So what is a small farm?
In my last post on small farms I acted as if small farms were small in area, talking about how it’s easier to grow grain on bigger fields which can be worked by machine. I think that’s the way most of us think of small farms.
Really though it does not make sense because whether a given size is profitable depends on the soil and the product. I remember people in the village where I grew up had what they called a mink farm. They had it in the back garden. Mink (nasty little creatures by the way) don’t need a whole lot of space. Of course that’s the extreme. The point is that you may be able to make a go of it as a market gardener/truck farmer with just a few acres of rich soil. But if you are out there in Arizona or the Scottish Highlands raising beef, a small enterprise may need hundreds or thousands of acres.
So what is a good definition of a small farm? The US Department of Agriculture wisely ignores acres and concentrates on money. According to them, a small farm is one that makes less that $250,000 gross a year. I’m using 1998 figures here but it probably hasn’t changed much. A whopping three quarters of these small farms made less than $50,000 gross a year. Actually about $12,500 of which $1000 was likely a payment from the government.
Now a small proportion of those are living in dire poverty perhaps. But most are what the USDA calls lifestyle or retirement farmers. We all know some of those. The couple who keep half a dozen horses and some wolfhounds on top of a hill in Southwest Virginia or who have a few acres of fir trees in Wisconsin that one day they will sell at Christmas time. US tax breaks encourage this as they do lots of small businesses. And that’s probably not a bad thing. It keeps the land tidy, maybe encourages a few start up entrepreneurs.
The bottom line, though, is that just as no nation would see the future of business as being vested in the kind of small business owner who makes a few hundred from crafts or novels and writes expenses off as a tax deduction, no nation should encourage the view that the future of its agriculture is in the hands of the retirement and lifestyle farmer.
I suspect similar figures would apply to most economically advanced nations.
Thanks to all who commented on my last post–Judith, Kay, Cindy, Maria. More coming now I’m on a roll on family farms versus corporate farms, the role of the family farm in American history and mythology, and why farmer’s markets are a sideshow. Urrgh. Feeling my oats.
Yes, mythology. I guess that’s why I am so skeptical of the locavore movement. The nutritionist part of me just can’t buy it from the POV of nutrition and the historian part of me sees the very thing a previous commenter made, that people nowadays do not have any ties to the land and so tend to romanticize farming, not realizing just how back-breaking work it is. All you have to do is live in Third-World country for a while and you’ll see that, that’s for sure. I must add that my husband grew up on 400-acre dairy farm in Wisconsin. He to this day has nightmares about not waking up in time to go to the barn and his Danish-born father standing there with the belt … no way would he ever go back to that life, belt or not. Hard, hard, hard work. They were VERY poor, too.
I look forward to reading your upcoming posts! My first take on the championing of small farms as the future of agriculture is that proponents tend to look at it from a narrow perspective. To borrow terminology from economics, they have taken a ‘normative’ stance (that is, placing the issue of food production in the context of what the world ‘should’ be) rather than a ‘positive’ position (looking at it from the perspective of how the world actually is) and making it work within these parameters.
My next thought was of your February 2001 article in Gastronomica, “A Plea for Culinary Modernism”; if I recall, you discussed how an overdeveloped sense of nostalgia does a very good job of whitewashing the rather unhygienic and unpalatable truths of past food production techniques.
I should refresh my reading of it in anticipation of your next installments!
now that you mention grain, that’s one thing crete does not grow any longer, although it used to. despite my insistence through my blog that we are self-sufficient in many ways, take away our supply of grain which is shipped to the island and we wouldn’t have any bread to eat.
the silos are located right next to the ferry port – go figure
Not sure if this should be here or with post from yesterday. It is about why some small farmers make it and why more in the EU do than other places. These are raw figures about farm subsidies and sources vary considerably in method of reporting. The USA with approximately 300 million people puts out subsidies of between $16 and $19 billion annually. The EU with approximately 500 million people uses between $42 and $46 billion (translated from eruos) — that is about 40% of the entire EU budget most of which goes to France, Germany and Italy rather than to some of the poorer countries in the 27 nation alliance. I”m sure that this makes a significant contribution to the lifestyle of the small Umbrian farmer. (whoops! that was yesterday.)
“The bottom line, though, is that just as no nation would see the future of business as being vested in the kind of small business owner who makes a few hundred from crafts or novels and writes expenses off as a tax deduction, no nation should encourage the view that the future of its agriculture is in the hands of the retirement and lifestyle farmer.”
I agree, but I’m not sure that small farms (or lifestyle or retirement farms) V large commercial farms is the central issue with the future of agriculture in the sense of feeding the world with carbohydrates.
Farmers Markets are a red herring I suspect, the more important issue is how bread bowls like Zimbabwe can turn into dust bowls in a few short years due to local/international political instability, how developing nations react to entering the free market economy, responses to changing environmental conditions.
Some of these issues are linked to more efficient farming practices, some are not.
Regarding subsidizing/tax breaks, that is a pretty complicated situation. In some respects it is pure protectionism, but a large part of keeping people on the land, no matter what the model is to maintain arable land acreage.
If Italy imports most of its soft wheat for bread, does it matter if some farmers have switched to more niche markets like producing farro et al? I’m not sure that these farmers producing a niche product for a limited amount of customers, has much bearing on say the lack of wheat in Zimbabwe. On the otherhand, large scale commercial farms have had dramatic effects on global supply of grain in the last few years. The push for biofuel v food crops wasn’t made by small farmers?
Just looked at a Japanese study that put the average life of a combine harvester at 7.6 years.
I highly recommend a look at this blog from Sri Lanka where the transition is now being made from hand to machine harvesting and the farmers expect the machines to be obsolete before the last payment is made.
http://villagerinsrilanka.blogspot.com/2009/03/organic-virgin-coconut-oil-manufactured_18.html
Farmers Markets in the USA? they are a carnival side show, of course, and I LOVE them.
I’m looking forward to following this blog for a while and seeing where it goes. Looks just up my street.