The romantic view people have of peasant farms is ruining all discourse about agriculture. I blame the books people read to toddlers.
Peasant farms were labor intensive, disease ridden, high risk, low reward businesses that shortened lives and ruined families. But somehow for a lot of people this episode in the history of farming is seen as the optimal blueprint for sustainable farming. They ignore the fact that all "successful" examples of small scale circular farming are making their revenue from donations, venues and from "selling" the model. Not from produce.
Similar with the artificial battle front between organic vs conventional/industrial, where each side claims the solution to sustainable food production, but no common ground is allowed.
By the way, not all children's books are equally naive. We've recently found a nice one [1] (in German) which shows small- and large-scale farms side-by-side, in a brutally honest way (including butchering).
If you're looking for similar books with realistic depictions of agriculture: No, that was a lucky find in the library.
In case you just want to practice German with media for children, I always recommend "Die Sendung mit der Maus" [1]. It's a mix of short animated stories with "how it's made" features, where they go filming in factories etc.
Well a lot of conventional farms that are hyperoptimized barely make enough money to get by. It is quite weird how we can't maintain something as basic as food security with a market based economy.
Farming is an efficient market due to the sheer number of competing agents, that drives the price to be close to the cost.
Markets are cyclic. When demand is higher than supply, prices go up, companies profit more and there's incentive for investment. Within time supply exceeds demand and prices go down, so companies barely make enough to pay off and those which are inefficient go broken and are sold, hopefully, to better managers.
This is generally a good thing but, of course, food/farming is of public interest. If prices go up those with lower income might struggle to feed themselves. And if prices go down poor farmers might struggle to survive and be forced into selling their land. Thus government intervenes.
What separates poor farmers from say poor food truck owners?
The issue with farm subsidies is they don’t actually change profitability long term, they simply result in over production. It’s vastly more efficient to build up a long term storage of surplus say 2 years of corn per American stored at -40C which should last ~100 years. Then let huge swaths of American farmers go bankrupt as you scale back production. This was the basic model hundreds of years ago, they still had famines.
Alternatively you can push productivity while paying pay farmers not to produce anything on their land. This keeps them from going bankrupt and requires fewer resources than excess production. We used to do this, it reduces the risk of famine because productivity can be scaled up quickly.
Finally you can just massively subsidize production and dump the excess on foreign markets, this is really bad for other countries and costs insane amounts of money and still results in excess production even as everyone gets fat. This is where bio fuels come in.
PS: There are also secondary effects as subsidizing farm insurance etc, keeps incompetent farmers in business.
"There are also secondary effects as subsidizing farm insurance etc, keeps incompetent farmers in business."
Any data to back that up? If you're incompetent and your crops repeatedly, then you're not going to be reimbursed enough to make it.
"It’s vastly more efficient to build up a long term storage of surplus say 2 years of corn per American stored at -40C which should last ~100 years."
Any data to back this up? This is a huge volume. Freezers capable of those temperatures are expensive and consume a lot of energy.
"The issue with farm subsidies is they don’t actually change profitability long term, they simply result in over production."
I think farm subsidies need to be changed or reduced, but for a slightly different reason. We are basically subsidizing other countries. A lot of our grains get exported, basically sending the fruits of those tax dollars overseas.
It’s not that people are completely incompetent it’s that some people are better at getting subsidies vs growing food. Essentially subsidies add a parallel skill set which becomes valuable but reduces the impact of being an inefficient farmer. I don’t have hard data, but have been told about people who are better at one side or the other.
> Any data to back this up.
The freezing thing was actually from a study I read. Ultra large freezers are very energy efficient via classic square vs cube scaling. The freezer loses energy on the surface and needs insulation along the surface while it and stores inside the volume. Energy costs of shipping vs colder climate etc.
The idea was a FIFO system along a circular storage system, but I don’t recall all the details.
Re: Freezers, yeah, I agree with this. Volume to surface area doesn't scale linearly[0], so you can build something like a giant sphere or cylinder and lose a relatively small amount of energy.
Commercial freezers are also frequently built with vacuum-insulated panels[1] which have very low thermal conductivity.
It's not crazy to build something very large, like a grain silo, to hold dried grain at a low temperature. That seems fairly plausible as a way to reliably "turn off" subsidies over time.
It sort of reminds me of the strategic oil reserve[2] in the US. Similar idea (boring holes in the earth cheaply via using water to etch into giant salt deposits)
That's because it makes no sense. The US consumes around 12 billion bushels of corn per year. Yes, some of that may be wasteful (corn syrup etc). But trying to store 24 billion bushels of corn without loss is simply impossible. Each bushel is roughly 1.25 cubic feet, so 2 years would be 30B cf. Imagine a storage unit 2 miles long, 2 miles wide, and 300 feet tall.
The point is to feed people not cows or cars, so your estimate is significantly off base.
A bushel of corn is 56 pounds. Assuming a very high 1lb of corn per person per day only gives 2 * 365 * 330 million / 56 * 1.25 = 5.4 billion cubic feet.
Which still sounds insane except AT&T Stadium in Dallas is 0.1 billion cubic feet and cost only 1.3 billion to construct while including all sorts of stuff we don’t need. So roughly one building that size per state. Even if it was almost that expensive vs a more realistic 1/10th, the cost of corn + ethical subsides would hit that in roughly a decade and we would could then spend a 1 billion a year cooling the things while saving money.
PS: Having just one building would look cool but would be a massive single point of failure. Also, you can store dry corn for quite a while even in non cryogenic conditions.
> What separates poor farmers from say poor food truck owners?
If all food trucks and restaurants disappeared off the face of the earth, people would mostly be able to feed themselves. The same is not true for farms.
> It is quite weird how we can't maintain something as basic as food security with a market based economy
We can't? Where's the famine? News to me. Last I checked we still have way more food than we know what to do with (massive worldwide fertilizer shortages and inflation notwithstanding).
Depends on what you mean by food security. We're guarenteed to have enough food without crop subsidies. We would just import a lot more than we export. The government seems that as a national security risk.
What was that one on Netflix that sold organic specialty produce to restaurants in Chicago? I thought that one was profitable without any sort of assistance.
Either way, we have several examples of local "peasant" farms, some organic, that do well.
They got a lot of exposure, even before Netflix. Now their model is to milk the brand they built. That's not traditional farming, that's marketing wrapped in farming.
Yeah, but if I remember correctly, actual farm operations were profitable, right? The marketing is just extra, or what it evolved into.
Don't get me wrong - small farms are a lot of work. For the most part, at least one member of the family has to have an outside job with benefits just due to healthcare costs. But it can make some money.
I hope to have a small farm as a "retirement" plan. It would mostly be an apiary for the commercial portion, maybe with some log and block grown mushrooms. Then the rest would likely be for personal use. Obviously the major costs like the initial land and health insurance would come from savings, so it would be mostly supplemental income to an already solid retirement plan. I don't think it will happen though.
I assume the biggest draw is the lifestyle ideals. It seems a common dream on this community. Maybe because we're tired of building some intangible thing or some app that nobody really needs, and want to have a physical job with meaningful produce.
> I assume the biggest draw is the lifestyle ideals.
A lot of people who have never physically worked a day in their life like the idea of hard labor. After a week of hard labor, they would decide to take up woodworking instead.
I think it depends on what we consider hard labor too. With all the mechanization today, hard labor has changed. Now it might be considered hard labor to run a log splitter and stack the wood, when in the past you'd be swinging a maul too. Like my grandpa used to plow field with a horse drawn plow, but now you just start up a tractor. So it evolves, and exactly what type of farming it is determines how physical it might be (although any of it is more physical than sitting in front of a screen all day).
Hehe reminds me of a volunteer day I set up for our team. They wanted to work on a farm that's part of the food bank. We spent maybe a half a day picking greens and squash. Most of them couldn't believe how "physical" it was - commenting about it being a workout or being tired.
The people who want to open a dairy farm that's kind to the cows comes to mind. Then they realize that cows need to be milked 2x a day, every day, forever.
> Yeah, but if I remember correctly, actual farm operations were profitable, right? The marketing is just extra, or what it evolved into.
Not really, there are different levels of profitable. Some extremely efficient operations can be profitable at scale, but no one is getting rich.
The places like you describe (have half a cow from one in my freezer now, from just outside Chicago) operate on marketing to upscale customers via advertising/co-marketing deals at fancy/local restaurants.
They also operate a number of farmers markets booths at about a half dozen markets in the city each weekend, and that is both a marketing and sales angle. This is where they pick up a large amount of their weekly subscriptions, and folks like me who order half a cow each year.
> I assume the biggest draw is the lifestyle ideals. It seems a common dream on this community.
I agree the idyllic dream sounds pretty great. However I'd suggest trying to not jump feet first into it. My parents were organic market garden farmers (one of their specialities was mushrooms), and if you need to at least break even your job will look far more like marketing/sales with a bunch of back-breaking physical labor in between than farming or gardening. Animal husbandry is just as involved with the bonus of random emergencies popping up at inconvenient times.
The successful farms in the space tend to focus their time on the "business side" of the operation, and have the standard hired help the large farms have to actually run most of the farm itself. If you've ever visited a "small farm" that did weekend tours this is typically the model they are utilizing.
At "hobby farm" level it can be pretty relaxing if you have no need for the income itself, and don't mind putting good money after bad towards equipment to make your life easier. I've seen these operations work out, but lots of times these folks have an extremely hard time integrating into their new community and tend to move on in a few years.
Just trying to provide a different perspective. Farm life is hard, and involves long hours for very little financial remuneration. I'd only even consider doing it as an absurdly over capitalized hobby.
I have a small apiary currently, so I understand the work and costs to a degree.
As a retirement "job", it could provide supplemental income. That's my goal.
If I'm not doing that, then what am I doing? I hate my job and don't see anything better. At least I could be physical rather than squander my health like my job requires now. Maybe make some money to cover hobby expenses, or use the land to save money by growing stuff for myself. Otherwise, I might as well sit in front of a TV in some suburban house while eating myself to death.
My country is one of the biggest agricultural exporters in the world yet less than 1% of the population works in the farming industry.
Farming is what drives all the mechanization and robotics research.
Peasant farms were labor intensive, disease ridden, high risk, low reward businesses that shortened lives and ruined families. But somehow for a lot of people this episode in the history of farming is seen as the optimal blueprint for sustainable farming. They ignore the fact that all "successful" examples of small scale circular farming are making their revenue from donations, venues and from "selling" the model. Not from produce.