Small Farms
Small farms, in my opinion, are not the future of agriculture. I’m asked all the time about why I hold this unfashionable position. It’s a tangled set of issues and I will post about several aspects over the next week or so.
But let’s start with my most basic worry. Farming is a business, an industry. It may also be a calling but a farmer first and foremost has to make a profit to keep going. And that means that like other businesses and industries, economies of scale matter.
That’s particularly the case in the most important kind of farming, food farming. (Remember farming has always also supplied fibres (cotton), industrial oils (olive oil), building materials (wattles, thatch), and fuel (faggots, straw, dung)).
But assuming we are talking about food, the most important kind of farming in the past (and for the foreseeable future too) is grain farming (particularly if you stretching that to include other seeds such as soy beans). This is what provides the bulk of the calories for the human race.
The idea that it would make sense to go back to non-mechanized grain farming is risible. I don’t see anyone arguing that we should have Americans or Europeans or even immigrants going around with scythes.
I vividly remember from my youth the problem of wild oats in a field. There were no herbicides that got rid of them and if the big milling companies found them in their samples, your price plummeted. The only way to get rid of them was to hand weed. In one sense it was easy because they grew taller than wheat at least at certain periods of growth. But ever tried spending a week hand weeding tens of acres of grain? Not, definitely not, recommended. And that’s a whole lot easier than harvesting with scythes would be.
Mechanized grain farming requires lots of capital and lots of land (that’s capital too). A tractor costs over $100,000. A combine harvester runs a cool $300,ooo new. Think about amortizing just those two over (say) ten years. Then add in rent, seed, fertilizers, storage, and think about the returns you need. You can only do this successfully if you have a big farm.
And of course a combine has a big turning radius. You simply can’t use one on small fields.
So grain farming has to be big farming.
But what counts as big? What about veggies? What about the family farm and family values? Lots of other questions. But this will get us started.
part-time farmers (ie farmers who also held another job that provided them with their primary source of income) are on the wan in crete, greece.
with the rise in crop yield (it’s much easier to grow crops now than it was before), and hence the decrease in prices, even full-time farmers are having a hard-time making a profit.
the small farm has now practically become a hobby – it’s no longer affordable to be a profitable farmer on the island
Oh Rachel, god, hard-hitting post. I am going to send this post to my father, who’s a retired plant pathologist who did a lot of work on wheat and later on cacao. He’s always said that while it’s admirable that people would want to do organics and smaller farms, that’s there no way it’s going to be the norm.
I meant to say
good,” not “god,” but that’ll work, too.
People whose ancestors have lived in the city for several generations have no memory of why those earliest city dwellers left the family farm — could barely wait to leave the farm. Farm work, not hobby farming, is excruciatingly back and health breaking and stressful AND so uncertain as to outcome that people die quite young. Too much rain, not enough rain, hail storm the day before harvest, a wolf in the lambing shed and an infinite host of other catastrophes can make for a starving winter with NO recourse. In the city one can, at least, go dumpster diving as a last recourse.
I’m wondering about the small wheat farms that surround us in Italy. I believe the system works there because many of the tractors are leased and because all of the wheat is combined and milled at the local ‘molino’. But you certainly have me wondering how the small Umbrian farmers are making a go of it.
Rachel,
I respect and agree with your stance on the disappearance of the small farm. Ironically enough, in America, with a government that “supports small, family farms,” regulations that the government passes will be the end of small, marginally profitable (family) farms.
In California, everything is regulated – tractors must meet certain emission standards, chemicals can not be used if they emit too many volatile organic compounds (VOC’s), labor is becoming to scarce, expensive, and reliant upon our (hard working) Mexican neighbors, and paperwork must be filled out for just about every application of pesticides. Currently, the government wants to pass a cap and trade system which will undoubtedly raise the price of agricultural inputs. Granted, it is a noble attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but I am sure it will be the end of many small farms.
I can not say that we would be better off without regulations, because they have prevented damage and preserved our environment – but we need to understand what the consequences are when we enact a new piece of legislation.
America’s food producers: 2% of the population and still declining!