Small farming is the future

[JohnyCanuck]

Small farming is the future

Jim Goodman — 7/28/2008 5:45 am

SNIP

I decided years ago that I didn't want my farming operation to get bigger. I liked milking 45 cows, raising their feed and doing a little direct marketing. I liked being small.

"Hopelessly behind the times," I was told. Local cheese makers were giving up, local meat processing was a thing of the past. Small farming was dead. The developing world couldn't feed itself and needed industrial farming systems.

Who could argue with the Green Revolution? Until the current food crisis. It's not so much a shortage of food, but a shortage of cheap food. The poor can't afford to eat and the middle class feels the pinch. Why wasn't industrial agriculture, farming fence row to fence row, feeding the world?

SNIP

Farmers, using cheap fuel, fertilizer and plenty of chemicals, could plant more acres, produce enough volume and generally make a profit. This, of course, benefited the seed and chemical companies, which long ago figured out that small farmers saving their own seed and tending small acreages didn't spend much money.

SNIP

Western countries need to take a step back. We cannot continue to feed grass-eating animals a diet of grain, nor can we continue to fill our fuel tanks with grain. We cannot continue to encourage and subsidize industrial agriculture at the expense of small local producers.

http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/298100

[Dont_Bogart_the_Pretzel]

1. Also small farms are better for the community,

It's when one farmer/Company gets too big, he buys all the land and puts a lot of other farmers out of work.

Sometimes a garden needs a little love to get going in drought times and I can't see a giant machine providing any.

[IrateCitizen]

2. Small-scale agriculture is alive and well in my neck of the woods!

I live in the black dirt region of New York State, about 65 miles from NYC. Although we produce about 1/4 of the U.S. onion crop and many other vegetables, most of the growers are small, labor-intensive independent farmers.

Our landscape is also dotted with small dairy and beef cattle farms.

Our farmer's market is packed with people every single Sunday through the summer, with a wide variety of fares from those independent growers. For example, we bought a quarter steer of grass-fed beef from one of the farmers there. He's only about 10-12 miles from here, the beef is excellent, and it worked out to only $3.30/lb cut, wrapped and delivered. We buy all our pork and chicken from another of the vendors. A local orchard who comes has the sweetest peaches I've ever tasted in my life -- and they're in season right now!

Furthermore, our town passed an ordinance by referendum to put a 0.5% tax on all real estate transactions above a certain amount, with the revenue going strictly to a fund that is used to buy up development rights to local farms. This allows the farms to get the capital they need to upgrade operations, keeps the farms from falling to developers, and maintains the agricultural heritage and character of the surrounding community.

[GliderGuider]

3. There's no question that small farms are preferable for a host of reasons

And they need to be encouraged at every turn.

One of the things we need to do is get more people interested in farming again, and give them the opportunity to do it. North America has lost 90% or more of its farmers over the last century. This loss of knowledge and experience must be reversed if we are going to move to small farms with their higher human inputs.

We should also keep in mind that no system of widespread organized farming is truly sustainable, as every technique draws down natural capital to a greater or lesser extent. Also, the mere action of putting land under cultivation destroys habitat for other species. We need to be as mindful of our ecological responsibilities as possible -- farming has the greatest impact on the biosphere of any human activity.

Lastly, we need to be aware that the current perception of the world needing more food to feed a rising population is a fundamental misunderstanding of population dynamics. Reverting to a system of small farms may be more ecologically sound, but may (not will, but may) also reduce the total amount of food grown. If this reduction in output occurs it should not be seen as a shortcoming, but rather as an advantage. A gentle, sustained downward pressure on the food supply will act to gradually curtail human population growth over the medium term, while at the same time restoring ecological room for more species.

Small localized farms are a winning idea whose time has come (again).

[eridani]

4. Considering that gardening is a multibillion dollar industry--

--that would seem to indicate that there are a lot of folks out there who might enjoy and be good at farming.

[GliderGuider]

5. Hoeing corn loses its appeal if you have hoe a hectare of it.

I agree that people have become aware of the need to grow some of their own food. But remember, gardening is a hobby, but farming is work. And farming with little oil is backbreaking work of a type that most people simply have no conception of any more.

[NickB79]

6. I've been trying to imagine how I'd work the family farm without tractors

Even with a few horses or oxen to plow the land, the manual labor required to cultivate and harvest the fields would be mind-boggling.

Hell, running 100 acres of land WITH tractors as a kid was bad enough. The idea of hand-scything 20 acres of hay in 90F weather makes me cringe.

Ultimately, I think that anything over 40 acres of land would have to be split up and distributed amongst new farmers and their families just to maintain some level of productivity. What we consider "small" farms now will still be too large to manage unless families come together to form communes, or hire a small army of hired hands.

[phantom power]

8. I sometimes wonder...

how well my career in computer science has prepared me for the future.

It's like... a twinge of doubt.

:hide:

[Dead_Parrot]

10. Aww, come on...

You're in the middle of a desert state in a city where the biggest employers are an airline and a bank, and you spend all day staring at a plastic box and pressing buttons.

What could possibly go wrong? :shrug:

[XemaSab]

11. All my friends dropped out of high school to go into computers

They all told me to come with them.

I said no.

Many years and several thousand dollars of debt later, I'm thinking my soil science degree was one of the best choices I ever made. :thumbsup:

I'll let you come visit after the collapse. You can help me can figs. :D

[phantom power]

14. I shall put you on my list.

The list of people I can team up with(*) for participating in post-apocalyptic survival communes. Figs is a good angle. Nobody else is offering figs.



(*)mooch off of

[NickB79]

9. The idea of 40 acres per family got me thinking, and crunching numbers

The US has 938 million acres of farmland per the USDA: http://www.ers.usda.gov/StateFacts/US.htm

At 40 acres per 5-person family, that would mean we could theoretically set up 117 million people as small family farmers in a perfectly equitable, egalitarian world. That number is actually a lot smaller than I had thought it would be :(

That leaves the remaining 200 million US citizens to make due in the cities, towns and suburbs.

On edit: the USDA link also shows the average age of a US farmer is 55 years! That highlights my post below about the rapidly aging farm population and all the knowledge that is being lost as they die off.

[IrateCitizen]

12. Amish farms average 50-96 acres...

... depending upon the region. Farms in the Eastern US (Lancaster) are on the low end, while many in the Midwest are toward the higher end.

http://www.everyculture.com/North-America/Amish-Economy.html

I would think that the Amish would be a good group to look in order to gain a better understanding of farming in an age of lower mechanization.

[NickB79]

7. Better move fast; most remaining farmers are getting old and dying off

I can't think of a single full-time farmer in the area where I grew up that's under the age of 40. If they can't pass on their knowledge of what it was like to farm decades ago, that knowledge may be lost.

As it is, I'm scrambling to get as much information from my grandma as possible about things such as how to can, jar, pickle and freeze produce, how to garden without pesticides and chemical fertilizers, etc, before she passes on :(

[bhbwl]

13. Small farms might be "good" for the community...

but communal farms are even better. The labor, the tools, AND the benefits of the harvest are all shared. More people working each farm means lower capital costs per farm (as opposed to each family having its own tools and machinery for each small farm).

Plus communal farms serve as a buffer against BigAg buying up individual farms to turn them into genetically modified factory farms. Less drive for greed and profit, more drive to put out a better product.