyards of Kansas City and Chicago. > Driving the nail in the coffin of the spontaneous generation of cities from farmland, Jacobs describes the inability of Ireland to turn itself around after the disastrous famines of the 1840s: >> There were no ports to receive relief food... There were no mills for grinding relief grain. There were no mechanics or tools and equipment to build mills. There were no ovens for baking bread. There were no ways to spread information about how to grow crops other than potatoes. There was no way to distribute the seeds of other crops, nor to supply the farm tools that were indispensable for a change of crops... >> To be sure, the Irish had reached this pass because they were held in an iron economic and social subjection. But the very core of that subjection-- and the reason why it was so effective and had rendered them so helpless-- was the systematic suppression of city industry, the same suppression in principle that the English had unsuccessfully tried to enforce upon industry in the little cities of the American colonies. > Closer to home, here's a report from one Henry Grady, speaking in 1880 about a funeral in Pickens Co. Georgia, some years before. >> The grave was dug through solid marble, but the marble headstone came from Vermont. It was in a pine wilderness but the pine coffin came from Cincinnati. An iron mountain over-shadowed it but the coffin nails and the screws and the shovel came from Pittsburgh. With hard wood and metal abounding, the corpse was hauled on a wagon from South Bend, Indiana. A hickory grove grew near by, but the pick and shovel handles came from New York. The cotton shirt on the dead man came from Cincinnati, the coat and breeches from Chicago, the shoes from Boston; the folded hands were encased in white gloves from New York... That country, so rich in undeveloped resources, furnished nothing for the funeral except the corpse and the hole in the ground and would probably have imported both of those if it could have done so. > Grady is eloquently describing the circumstances of a passive economic region: despite all its resources, it makes nothing. So blaming it all on Nixon, which has an obvious appeal I admit, is a bit ahistorical.
- throwway120385 3y ago
  I understand that these quotes are poignant symbols of how dependent rural areas are on cities, but you can't expect to base an argument about economic change on some quotes that you liked from books.
  - msla 3y ago
    Do you have anything to add?
- kasey_junk 3y ago
  Again, I have no business commenting on this as I have no idea what I’m talking about. But it’s striking driving through WI and MI vs IN, IL and IA. In the former, where the agriculture is dominated by less commodity agriculture (dairy & fruit) small towns exist and thrive. In the latter dominated by the most commoditized crops in the world (feed corn & soy) they don’t.
  - maxerickson 3y ago
    Lots of timber industry in Wisconsin and Michigan. The paper mill in my town directly supports several hundred jobs (like the on site jobs) and is a gaping maw consuming wood fiber from the region. (several hundred jobs doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a big deal in a small town) Oh oops: It's not several hundred on site, it's ~1,000.
  - JackFr 3y ago
    You can store grain 10 years. You cannot store milk or fruit (even with the best inert gas refrigeration) more than a year at most without noticeable degradation. That has significant implications.
frogblast 3y ago
Did he make that true via policy changes, or was it an astute observation of what was going to be true given economic realities?

m463 3y ago

This is sort of sad, because - 350 years! I think the other side of the coin is the places stagnation and outright decay have set in, like many inner cities or rustbelt regions that have not thrived. The opposite would be places like tokyo where everything is turned over rapidly and the new is ousted to be almost immediately replaced by the newer and newest.

thelastparadise 3y ago
It's interesting to see that the same thing has been happening on the other side of the Atlantic. I grew up in a farming community in County Clare, Ireland (~1980 - 1999) and many farms there have been abandoned due to the low returns from agriculture.
- rgmerk 3y ago
  The same thing has been happening pretty much everywhere in the world for a century.
samstave 3y ago
Thanks for introducing me to that concept, enjoyed that. We need a new New Deal w/ UBI and just invest in ourselves.
bredren 3y ago
The length of its existence is interesting, but by todays standards, the farm may have been just as unsustainable as it was at its onset. Notably, the Smithsonian article only asks about recent changes affecting the farm. Slavery was common in Massachusetts through 1700s. If the farm was made sustainable through slave labor in its first 100 years, it would have avoided the same concerns that the article says are doing it in now: dependable and low cost labor.
- ROTMetro 3y ago
  My Scottish male ancestors were forcibly shipped to Massachusetts and made to do forced labour when they lost the civil war to the English. Because they were prisoners of war they were not allowed to bring their families with them.

dauertewigkeit 3y ago

From an economic standpoint, there is no sense in small scale farming. From a personal standpoint, the sensible thing to do is to scale it down to subsistence gardening for yourself and your family. That is what my family does. I remember, when I was still young, they still used to sell some produce. Nowadays it is entirely consumed by the family or gifted out. The benefit of this, is that you are free from economic demand. You grow whatever you please, because you want to have it at the dinner table.

flerovium 3y ago
Is that true? Small farms benefit from greater attention and incentives of their owners.
zwieback 3y ago
That and maybe specialty farms. Where I live you can't throw a rock without hitting a small farm or nursery that does very specific things and they seem to do okay in their niches.
randomdata 3y ago
> From an economic standpoint, there is no sense in small scale farming. So long as there is residual value in the "hand-me-down" equipment, there will be economic value in operating it. At the same time it is not economically sensible for large scale farming to continue to operate old and outdated equipment, so the smaller scale farm actually fills a useful role in the economy.
- flangola7 3y ago
  Are there really that many innovations in how to harvest a wheat field?
  - btilly 3y ago
    Yes. https://www.geoforce.com/how-can-gps-be-used-in-precision-farming/ https://www.geoforce.com/how-can-gps-be-used-in-precision-fa... https://wheatfoundation.org/innovation-to-feed-the-future-a-case-for-biotech-use-in-wheat/ https://wheatfoundation.org/innovation-to-feed-the-future-a-... https://www.corteva.us/Resources/graininnovations/grain-innovations-library.html https://www.corteva.us/Resources/graininnovations/grain-inno... And a whole lot more.

zwieback 3y ago

It's hard to support the idea of inefficient farming just out of pure nostalgia but I think there's something else lost when these small family farms die out. I imagine large commercial farms aren't going to experiment as much or adapt to changing conditions.

SoftTalker 3y ago
They aren't going to take any chances on growing unusual crops, perhaps. But big farm operations are constantly experimenting to improve yields and reduce expenses.
- zwieback 3y ago
  Yes, definitely. Working on a mature product in a big corporation I'm very familiar with the concept of continuous optimization and it can actually be quite interesting. That's how I see the division: small companies invent and experiment, large ones scale and optimize, both are critical.

Maursault 3y ago

> the 17-acre Willard Farm This is a very small farm even for family farm-sizes. Article does not mention if it was once larger, but I have a suspicion that it was. > “Today, the cost of producing anything is way out of line,” Paul tells Harasimowicz. “A dollar gets spent almost before you earn it because of the cost of pesticides, diesel fuel, labor, insurance—everything has gone up. You can only get so much for a tomato.” At 17 acres, the farm would not be able to take advantage of economies of scale the way a one man show of, say, 530 acres would. My friend, a farmer that left his family farm (of about 5000 acres now) after decades to become an accountant (due to the toxic behavior of the uneducated and entitled next generation, Millennials fwiw, not insolvency) was just talking to me about smaller 1000 acre farms around his family's farm that "were basically one-man shows," that they would hire seasonal help only during harvest, and the reason they were not wealthy (they're not unsuccessful though) had nothing to do with farming, per se, instead poor crop choices and bad timing in planting.

Infernal 3y ago
The author states that a nearby historical building was on what used to be Willard land. It’s likely that what remains is a very small fragment of the original whole.
- Maursault 3y ago
  That was my feeling, but thanks for spotting the evidence.
tsunamifury 3y ago
I really want to know why entitled and toxic millennials forced your friend off his farm and into accounting…
- fundad 3y ago
  That's easy, he hated being a boss and probably underpaid the farmhands.
- jacobsenscott 3y ago

mikewarot 3y ago

There goes another possible experiment in regenerative agriculture, the only sustainable way for our great-grandchildren to avoid mass starvation. Industrial farming depends on oil as a chemical input, because the soil has been sterilized and turned into dirt in most places by ammonia based fertilizers. The process of tilling the land resulted in most of the remaining dirt being eroded over the past century. We're going to run out of oil. I know that's a minority opinion here, but the facts will bear it out over time. Without that oil to turn into fertilizer, the only other chance is to have ruminants actively managed on a regenerative farm growing both meat and produce. Doing so would build soil, capturing and fixing large amounts of carbon in the process, improving drought resistance (through improved ability to hold water without runoff, and reduced ground temperature and evaporation due to cover crops).

cm2012 3y ago
Scientists will figure it out. Much more likely than everyone switching to artisan, labor intensive farms.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Or, like many things, the labor intensive parts will be automated by ever more autonomous farm devices allowing more biologic processes to grow food and less chemical intervention. The cost an autonomous drone that uses electricity to zap pests and weeds, charged off panels in the fields, over time will be significantly less than applying mass amounts of synthetic chemicals over a large surface area. The biological processes that yield soil are very efficient and essentially free at extreme scales, so long as the labor isn’t so expensive. And I think most people are wagering on automation taking over an awful lot of tasks. There have been plenty of HN postings of companies proving the basic techniques out, which work but are too expensive today. That will change. I think this is more likely than vertical farming or that we can continue to blast the environment with chemicals that interfere with fundamental biological processes at extreme scales.
nordsieck 3y ago
> Without that oil to turn into fertilizer, the only other chance is to have ruminants actively managed on a regenerative farm growing both meat and produce. False dilema. There are probably more options, but one that immediately comes to mind is that we could synthesize petroleum from the atmosphere. It'd probably be the only sensible way to do long-range air travel in your scenario anyhow.

jmyeet 3y ago

Here's what I find funny: many of the people who extoll the virtues of capitalism also bemoan the death of small businesses and family farms. Or at least they pay it lip service. Why is this funny? Because small businesses and family farms are inherently more socialist than capitalist. Why? Because it is closer to owning the means of production and capturing the excess value of labor by those who are, well, laboring. These are socialist principles. Many (including in these comments) will repeat the propaganda that small farms (or businesses) can't survive. Yet farmer's markets, which many people like, can offer better prices and products than those that come out of agribusiness and go through distribution chains to end up on supermarket shelves. Again, the value has simply shifted to many layers of capital owners instead of the farmers. This is a myth because it's been artificially created. Agribusiness is predatory in nature. Things like seeds are now a subscriptio model. Modern farm equipment often can't be repaired. It requires another predatory subscription. Yet, those large agricultural conglomerates also operate their own farms and don't have to pay those predatory prices.

randomdata 3y ago
> Why is this funny? Because small businesses and family farms are inherently more socialist than capitalist. Why? Because it is closer to owning the means of production and capturing the excess value of labor by those who are, well, laboring. These are socialist principles. But why is it funny? You're not wrong that family farms are socialist in nature. Farmers have traditionally, at least here in Canada, even been socialist in political view. Our socialized healthcare system, for example, was a product of the work of farmers. The NDP, our closest answer to a socialist party, was born out of the older United Farmers party. Bemoaning the death of that socialist legacy is like bemoaning the disposal of an Apple II, Commodore 64, or whatever legacy computer system is to your fancy. Being sad to see that history go isn't at odds with extolling the virtues of our modern technology, nor is it unusual to have a place in one's heart for the past while also embracing the present.
jkepler 3y ago
I'm not sure how you can say that an owner-operated family farm is socialist. The family owns the capital in the farm, and profits from its use. That's pretty capitalistic. What seems far more socialist is the crony capitalism of large agro-business that prices small, family-owned capitalist farmers out of the market by taking taxpayer-funded federal subsidies and using them to capture regulators and buy out their competition.

harshaw 3y ago

This farm is in Harvard MA - e.g the exurbs of Boston. Harvard is one of these communities that has large minimum lot sizes and restrictions on commercial property so it retains its rural feel. It's pretty, possibly not the best use of property in Boston these days, kinda snooty, and is certainly not a cheap place to run a family farm. A couple towns south where I live there are many active small farms. They either specialize in CSAs or have farmstands that sell a mix of their own produce and imported (e.g California) produce. It certainly is possible to farm - but you have to adapt to the times I guess. My family also has a large commercial dairy farm in upstate NY. Very different farm then when I was growing up. Went from milking 70 cows to 1100+. From what my cousin's say - the only way is to go big or go home.

fundad 3y ago
That close to Boston, they have an 8-figure net worth. That must be why they can't hire help and want to hold onto the land to bequeath to their daughter.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Harvard isn't particularly close to Boston. It's 25-30 miles outside of Boston and outside of even I-495, the outer loop highway encircling Boston. (Still River, where the farm is, is on the far end of Harvard.) Article says they used to farm two fields they owned and three they leased and have backing away from some of the leased land. From a quick search (unverified/fact-checked), it looks like it's a <20 acres of owned farmland, which would fetch close to $3M in all likelihood. Add $1M for buildings and equipment and, assuming no debt, it's a modest 7-figure estate, seemingly split two ways. Many regular employees on this board have more in investments than each of the owners of this farm and didn't have to farm for 60 years to get there.
  - oh_sigh 3y ago
    The farmers didn't need to farm for 60 years either, if they just let land till I follow, it would still be worth just as much to a developer.

crtified 3y ago

Low wage industries struggle in high wage countries. Globalization displaces natural local supply and demand outcomes. The above two factors result in some very complex status quos. For example, take the country of New Zealand, whose significant apple growing industry is largely for export purposes - ostensibly, sending good fresh highly-valued NZ apples to other countries, where they'll fetch max $. Problem: apple workers are minimum wage jobs. Over recent decades, the minimum wage in NZ has risen by a great deal more than the price of apples has. Profitability slumped. The powerful industry, rather than cede ground or change crops, instead loudly complained and politically lobbied to have special conditions put in place for their industry: since 2007, they can 'temporarily import' hundreds of foreign labourers from the islands of Tonga and similar - a special workforce of large muscled young men for whom any NZ wage is a fortune back home, and to whom the powerful orchardists and their cronies are like little gods. The natural local market forces that-would-be are being manipulated for commercial purposes, with significant and complex environmental, economic, and cultural side effects. Whose fault is it? What should we do instead?

golergka 3y ago
Fault? The situation with apple producers you just described looks like a win-win situation both for consumers and immigrants. The only ones losing are New Zealand workers, but from all invoked groups, they're the only citizens who could theoretically vote out these politicians.
- crtified 3y ago
  I acknowledge that win/loss is arguable. It invokes ethical cans of worms that I'm reluctant to open here. In theory, the dominant demographic at HN are from affluent countries, so the maxim that there are endless folk from poorer countries who'd be willing to come and do our work for a lot less - could apply to most of us, in similar fashion. Would we call that 'a win'? Highly subjective, obviously. And dependent upon other factors such as opportunity cost, the question 'is there something economically better we could be doing instead'? I suppose my point could be construed as highlighting the significant factors of power and inertia in regulatory systems, as pertaining to environmental and economic setups. Regarding your point about Voting Out - it assumes that the major political parties differ in their stance on this one matter. If both/all are subject to the same lobbying, then whichever is elected will see the status quo remain.

jschveibinz 3y ago

I’ll suggest that farmland is even older, like thousands of years old, and it belonged to other people who lived there before Europeans showed up. So it’s important to keep that in the conversation.

linksnapzz 3y ago
The land has been above-water since the middle Triassic. So yes, much older than thousands. The most recent non-European owners didn't leave much in the way of title (they took possession of it by conquest); so it is important to keep that in the conversation.

itissid 3y ago

I was reading Matt Levine commenting on how the oil industry would have to figure out how to get "out" while making wild profits as recent as this year. It sounds poetic: the elements of man's destruction and food salvation are both rended from earth and yet both might end up being undoable, on almost the same time scales of technological evolution.

vrglvrglvrgl 3y ago

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pentagrama 3y ago

If you feel moved by this story, I am going to recommend the Spanish movie Alcarràs. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcarr%C3%A0s_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcarr%C3%A0s_(film) Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av7xGRiXe0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av7xGRiXe0M

photochemsyn 3y ago

This 17-acre farm was enough to keep about eight humans alive if it had been the sole source of agricultural production to feed them. That's the fundamental equation, and it generally assumes a vegan diet as well. Nobody has ever been able to reduce this value, it's related to the solar input and the ability of plants to capture carbon into a human-digestible energy source. It'll be worse on Mars, of course, due to the reduced intensity of sunlight.

gknapp 3y ago
I'm not quite sure where you got that figure from, but some quick research cites numbers vary between 0.1 and 1.2 acres per person. In any event, 17 acres could theoretically supply food for an enormous range from 15 to 170 people, depending on how intensively it's farmed. [1] 4000 sq ft bio-intensive farming (http://www.growbiointensive.org/ http://www.growbiointensive.org/) [2] 0.44 acres permaculturism (https://permaculturism.com/how-much-land-does-it-take-to-feed-one-person https://permaculturism.com/how-much-land-does-it-take-to-fee...) [3] 1.2 from a 1994 study (and further discussion in this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1aozn1/how_much_land_does_it_take_to_support_one_human/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1aozn1/how_much...)
somenameforme 3y ago
China has around 330 million acres of farmland and, until relatively recently, they were a net food exporter with a population of 1.4 billion. That's around 4 people fed per acre, and that's not especially remarkable. Even urban homesteads are also able to match this. Here's [1] a heavily commercialized one that is/was operating on a fifth of an acre for a family of four. And meat also provides an excellent nutrient:calorie ratio with extremely low upkeep. You can sustain around 50 free range chickens per acre, and they're ready for harvest in 6 weeks. That's more than a whole chicken per day, on a single acre. If you want to get real crazy you can also get into things like vertical farming/aquaponics [2] and more, where the densities are limited really only by cost. Though on the still very reasonable end, you can do things like potato boxes where you can get hundreds of pounds of potatoes in tens of square feet. [1] - https://www.urbanhomestead.org/ https://www.urbanhomestead.org/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming

Incipient 3y ago

Family grown, wholesome produce is a great product, and definitely just better than mass produced. However, as furniture, building, etc has all shown...people just want cheaper and easier. Is the family farm just a victim of our move to mass production?

cujaneway 3y ago
The majority of people don't just want for cheaper goods, it's a necessity.

chevman 3y ago

If you find this story interesting, I would encourage you to travel to central and south america. There are farms there with 1,000+ year traceable, verifiable histories.

Nicholas_C 3y ago
Source? Sounds interesting.

jessmartin 3y ago

Wendell. Appropriate name, given the situation. Wendell Berry has written beautifully on this subject, in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Highly recommended, if you want to dive into the nuance and heartbreak. Suffice to say the situation is complex and irreducible and does not yield to armchair quarterbacking.

nn3 3y ago

So all the trillion+ of the farm bill are going somewhere else?

tlear 3y ago

There is a lot of discussion about prices, weather etc. but the key here is that their family died out. Being 80 and 74 and the only ones running the farm..

SenHeng 3y ago
The young don't want to farm. My neighbour is 84, his children in their 40s and 50s. They moved to a small regional town to work in factories. Same story for the several other farmers in this area. He has offered to let me use the land for free. I moved here for the scenic views. I don't want to farm. There's over 10,000 square metres of farm land right outside my window growing weeds as I sit here in climate controlled comfort in a HM chair, typing away. edit: math is hard
ricardo_nh 3y ago
The same is happening in many places in Europe: young people are leaving rural areas and the only ones left to tend the farms are the elderly who eventually give up and sell their land to a big company. There is a huge lack of incentives for young people to stay in the farming business, or just to live in the countryside

frank_bb 3y ago

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sgt 3y ago

> The question of what will become of the farm is a very complicated and painful one for Eleanor. They are an academic and a writer, and their family wants them to pursue their passions. Eleanor has no interest in farming themself, but they don’t want to see the farm disappear. They now live in New York State and miss home all the time. The family wants to hold on to the property, if at all possible, so they can live out their days here and leave it for Eleanor to do with it as they wish. This is getting pretty old. Is it one person or several? Confusing readers just to be politically correct is not surprising coming from Smithsonian Magazine, but I just can't help rolling my eyes at this nonsense.

joseph_grobbles 3y ago
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klodolph 3y ago
These things only become familiar with continued usage. Give it time.
- aintgonnatakeit 3y ago
  It may become familiar, but it is no less confusing. I had to read that paragraph several times to understand who “they” were.
  - klodolph 3y ago
    Yeah, you have to give it time. That said, the particular paragraph has some problems with antecedents. It could equally have those same problems if you were using other pronouns, like he, she, or it.
    - boringg 3y ago
      It would seem that if there was another word that was gender neutral and that people like to use instead of they would reduce the plural confusion reading problem. I realize that isn’t likely to happen but would solve the technical issue.

ThorsBane 3y ago

Could investing in more automation keep this legacy going? Also, huge thanks to Smithsonian Mag for writing a quality piece on something this important and beautiful. Very amazing legacy and photos and writing to capture. It causes me to consider a subscription or at least an account. More content like this in general would not be reproducible by AI for a long time yet - not until AI can walk and are indistinguishable from humans. The media organizations that scale into the future and take the existing market share are going to be the ones that invest in deep relationships with communities and bringing quality stories like this to light.

giantg2 3y ago

This really isn't anything new - costs and lack of scale forcing out small farmers has been going on forever.