5 ms·

Centralized agriculture is not necessarily more efficient compared to localized agriculture, because centralization introduces additional machinery, transport c

Centralized agriculture is not necessarily more efficient compared to localized agriculture, because centralization introduces additional machinery, transport costs, pesticide/fertilizer research/production/shipping etc etc. centralized agriculture is actually a huge resource suck compared to localized methods, which puts a huge thumb on calorie-per-acre net.

Ekaros 3y ago
How does labour costs compare? As in amount of living wage labour per calorie?
lukas099 3y ago
On the other hand, it's easy to teach a few large farmers best practices from ag and soil science. The more decentralized agriculture becomes, the more individuals have to educate themselves. Do you trust your next door neighbors to become ag scientists to be good stewards of their land?
- Calamitous 3y ago
  > Do you trust your next door neighbors to become ag scientists to be good stewards of their land? As someone who lives in a rural/agricultural area, yes.
  - circlefavshape 3y ago
    As someone else who lives in a rural/agricultural area (in Ireland), definitely not
- defrost 3y ago
  As it happens, yes. She is an ag scientist and and damned good one to by all accounts, co owner of a regional ag consulting group. For that matter the chap down on the corner is in the grain seed ANOVA business, he has thousands of test plots all over the wheat belt region. What's always happened here is that everybody multi skills - not everbody is an ag scientist, but everybody knows someone who is - ditto diesal mechanics, well borers, drone operators, tractor hackers, silo builders, etc.
- artificialLimbs 3y ago
  >> Do you trust your next door neighbors to become ag scientists to be good stewards of their land? I expect the people intending to produce good, healthy, and natural food to be more able to do so than those who follow FDA standards with the sole intention of making money.
- throwaway894345 3y ago
  The problem with industrial farming isn't an education bottleneck, it's an incentives bottleneck. Family farmers treat the land like a legacy to be passed onto their children--they don't necessarily know that they're depleting the land, and as such education is a bottleneck. But industrial farmers know they're exploiting the land to make as much money as quickly as possible. They're perfectly happy to exhaust the soil because they can make a bunch of money and still sell the depleted land for a profit later on. Educating small farmers is a big task but it's at least actionable--I have no idea how you could go about making corporations care less about profit than they do about sustainability.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    > The problem with industrial farming isn't an education bottleneck The problem of industrial farming is the education bottleneck, though. There is good reason why virtually all farms in America have remained family farms. What growth in farm sizes we've seen has been mostly on the back of machinery and other technical innovation allowing families to do more work, and not so much farms being able to hire more and more labourers. The latter has not happened in any significant way because educating farmhands about agriculture is a monumental task. And if you manage to pull it off, there is a very good chance that they will soon want to become the farmer running their own family farm!
    - throwaway894345 3y ago
      > There is good reason why virtually all farms in America have remained family farms. This is the wrong metric; we don't care about the number of farms, we care about the amount of agricultural productivity. Large scale family farms and industrial farms account for more than half of all agricultural output in the US (USDA (2021) America’s Diverse Family Farms). > What growth in farm sizes we've seen has been mostly on the back of machinery and other technical innovation allowing families to do more work, and not so much farms being able to hire more and more labourers. I agree--in fact, larger machines and more automation allows large operations to reduce labor costs in ways that smaller family farms can't compete with, which is helping to squeeze out small family farms. > The latter has not happened in any significant way because educating farmhands about agriculture is a monumental task. No, it's because farmhands don't have access to capital to buy land and equipment. Farmhands understand agriculture, moreover, even if you can buy a small farm you'll be working 80 hour weeks to break even--you have to have a large operation in order to keep your head above water (the only really viable small operations are selling prestige 'organic / locally grown / free range' foods to yuppies and even then I'd bet many of those farmers feel pretty strapped). Anyway the farmhands aren't the ones calling the shots on how the land is managed, they're shoveling shit and driving the tractor where and how they're told.
- troyvit 3y ago
  My partner got a grant to find this out.[1] It turns out that by building networks of producers who share their experiments as they try to find best practices for their specific place, time, and crops for regenrative ag actually helps them improve it for their context and make a little money. The problem with ag scientists is that they stay in universities, grow a few test crops in their own fields, then try to replicate that at scale a hundred miles away. Then they throw their hands up when the producers tell them they're full of it. On the other hand when you build real social networks of producers they can find more common ground and share stories about practices that work. It helps too because it's actually _their_ next door neighbors who don't use sustainable or regenerative practices who are coming over and telling them they're doing it wrong. IOW the isolation that comes with the decentralized ag that you're talking about is also a social isolation that makes it really hard to even experiment. [1] https://www.farmsproject.org https://www.farmsproject.org
- randomdata 3y ago
  > it's easy to teach a few large farmers best practices from ag and soil science. But much, much harder to teach their workers who actually steward the land on large farms. Farmers have some incentive to listen, but farmhands couldn't care less. They are just there to collect a paycheque. The long-term viability of the operation means nothing to them – they can always get a job somewhere else. The more decentralized farming, the more farmers, and thus more people who have reason to care and fewer people who have no reason to care.
throwaway894345 3y ago
Centralized-vs-distributed is mostly a matter of efficiencies of scale vs transportation, and efficiencies of scale almost invariably win. Pesticide/fertilizer/etc are all orthogonal (there's nothing preventing local farmers from using pesticides and fertilizer). In particular, the machinery costs per acre are lower for centralized agriculture than for distributed agriculture, but the transport costs are higher (although not as high as you might think because the costs of moving things around the country are shared broadly--not just by food producers). Besides machinery, personnel costs are much lower for centralized agriculture. There are a lot of advantages to local agriculture, but 'cost' isn't one of them. I would like to live in a world where more food is grown locally, but that means we have to solve (and not ignore) the cost problem--how do we afford the additional machinery, personnel, etc costs that are passed along in food prices without pricing out poorer people?

Ekaros 3y ago

How does labour costs compare? As in amount of living wage labour per calorie?

lukas099 3y ago

On the other hand, it's easy to teach a few large farmers best practices from ag and soil science. The more decentralized agriculture becomes, the more individuals have to educate themselves. Do you trust your next door neighbors to become ag scientists to be good stewards of their land?

Calamitous 3y ago
> Do you trust your next door neighbors to become ag scientists to be good stewards of their land? As someone who lives in a rural/agricultural area, yes.
- circlefavshape 3y ago
  As someone else who lives in a rural/agricultural area (in Ireland), definitely not
defrost 3y ago
As it happens, yes. She is an ag scientist and and damned good one to by all accounts, co owner of a regional ag consulting group. For that matter the chap down on the corner is in the grain seed ANOVA business, he has thousands of test plots all over the wheat belt region. What's always happened here is that everybody multi skills - not everbody is an ag scientist, but everybody knows someone who is - ditto diesal mechanics, well borers, drone operators, tractor hackers, silo builders, etc.
artificialLimbs 3y ago
>> Do you trust your next door neighbors to become ag scientists to be good stewards of their land? I expect the people intending to produce good, healthy, and natural food to be more able to do so than those who follow FDA standards with the sole intention of making money.
throwaway894345 3y ago
The problem with industrial farming isn't an education bottleneck, it's an incentives bottleneck. Family farmers treat the land like a legacy to be passed onto their children--they don't necessarily know that they're depleting the land, and as such education is a bottleneck. But industrial farmers know they're exploiting the land to make as much money as quickly as possible. They're perfectly happy to exhaust the soil because they can make a bunch of money and still sell the depleted land for a profit later on. Educating small farmers is a big task but it's at least actionable--I have no idea how you could go about making corporations care less about profit than they do about sustainability.
- randomdata 3y ago
  > The problem with industrial farming isn't an education bottleneck The problem of industrial farming is the education bottleneck, though. There is good reason why virtually all farms in America have remained family farms. What growth in farm sizes we've seen has been mostly on the back of machinery and other technical innovation allowing families to do more work, and not so much farms being able to hire more and more labourers. The latter has not happened in any significant way because educating farmhands about agriculture is a monumental task. And if you manage to pull it off, there is a very good chance that they will soon want to become the farmer running their own family farm!
  - throwaway894345 3y ago
    > There is good reason why virtually all farms in America have remained family farms. This is the wrong metric; we don't care about the number of farms, we care about the amount of agricultural productivity. Large scale family farms and industrial farms account for more than half of all agricultural output in the US (USDA (2021) America’s Diverse Family Farms). > What growth in farm sizes we've seen has been mostly on the back of machinery and other technical innovation allowing families to do more work, and not so much farms being able to hire more and more labourers. I agree--in fact, larger machines and more automation allows large operations to reduce labor costs in ways that smaller family farms can't compete with, which is helping to squeeze out small family farms. > The latter has not happened in any significant way because educating farmhands about agriculture is a monumental task. No, it's because farmhands don't have access to capital to buy land and equipment. Farmhands understand agriculture, moreover, even if you can buy a small farm you'll be working 80 hour weeks to break even--you have to have a large operation in order to keep your head above water (the only really viable small operations are selling prestige 'organic / locally grown / free range' foods to yuppies and even then I'd bet many of those farmers feel pretty strapped). Anyway the farmhands aren't the ones calling the shots on how the land is managed, they're shoveling shit and driving the tractor where and how they're told.
troyvit 3y ago
My partner got a grant to find this out.[1] It turns out that by building networks of producers who share their experiments as they try to find best practices for their specific place, time, and crops for regenrative ag actually helps them improve it for their context and make a little money. The problem with ag scientists is that they stay in universities, grow a few test crops in their own fields, then try to replicate that at scale a hundred miles away. Then they throw their hands up when the producers tell them they're full of it. On the other hand when you build real social networks of producers they can find more common ground and share stories about practices that work. It helps too because it's actually _their_ next door neighbors who don't use sustainable or regenerative practices who are coming over and telling them they're doing it wrong. IOW the isolation that comes with the decentralized ag that you're talking about is also a social isolation that makes it really hard to even experiment. [1] https://www.farmsproject.org https://www.farmsproject.org
randomdata 3y ago
> it's easy to teach a few large farmers best practices from ag and soil science. But much, much harder to teach their workers who actually steward the land on large farms. Farmers have some incentive to listen, but farmhands couldn't care less. They are just there to collect a paycheque. The long-term viability of the operation means nothing to them – they can always get a job somewhere else. The more decentralized farming, the more farmers, and thus more people who have reason to care and fewer people who have no reason to care.

throwaway894345 3y ago

Centralized-vs-distributed is mostly a matter of efficiencies of scale vs transportation, and efficiencies of scale almost invariably win. Pesticide/fertilizer/etc are all orthogonal (there's nothing preventing local farmers from using pesticides and fertilizer). In particular, the machinery costs per acre are lower for centralized agriculture than for distributed agriculture, but the transport costs are higher (although not as high as you might think because the costs of moving things around the country are shared broadly--not just by food producers). Besides machinery, personnel costs are much lower for centralized agriculture. There are a lot of advantages to local agriculture, but 'cost' isn't one of them. I would like to live in a world where more food is grown locally, but that means we have to solve (and not ignore) the cost problem--how do we afford the additional machinery, personnel, etc costs that are passed along in food prices without pricing out poorer people?