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I have a neighbor that can grow enough food for 400 people on 4 acres of land using hoop houses and irrigation, and certainly a victory garden can supply food for your family, but from a money standpoint, it is cheaper to buy groceries from the store then to grow your own food.
That is just fact...economy of scale.
If an average blue collar person worked a mere 5 hours of overtime at work,or a white collar person worked part time one day a week, they could buy more groceries and food with the extra money they make then they ever could growing their own food and limiting themselves to the same amount of time toiling in their gardens.
It takes a fair amount of work to produce food but something few people calculate sine it is a labour of love. If you are doing it because you love it...great what a wonderful hobby, but once you calculate in the costs, and the value of your time, it is a losing proposition. Historically, as people grow older, they realize the importance of time management and get out of victory gardens. My Secretary pointed this out to me quickly, she one said she was up at midnight one day canning veggies from her garden...veggies she could buy at the store for 99 cents a can. "Why am I doing this", she asked herself?
Myself, I am a small commercial sheep farmer and I calculate out my time everyday on this and that...I don't have time to get into it all, but I spend roughly:
33% of my time sleeping
63% of my time farming
4% of my time with family
I further split that time into two categories, doing general skilled labor at $12.38 per hour, and Supervisor work at $19.60 per hour. At the rate I am going, I will invest roughly $100,000 of my time into the farm, to bring in a mere $31,000 in income. It does not make much sense to be a farmer either now does it...and probably why there are only 1/2% of us left in this nation feeding the other 99-1/2%!
As much as we would like to beat up the author on this...he is unfortunately right. I have run the numbers myself and I agree with him.
(But emotionally...I love what I do and that is priceless).
We produce eggs, fiddleheads, sprouts, honey and a few veggies. I was a vendor at our local Organic Farmer's Market for a year. It was a good experience for me, I learned a lot.
After a few months of selling stuff in a parking lot, I came to know the other vendors and I found out a lot of things about each of their operations.
Some of them are family operations with one or two children, more of them are partnerships [like two couples that take in farm-hands in season, or groups of six to eight adults that live communally].
Among them 10-acres seems to be about the biggest. 3 acres to 5 acres is the norm.
Two adults up to eight adults can work a 5 acre farm, feed themselves and market enough to support them and their operation.
However, the aspect we all seem to be skipping over is the future of the small farm.
Over the last 20 years we've seen farm after farm sold off and subdivided. In the 2.5 years since I bought my 10 acres 30 minutes outside the city (and a big enough city that 30 minutes TO the city is still a 45-minute commute to work) I've seen three farms nearby sold off and subdivided (meaning houses sprung up in proliferation).
There will come a day when 10 acres is a LOT of land, and there will come a day when we'll be forced to sell land and subdivide, although I expect S to HTF before it really gets quite that far.
Nevertheless, I have only one child to leave this to, and I plan to raise him to hang onto it; but what about if he has more than one child? It's good to talk about family land but who really owns it? And what happens when down the line a generation or two one sibling takes advantage of the others (certainly NOT unknown)?
Just things to consider as our world population continues booming.
I have a neighbor that can grow enough food for 400 people on 4 acres of land using hoop houses and irrigation, and certainly a victory garden can supply food for your family, but from a money standpoint, it is cheaper to buy groceries from the store then to grow your own food.
That is just fact...economy of scale.
If an average blue collar person worked a mere 5 hours of overtime at work,or a white collar person worked part time one day a week, they could buy more groceries and food with the extra money they make then they ever could growing their own food and limiting themselves to the same amount of time toiling in their gardens.
It takes a fair amount of work to produce food but something few people calculate sine it is a labour of love. If you are doing it because you love it...great what a wonderful hobby, but once you calculate in the costs, and the value of your time, it is a losing proposition. Historically, as people grow older, they realize the importance of time management and get out of victory gardens. My Secretary pointed this out to me quickly, she one said she was up at midnight one day canning veggies from her garden...veggies she could buy at the store for 99 cents a can. "Why am I doing this", she asked herself?
Myself, I am a small commercial sheep farmer and I calculate out my time everyday on this and that...I don't have time to get into it all, but I spend roughly:
33% of my time sleeping
63% of my time farming
4% of my time with family
I further split that time into two categories, doing general skilled labor at $12.38 per hour, and Supervisor work at $19.60 per hour. At the rate I am going, I will invest roughly $100,000 of my time into the farm, to bring in a mere $31,000 in income. It does not make much sense to be a farmer either now does it...and probably why there are only 1/2% of us left in this nation feeding the other 99-1/2%!
As much as we would like to beat up the author on this...he is unfortunately right. I have run the numbers myself and I agree with him.
(But emotionally...I love what I do and that is priceless).
Perhaps currently, it's true from an economics standpoint. But there were a lot of germans wishing they had some land when it took a wheelbarrow full of paper money to buy a loaf of bread, lots of Americans wishing the same while standing in bread lines in cities during the Depression, etc. There's something to be said for not having to entirely depend on money and the economic system.
And after the various food scares/salmonella issues from improper handling of food, especially things like lettuce or such, it's also nice to know I don't need to worry about that.
The article is somewhat interesting, makes some good points, but misses some other major points.
First, not all climate zones have the same crop carrying ability. What may be impossible in Arizona may be entirely practical in Alabama.
Second, by using yield figures from the 1800s for small farms he is seriously underestimating the crop science and technology improvements available to anyone, as well as the level of labor required. A 20hp tractor and a tiller, bush hog, seed drill and a few gallons of diesel can so some serious planting.
Third, and most importantly, he totally ignores the effect that small scale farming has on food prices in general. Very seriously, supermarkets have to price produce based on market conditions. If they try to market summer squash at $2.50/lb when the local gardeners are GIVING it away, they will end up with a lot of unsold rotting summer squash. For a Friggin ECONOMIST to miss such a basic point is outrageous.
Let's delve into that a bit further. My first wake-up call about how screwed-up the pricing for produce is happened back on Clinton's watch, when NAFTA was approved. We lived in south Florida, less than 50 miles from some of the biggest tomato fields in the country. Right after NAFTA, prices jumped from less than 50 cents/lb to close to $2/lb. for tomatoes that were far worse than what we had been buying. The supply chain had shifted to Mexican tomatoes, growers in south Florida were going out of business or into other produce, and the cumulative costs of transportation and distribution were being passed on to the customer. Stores in Chicago might have shown lower tomato prices by a couple of cents, but for us the supermarket tomatoes were out.
We skipped the high priced cr8ppy tomatoes and started growing our own, discovering a variety of Everglades tomatoes that we could harvest nearly year round. Other people must have had similar reactions, because after a while, tomato prices started dropping a little. An OPEN market, where people have access to alternatives, will tend to self-correct.
The area up here in north Alabama is even worse than Florida in some ways. Corn is a common crop and there are HUGE fields of dent corn and smaller ones of sweet corn. Yet, if you go into the local stoopidmarket, you pay $1.00 PER EAR of corn. In south Florida, that same corn was 3/$1 and sometimes even 4/$1.
What happens every year about the time that local vegetables are maturing is that stores HAVE to reduce produce prices or suffer mass defection of customers and increased competition. The reduced prices set the customer mindset of what a fair price is for vegetables.
We have all seen how drug companies are able to charge crazy prices for a drug, then, once it becomes generic consumers will see that price reduced because other companies can manufacture it. The analogy here is that if there weren't small market farms, and large agribusiness had a lock on plants, prices would skyrocket, even with the benefits of scale.
The cost of production is NOT an absolute indicator of the cost in a retail marketplace, and never has been. Nathan Lewis is stuck on thinking in the old Soviet mindset of collective farming, and is singing the praises of a system that has no depth of redundancy.
Which brings up my fourth point (I could do more, but I have other stuff to do - like planting my garden). Large scale agribusiness is subject to massive disasters. If a cow pees on my spinach, I might get sick. If a herd of cows pees on a spinach field, there can be an e-coli scare that destroys an entire month's worth of the nation's spinach. Imagine what could happen with someone intentionally messing with the food supply in a system that is so unitized and so vulnerable. Redundancy, individuation, and multiple streams of source are vital to any robust system.
In other words - Nathan wrote an interesting article which exposed a few points but his screed had huge conceptual gaps.
I disagree with you HC on a few levels, but first is the small farm tractor...it is probably the most inefficient machine on the farm.
On my fledgling sheep farm I have a 25 hp Kubota that burns about 10 gallons of fuel per day. Due to its limited traction and horsepower, I can only plow about 2 acres in a day. It's pretty simple math, that is about 5 gallons to the acre.
On the big dairy farm we have, our New Holland 9684 can pull a 10 bottom plow faster and easier then my Kubota can. It has plowed 7 acres in 25 minutes and gets an astonishing 3/4 of a gallon per acre.
So now lets talk price. The Kubota cost 17,000 dollars to purchase, while the New Holland cost 100,000 dollars to purchase. At those rate, the Kubota is 680 dollars per horsepower and the New Holland is 1/3 that at 250 dollars per horsepower.
People often ask me why farmers need a $100,000 dollar tractor to farm today. The answer is you don't, but you do need one to farm efficiently!
The problem is, today society thrives on sensationalized stories and food scares are the worst. The truth of the matter is, very few people get sick from commercialized farms, but one one incident hits the news, it gets hit big time. Yet the poor 8 year old girl that had half her face swell up from drinking unpasteurized goats milk, never even made the local paper. And consider this, the potential for people to get sick on improperly canned home grown food is far more likely then eating tainted spinach.
I think with these sort of things, we go by emotion and fail to compare things on an apple by apple basis.
By the way, the author was wrong on the farmer perentage...
He got that from flawed data that included restaurant workers, truckers and other profession involved in the movement of food. The truth is, only one half, of one percent of this country actively are engaged in raising food for this country to consume.
By the way, the author was wrong on the farmer percentage...
He got that from flawed data that included restaurant workers, truckers and other profession involved in the movement of food. The truth is, only one half, of one percent of this country actively are engaged in raising food for this country to consume.
I have read previously that since the masses would refuse to believe any statistic that showed less than 1% could be farmers they pad the statistics with truckers, grocery store workers and restaurant workers.
I don't deny the economy of scale in any way. A larger tractor will almost always be more efficient. A larger field will be more efficient. A larger herd makes for more efficient practices. Someone farming professionally who plans on selling to established outlets HAS to take that into account. That is not what market gardens, buy local farms, and household gardens are about.
A standard exercise is to take a concept and examine the extremes to find out what the inherent problems are. If there was ONE field stretching across a leveled Kansas, and ONE giant combine, then ONE person could harvest enough wheat for the nation. If that combine broke down, uh-oh! Someone who thinks on a reserve capacity basis would be horrified at the thought of only one combine. Someone who considers only efficiency would be delighted at the concept.
If, OTOH, each person had to plant a plot of wheat, there would be no economy of scale and a tremendous amount of wasted man-hours and resources, but the chances of any one event wiping out all the harvest is far less. Someone concerned with the overall GDP would be horrified at the waste of time, energy, and resources, but an invading country would be hard pressed to destroy basic infrastructure, and a military commander would be delighted at the reserve capacity and redundancy.
WWII was very instructive. The ability of people in the U.S. and England to not only grow their own crops when under stress, but crops for soldiers and those living in bombed out areas proved a powerful weapon and safety net for the west.
Currently, we are in a situation where 10% unemployment is fairly consistent, and minimum wage jobs and part-time jobs are more prevalent. Vast swaths of office workers were made redundant by technology in the past few years. Robotics have emptied out many factories. We have a plethora of people, some of whom cannot be effectively trained to new jobs. The market has an overabundance of labor, and market forces are keeping wages down.
Now take a look at main street. Even while farmers in Florida are getting 25 cents per pound for strawberries, stores are charging ten times that amount to consumers. How do unemployed and underemployed people pay such prices? The answer is that many of them either go bankrupt and depend on aid, or don't, and grow part of their own food.
It becomes obvious that the efficiencies of scale and the use of technology are only a small part of the retail cost of food. The ten to one ratio of the (factual) example is a bit extreme, and used only as an example, but distribution, overhead, and other costs can EASILY double or triple the cost of production, and the commodity markets are such that speculation can drive prices to spikes. Those price factors are out of control of the farmers. A large farmer cannot easily shift from selling to a co-op or large buyer to selling to individuals.
A small farmer can have 1/2 the efficiency and still sell at a lower price direct to consumers and make a small profit. The small direct-to-consumer farmer is a safety valve on what could otherwise easily be another housing bubble or internet bubble. Are they inefficient? Heck yes. Are they working at a disadvantage? Heck yes. Would large scale agriculture love to totally eliminate them? Heck yes.
Man only needs air, water, food, and shelter to survive. Corporate America and governments have worked for years trying to figure out ways to sell or tax these basic needs and then turn the screws even harder. Growing ones own food, drilling ones own well, and owning ones own basic shelter is a threat to such plans. Darn. Heck.
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