Intermission on Small Farms
Taking a breather before my next rant but meantime let me just thank all for the comments and just a few round up generalizations.
Grains. Maria, really appreciated your insight that Crete may be self sufficient in most foodstuffs but not grains.
Subsidies. Kay and Adam, I wish, I wish I had some grip on the subsidy system. I don’t. All I know is that governments have always been major players in agriculture and that government decisions are probably more important than weather, market or anything else in whether or not farms make a go of it. And if anyone can contribute more here, I’d love to hear it.
Normative or positive. Paola, I completely agree that much of the US discussion is driven by what should be. As an empiricist, to throw in another technical term, I think what has happened has to inform what we think should happen. And I think the fact that small farms (both in terms of acreage and in terms of income) don’t do well in the developed world is something that has to be p0ndered.
Life on farms. Hard, as Cindy and Kay point too. And to go back to a comment of Judith Klinger a couple of posts back, yes combing wheat throws up a lot of nasty dust. Not nearly as much or as nasty as older methods of threshing.
World agriculture. I’m really talking about the US (and to some extent Europe) in these posts Adam. As you know there is this constant barrage of “if only we could have small farms . . .” which also throws in sustainable which I have to get to sometime. I appreciate that I am horribly ignorant of most other parts of the world. May be we can chat about that later and I’d love to know more about the examples you describe. But step by step!
More in a couple of days.
I realise that “Small farms are the answer to everything” is tedious, but when talking about something like wheat production, then the discussion has to be international, not local. The top ten world wheat exporters produce 2/3 of the world wheat. I imagine that similar figures exist for corn, beef, sugar etc.
I don’t think that anybody is suggesting that a switch to small farmers would improve the world wheat supply and distribution. As yet I have never seen a wheat stand at a farmers market. What I have seen is a few specialist mills that might produce small volumes of stone ground barley, bere, oat or wheat flour. This isn’t about supplying a community or even a family with a food staple, this is selling to a niche market as a lifestyle choice.
Even with some of the most vocal supporters of small/tradional farming practices (slow food for instance),they tend to leave products like wheat alone. I think that I would take this as a tacit acknowledgement that really, it is about lifestyle, not sustenance. If they say that X rare breed chicken raised in ideal condions tastes better, then a industrially produced version, then that is almost certainly correct.
I think I agree with all you say Adam. I wish though that the vocal supporters of small farms would be more up front about the fact that they are dealing with lifestyle and not with supplying food. At least in the US press, this vital distinction goes unremarked. I think it needs to be hammered home again and again.