6 ms·

To your point, you're talking about processes that while impressive in many respects are HIGHLY labor intensive. The benefits from modern agriculture are the lo

by ch4s3 3y ago

To your point, you're talking about processes that while impressive in many respects are HIGHLY labor intensive. The benefits from modern agriculture are the low levels or required human labor and the low prices, both of which free up most people to do other things and to spend far less on food. In the not distant past most Americans spent 30+% of their income on food, which I doubt is a world many of us want to return to.

dmoy 3y ago
> In the not distant past most Americans spent 30+% of their income on food, which I doubt is a world many of us want to return to. Not only that, but as recently as like 100 years ago, 30% of people in the US were farmers (ish).
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  For that matter, it hasn't been all that long since around 90% of the people were agricultural laborers -- pretty much world-wide before the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, and in many areas of the planet, well into the 20th Century. Generally unfree laborers at that (i.e., slaves or serfs).
gdubs 3y ago
I think modern agriculture is miraculous, don't get me wrong. But we ignore the negative externalities – the cost to our health, and to ecosystems, and to the sustainability of civilization long-term. Even conventionally-minded farmers know that things like soil loss are a huge looming problem. And the labor issue is also complex – while big corn fields may be farmable via GPS-enabled, air-conditioned tractors, there's still a ton of migrant labor without which the system would cease to function. The idea behind a lot of the regenerative methods is to work with nature to reduce the need for inputs. I am a pragmatist and will tell you that, it's really hard! On this I agree. But a lot of the ideas from more fringe communities like permaculturists are becoming more and more integrated into the mainstream. I just think we need to accelerate that, and put a lot more research into alternative methods like agroforestry – because I think we all rely on a food system that's way more brittle and tenuous than people realize. One with a lot of negative externalities that we can't paper over forever.
- ch4s3 3y ago
  > the cost to our health This seems highly debatable. Sure cheap calories and cheap corn based sugars make it easy to develop so called lifestyle diseases, but on the other hand we've essentially eliminated famine and in most parts of the world malnutrition. In terms of ecosystem loss, it seems to me that concentrating most calorie production onto the smallest amount of land makes sense. > And the labor issue is also complex You're right of course, but I don't see how the manually intense process of regenerative and/or organic ag makes this better. Every small farm like this that I'm aware of makes heavy use of children, unpaid interns, and extremely low wage workers. It's not exactly comparable to migrant workers picking strawberries en-masse, but that's more of an issue of sacle and where these boutique farms find their labor IMO. I say this as someone whose parents and grandparents were all farmers, and my sister-in-law worked for a few years on a regenerative/organic farm. > But a lot of the ideas from more fringe communities like permaculturists are becoming more and more integrated into the mainstream This is the part that's actually really interesting to me. Finding ways to scale up and integrate ideas about soil health, water use, etc into mechanized, large scale agriculture is really great. People seem to be doing cool things with no-till and drip irrigation right now. > alternative methods like agroforestry My concern with this is that it definitely require LOADS of labor, and isn't likely to produce that much food. It also may put pressure on forest land may not be sustainable long term. On a small scale on you your own farm, it's probably great. But I have trouble imagining how it could ever make up a significant portion of overall fruit and nut consumption.
  - petsfed 3y ago
    >Sure cheap calories and cheap corn based sugars make it easy to develop so called lifestyle diseases, but on the other hand we've essentially eliminated famine and in most parts of the world malnutrition. I think this is letting the good be the enemy of the perfect (a rare construction, to be sure). Yes, we've solved a very bad 1st order problem. That frees us up to work on 2nd order problems that we've never had to deal with before. This is a thalidomide-style problem in that the side-effects of the "cure" are a disease in their own right. I'd rather have diabetes than be dead, certainly, but wouldn't it better to not risk diabetes just to stay alive? I'm substantially in agreement with you though. The less land we use on food production, the better. The less labor we can expend growing and harvesting that food, the better. All of that said, the parameter space of agriculture has a complicated shape, so optimizing for any one parameter will be at the expense of other parameters.
m463 3y ago
What if cheap food gets you sick in some way, or gives you cancer?
- ch4s3 3y ago
  I'm not sure what your point is.
  - m463 3y ago
    My point is that labor saving efficiency may take a hit producing healthy food. For example, if instead of fighting insects directly, everything is soaked in glyphosate, it might be too much of a compromise. In fact there are lots of these compromises that end up killing fiber, or favoring starches or processing away nutrients that makes eating a faustian bargain. I would think labor-saving solutions should try to get whole foods to the table quickly and cheaply, rather than say maximizing shelf life or storage convenience.
RangerScience 3y ago
> In the not distant past most Americans spent 30+% of their income on food, which I doubt is a world many of us want to return to. I mean - I think I understand the motivation behind that but I am pretty convinced that the value of "low-carb" / "no-carb" diets has less to do with the impact of carbs (after all, wheat literally was the symbol of European civilization for a really long time) and more to do with how they're used as cheap caloric filler (looking at you, Panda Express). Pretty much a "get what you pay for" kind of situation, in my eyes - so maybe spending that much on food isn't as bad as was thought. also, on the gripping hand, looks at cost of housing - so maybe if it's not one thing it's another.
- ch4s3 3y ago
  Even high quality food is far cheaper than it was only a generation or two ago.
  - bbojan 3y ago
    What quality are you talking about? In my 8 years in Canada I wasn't able to by decent blackberries or tomatoes. At any price.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      30 years ago (within that generation-or-two span), at least here in the parts of the US I was in around that time, blackberries and lots of other stuff were both expensive, and only available seasonally. You could get canned year-round, not fresh.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ilyt 3y ago
  I think it's mostly that this kind of food is also easily and quickly digestible which just means getting hungry earlier.
- Aerroon 3y ago
bbojan 3y ago
> In the not distant past most Americans spent 30+% of their income on food And now they spend 30% of their income on medical costs.
Phenomenit 3y ago
I wouldn’t mind spending a couple of hours a day doing physical labor instead of working in the office to guarantee that my food was made in a sustainable and safe way, heck I even think it would be good for my health.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  That is a lot harder to say after the age of 35 or 40. My social circle includes many alternative people in organic farming where I have occasionally pitched in to help, and I have also volunteered with WWOOF for food and accommodation when traveling. This kind of work, even if a mere couple of hours a day, really, really starts to suck after your knees and back begin to age. And it is not that I have given up and settled into a sedentary lifestyle – nowadays my travels are bikepacking/bicycle-touring where I do 100 km+ day after day, but that exercise is a lot easier on one’s body than the repetitive motions of farming.
- digging 3y ago
  My dream: we give up on bullshit jobs. We implement UBI. We localize the majority of our agriculture. Humans, largely freed from fake labor, work communally on their local farms, splitting up the labor so nobody has to wreck their health and finances gambling on a lettuce crop.
  - dukeyukey 3y ago
    > We localize the majority of our agriculture That means continental-scale famine. I'm not kidding - loads of countries only have the populations they have today because they can import cheap food from Europe and the Americas. Without that trade, billions starve.
    - digging 3y ago
      I'm not talking about cutting off trade overnight, though. I'm talking about building up community resources to reduce the need. But this is all very abstract anyway.
  - 3y ago
Kerrick 3y ago
2022 median household income after taxes [0] was $64,240, or $5,353/mo. According to the USDA [1], a moderate cost of food prepared at home for a family of four (with, say, a 16 year old daughter and 14 year old son) is $1,378.90/mo. So, the median family on a moderate food plan (never eating from restaurants) ALREADY spends 25% on food. People who make less money, dine out, have more children, eat more food, buy fancier food, or have food waste spend proportionally even more. A lot of people who read and comment here don't realize that there's no "return to" that world -- lots of the U.S. already lives there. [0]: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/median-household-income.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/median-househ... [1]: https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/media/file/CostofFoodJul2023LowModLib.pdf https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/media/file... via https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/usda-food-plans-cost-food-monthly-reports https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/usda-food-plans-cost-food-mont...
- ch4s3 3y ago
  The USDA[1] shows Americans spending 11.3% of disposable income on food. To quote them: >U.S. consumers spent an average of 11.3 percent of their disposable personal income on food in 2022 [1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices-and-spending/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    The median income is a lot lower than the average income. Not even sure how food falls under disposable income. Sounds like a cute way of saying "after-tax income" as if "things to buy otherwise you die" is a luxury"? From the chart after the one you quoted: "In 2021, households in the lowest income quintile spent an average of $4,875 on food (representing 30.6 percent of income), while households in the highest income quintile spent an average of $13,973 on food (representing 7.6 percent of income)." Pretty cool/sad to see the top 20% spending almost 3x/household on food.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> The benefits from modern agriculture are the low levels or required human labor and the low prices, both of which free up most people to do other things and to spend far less on food. I feel like it should be possible to have it both ways. Right now we have a dichotomy with on one hand industrial methods that overuse chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the other hand organic methods that are excessively labor-intensive. Why is it not possible to use the organic methods, but automate the labor-intensive parts? I understand that we don't currently have the technology to do this, but is there some reason it isn't possible? Wouldn't it be a productive thing to fund the development of?
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  > I feel like it should be possible to have it both ways. Sure, that's entirely possible. Build lots of nuclear power plants and run everything off electricity. I do not expect the "organic" people to accept this, of course.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    My understanding is that the availability of electricity is not the issue, but rather e.g. that manual weeding instead of using herbicides is labor intensive, and we don't currently have machines that can do this. But this is a problem of robotics and computer vision etc., not of powering the equipment.
ilyt 3y ago
Then why they are still getting subsidies ? We're essentially taking a part of the tax, give it to farmers, so instead of paying less tax we pay less for foods, except wasting a ton of it along the way for bureaucracy
- randomdata 3y ago
  The subsidy is a reduction in insurance premiums. Or, if you want to look at it another way, when insurance payouts are required, the public pays a portion of the cost. The math is the same either way, so take your pick. This is considered a social good as it compels farmers to carry insurance instead of rolling the dice, the latter of which they would be more apt to do if they had to pay the full premium cost. Even with the subsidies, some farmers still opt to roll the dice. But perfect need not be the enemy of good. The split gets enough farmers interested in carrying insurance. Farmers having insurance is considered a social good as it maintains some stability in food production. If experienced farmers are going bankrupt every time Mother Nature decides to throw a bit of a curve ball, you are at the mercy of the newbies who swoop in to replace them. Indeed, you always need some inflow of newbies to ensure that there are future farmers, and some farmers making mistakes can be absorbed, but when they are all newbies at the same time because everyone else went bankrupt, that is a big risk to the food supply. There is a lot of generational knowledge and experience required to make good management decisions in farming, so it is valuable to have some experienced people remaining in the business.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    Well it aint working coz more and more people are moving away from farming, and the only way to start is to start big as small size farms are just not profitable.
    - randomdata 3y ago
      > and the only way to start is to start big as small size farms are just not profitable. Why do you say that? My small farm – just a traditional grain farm, nothing fancy – is quite profitable. The big farm is a different business model. They are focused on wealth building, leveraging large amounts of debt to keep growing as much as possible, using most of the farm income to cover the debt requirements. In this model you need to be large to survive as the remaining profit margin after paying off the debt is tiny. I have kept the debt to a minimum. That means growth happens at a snail's pace, but it also means that all the money that would have went to the bank ends up in my pocket instead. I'll no doubt have a lot less wealth at retirement, taking the profitability now instead of later, but maybe that's okay? How much do you really need? I don't feel like I'm short of my retirement goals. I just might not be crazy rich in the end. Tradeoffs, as always.
carlosjobim 3y ago
I think spending 30+% of income on food is perfectly sensible, while spending more than 10% on shelter is complete madness. A house is built and stays there for decades without any extra work to speak of, yet even the most primitive house in industrialized nations is more expensive than an extremely advanced motorcycle that can go 200mph without breaking apart. Anybody can build a house by himself with primitive tools, trees and stones, given some time. Almost nobody can build a motorcycle by himself, even with advanced precision tools and all instructions given. Not to mention computers, cars and cell phones, which are tremendously advanced. Considering the labour and resources needed to grow food, compared to the labour and resources needed to build houses, food should be much more of our expenses while housing should be much less.
imtringued 3y ago
Yeah sure permaculture is ridiculous, but something like no till? There is nothing that prevents mechanization of it and it has seen significant success compared to conventional agriculture. The thing is, tilling resets your soil, so once you start tilling, there is not much you can do about soil health. In fact, tillage backs you into a corner where the only option is to spray back what you have destroyed through industrially produced synthetics. That also includes all the artificial fertilizer you're spraying. Once you till it, all the money you spent on the fertilizer is wasted. Once you stop tilling, there are actually ways to improve soil health that shouldn't be impossible to scale up. The biggest problem is that every soil is different and you need a complex "cocktail" of two dozen cover crops and another set of mycorrhizal fungi that is uniquely suited for your soil. Yes this does reduce yields, especially in the short term when you are building up soil health but conventional agriculture tends to reduce yields over the long term. This is ultimately a battle between "farm - regenerate - repeat" vs "farm until exhaustion - regenerate". It's not implausible that conventional agriculture is worse in the long run but we might not know it until it is too late, because it takes 20 to 30 years for soil to become useless.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by ch4s3 3y ago

dmoy 3y ago

> In the not distant past most Americans spent 30+% of their income on food, which I doubt is a world many of us want to return to. Not only that, but as recently as like 100 years ago, 30% of people in the US were farmers (ish).

Turing_Machine 3y ago
For that matter, it hasn't been all that long since around 90% of the people were agricultural laborers -- pretty much world-wide before the European Renaissance and Enlightenment, and in many areas of the planet, well into the 20th Century. Generally unfree laborers at that (i.e., slaves or serfs).

gdubs 3y ago

I think modern agriculture is miraculous, don't get me wrong. But we ignore the negative externalities – the cost to our health, and to ecosystems, and to the sustainability of civilization long-term. Even conventionally-minded farmers know that things like soil loss are a huge looming problem. And the labor issue is also complex – while big corn fields may be farmable via GPS-enabled, air-conditioned tractors, there's still a ton of migrant labor without which the system would cease to function. The idea behind a lot of the regenerative methods is to work with nature to reduce the need for inputs. I am a pragmatist and will tell you that, it's really hard! On this I agree. But a lot of the ideas from more fringe communities like permaculturists are becoming more and more integrated into the mainstream. I just think we need to accelerate that, and put a lot more research into alternative methods like agroforestry – because I think we all rely on a food system that's way more brittle and tenuous than people realize. One with a lot of negative externalities that we can't paper over forever.

ch4s3 3y ago
> the cost to our health This seems highly debatable. Sure cheap calories and cheap corn based sugars make it easy to develop so called lifestyle diseases, but on the other hand we've essentially eliminated famine and in most parts of the world malnutrition. In terms of ecosystem loss, it seems to me that concentrating most calorie production onto the smallest amount of land makes sense. > And the labor issue is also complex You're right of course, but I don't see how the manually intense process of regenerative and/or organic ag makes this better. Every small farm like this that I'm aware of makes heavy use of children, unpaid interns, and extremely low wage workers. It's not exactly comparable to migrant workers picking strawberries en-masse, but that's more of an issue of sacle and where these boutique farms find their labor IMO. I say this as someone whose parents and grandparents were all farmers, and my sister-in-law worked for a few years on a regenerative/organic farm. > But a lot of the ideas from more fringe communities like permaculturists are becoming more and more integrated into the mainstream This is the part that's actually really interesting to me. Finding ways to scale up and integrate ideas about soil health, water use, etc into mechanized, large scale agriculture is really great. People seem to be doing cool things with no-till and drip irrigation right now. > alternative methods like agroforestry My concern with this is that it definitely require LOADS of labor, and isn't likely to produce that much food. It also may put pressure on forest land may not be sustainable long term. On a small scale on you your own farm, it's probably great. But I have trouble imagining how it could ever make up a significant portion of overall fruit and nut consumption.
- petsfed 3y ago
  >Sure cheap calories and cheap corn based sugars make it easy to develop so called lifestyle diseases, but on the other hand we've essentially eliminated famine and in most parts of the world malnutrition. I think this is letting the good be the enemy of the perfect (a rare construction, to be sure). Yes, we've solved a very bad 1st order problem. That frees us up to work on 2nd order problems that we've never had to deal with before. This is a thalidomide-style problem in that the side-effects of the "cure" are a disease in their own right. I'd rather have diabetes than be dead, certainly, but wouldn't it better to not risk diabetes just to stay alive? I'm substantially in agreement with you though. The less land we use on food production, the better. The less labor we can expend growing and harvesting that food, the better. All of that said, the parameter space of agriculture has a complicated shape, so optimizing for any one parameter will be at the expense of other parameters.

m463 3y ago

What if cheap food gets you sick in some way, or gives you cancer?

ch4s3 3y ago
I'm not sure what your point is.
- m463 3y ago
  My point is that labor saving efficiency may take a hit producing healthy food. For example, if instead of fighting insects directly, everything is soaked in glyphosate, it might be too much of a compromise. In fact there are lots of these compromises that end up killing fiber, or favoring starches or processing away nutrients that makes eating a faustian bargain. I would think labor-saving solutions should try to get whole foods to the table quickly and cheaply, rather than say maximizing shelf life or storage convenience.

RangerScience 3y ago

> In the not distant past most Americans spent 30+% of their income on food, which I doubt is a world many of us want to return to. I mean - I think I understand the motivation behind that but I am pretty convinced that the value of "low-carb" / "no-carb" diets has less to do with the impact of carbs (after all, wheat literally was the symbol of European civilization for a really long time) and more to do with how they're used as cheap caloric filler (looking at you, Panda Express). Pretty much a "get what you pay for" kind of situation, in my eyes - so maybe spending that much on food isn't as bad as was thought. also, on the gripping hand, looks at cost of housing - so maybe if it's not one thing it's another.

ch4s3 3y ago
Even high quality food is far cheaper than it was only a generation or two ago.
- bbojan 3y ago
  What quality are you talking about? In my 8 years in Canada I wasn't able to by decent blackberries or tomatoes. At any price.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    30 years ago (within that generation-or-two span), at least here in the parts of the US I was in around that time, blackberries and lots of other stuff were both expensive, and only available seasonally. You could get canned year-round, not fresh.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ilyt 3y ago
I think it's mostly that this kind of food is also easily and quickly digestible which just means getting hungry earlier.
Aerroon 3y ago

bbojan 3y ago

> In the not distant past most Americans spent 30+% of their income on food And now they spend 30% of their income on medical costs.

Phenomenit 3y ago

I wouldn’t mind spending a couple of hours a day doing physical labor instead of working in the office to guarantee that my food was made in a sustainable and safe way, heck I even think it would be good for my health.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
That is a lot harder to say after the age of 35 or 40. My social circle includes many alternative people in organic farming where I have occasionally pitched in to help, and I have also volunteered with WWOOF for food and accommodation when traveling. This kind of work, even if a mere couple of hours a day, really, really starts to suck after your knees and back begin to age. And it is not that I have given up and settled into a sedentary lifestyle – nowadays my travels are bikepacking/bicycle-touring where I do 100 km+ day after day, but that exercise is a lot easier on one’s body than the repetitive motions of farming.
digging 3y ago
My dream: we give up on bullshit jobs. We implement UBI. We localize the majority of our agriculture. Humans, largely freed from fake labor, work communally on their local farms, splitting up the labor so nobody has to wreck their health and finances gambling on a lettuce crop.
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  > We localize the majority of our agriculture That means continental-scale famine. I'm not kidding - loads of countries only have the populations they have today because they can import cheap food from Europe and the Americas. Without that trade, billions starve.
  - digging 3y ago
    I'm not talking about cutting off trade overnight, though. I'm talking about building up community resources to reduce the need. But this is all very abstract anyway.
- 3y ago

Kerrick 3y ago

2022 median household income after taxes [0] was $64,240, or $5,353/mo. According to the USDA [1], a moderate cost of food prepared at home for a family of four (with, say, a 16 year old daughter and 14 year old son) is $1,378.90/mo. So, the median family on a moderate food plan (never eating from restaurants) ALREADY spends 25% on food. People who make less money, dine out, have more children, eat more food, buy fancier food, or have food waste spend proportionally even more. A lot of people who read and comment here don't realize that there's no "return to" that world -- lots of the U.S. already lives there. [0]: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/median-household-income.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/median-househ... [1]: https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/media/file/CostofFoodJul2023LowModLib.pdf https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/media/file... via https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/usda-food-plans-cost-food-monthly-reports https://www.fns.usda.gov/cnpp/usda-food-plans-cost-food-mont...

ch4s3 3y ago
The USDA[1] shows Americans spending 11.3% of disposable income on food. To quote them: >U.S. consumers spent an average of 11.3 percent of their disposable personal income on food in 2022 [1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices-and-spending/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  The median income is a lot lower than the average income. Not even sure how food falls under disposable income. Sounds like a cute way of saying "after-tax income" as if "things to buy otherwise you die" is a luxury"? From the chart after the one you quoted: "In 2021, households in the lowest income quintile spent an average of $4,875 on food (representing 30.6 percent of income), while households in the highest income quintile spent an average of $13,973 on food (representing 7.6 percent of income)." Pretty cool/sad to see the top 20% spending almost 3x/household on food.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> The benefits from modern agriculture are the low levels or required human labor and the low prices, both of which free up most people to do other things and to spend far less on food. I feel like it should be possible to have it both ways. Right now we have a dichotomy with on one hand industrial methods that overuse chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and the other hand organic methods that are excessively labor-intensive. Why is it not possible to use the organic methods, but automate the labor-intensive parts? I understand that we don't currently have the technology to do this, but is there some reason it isn't possible? Wouldn't it be a productive thing to fund the development of?

Turing_Machine 3y ago
> I feel like it should be possible to have it both ways. Sure, that's entirely possible. Build lots of nuclear power plants and run everything off electricity. I do not expect the "organic" people to accept this, of course.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  My understanding is that the availability of electricity is not the issue, but rather e.g. that manual weeding instead of using herbicides is labor intensive, and we don't currently have machines that can do this. But this is a problem of robotics and computer vision etc., not of powering the equipment.

ilyt 3y ago

Then why they are still getting subsidies ? We're essentially taking a part of the tax, give it to farmers, so instead of paying less tax we pay less for foods, except wasting a ton of it along the way for bureaucracy

randomdata 3y ago
The subsidy is a reduction in insurance premiums. Or, if you want to look at it another way, when insurance payouts are required, the public pays a portion of the cost. The math is the same either way, so take your pick. This is considered a social good as it compels farmers to carry insurance instead of rolling the dice, the latter of which they would be more apt to do if they had to pay the full premium cost. Even with the subsidies, some farmers still opt to roll the dice. But perfect need not be the enemy of good. The split gets enough farmers interested in carrying insurance. Farmers having insurance is considered a social good as it maintains some stability in food production. If experienced farmers are going bankrupt every time Mother Nature decides to throw a bit of a curve ball, you are at the mercy of the newbies who swoop in to replace them. Indeed, you always need some inflow of newbies to ensure that there are future farmers, and some farmers making mistakes can be absorbed, but when they are all newbies at the same time because everyone else went bankrupt, that is a big risk to the food supply. There is a lot of generational knowledge and experience required to make good management decisions in farming, so it is valuable to have some experienced people remaining in the business.
- ilyt 3y ago
  Well it aint working coz more and more people are moving away from farming, and the only way to start is to start big as small size farms are just not profitable.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    > and the only way to start is to start big as small size farms are just not profitable. Why do you say that? My small farm – just a traditional grain farm, nothing fancy – is quite profitable. The big farm is a different business model. They are focused on wealth building, leveraging large amounts of debt to keep growing as much as possible, using most of the farm income to cover the debt requirements. In this model you need to be large to survive as the remaining profit margin after paying off the debt is tiny. I have kept the debt to a minimum. That means growth happens at a snail's pace, but it also means that all the money that would have went to the bank ends up in my pocket instead. I'll no doubt have a lot less wealth at retirement, taking the profitability now instead of later, but maybe that's okay? How much do you really need? I don't feel like I'm short of my retirement goals. I just might not be crazy rich in the end. Tradeoffs, as always.

carlosjobim 3y ago

I think spending 30+% of income on food is perfectly sensible, while spending more than 10% on shelter is complete madness. A house is built and stays there for decades without any extra work to speak of, yet even the most primitive house in industrialized nations is more expensive than an extremely advanced motorcycle that can go 200mph without breaking apart. Anybody can build a house by himself with primitive tools, trees and stones, given some time. Almost nobody can build a motorcycle by himself, even with advanced precision tools and all instructions given. Not to mention computers, cars and cell phones, which are tremendously advanced. Considering the labour and resources needed to grow food, compared to the labour and resources needed to build houses, food should be much more of our expenses while housing should be much less.

imtringued 3y ago

Yeah sure permaculture is ridiculous, but something like no till? There is nothing that prevents mechanization of it and it has seen significant success compared to conventional agriculture. The thing is, tilling resets your soil, so once you start tilling, there is not much you can do about soil health. In fact, tillage backs you into a corner where the only option is to spray back what you have destroyed through industrially produced synthetics. That also includes all the artificial fertilizer you're spraying. Once you till it, all the money you spent on the fertilizer is wasted. Once you stop tilling, there are actually ways to improve soil health that shouldn't be impossible to scale up. The biggest problem is that every soil is different and you need a complex "cocktail" of two dozen cover crops and another set of mycorrhizal fungi that is uniquely suited for your soil. Yes this does reduce yields, especially in the short term when you are building up soil health but conventional agriculture tends to reduce yields over the long term. This is ultimately a battle between "farm - regenerate - repeat" vs "farm until exhaustion - regenerate". It's not implausible that conventional agriculture is worse in the long run but we might not know it until it is too late, because it takes 20 to 30 years for soil to become useless.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]