food supply: small farms generate $1,400 per acre; large farms only $39 an acre

[Vinay Gupta]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/opinion/11barber.html?_r=1&pa...

Good article on the forces that define how food is grown.

Add this to

http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=5936

which describes how simple organic agriculture practices could double food output in much of the developing world.

Marcin, why aren't you documenting the growing processes, man? In fact, why aren't you documenting everything? Do we need to raise you some money for a camera? Do we need to find you a video production team?

Fill a brother in here...

[gmoke]

According to Paul Polak, author of Out of Poverty and the founder of International Development Enterprises:

There are 525 million farms in the world, 85% are less then 5 acres.
Farms under 5 acres are about half of all cultivated acreage in the world.
Average farm size in Africa is 4 acres.

Concentrating on that scale of farming is exactly what we should be doing if we want to reach the majority of farmers in the world.

[Vinay Gupta]

I agree one hundred percent, George. I think that these farms and how solar energy and the like will change them is the real story of the 21st century.

[Chris Watkins]

Interesting article, but written by an advocate for one side, and quotes a fairly meaningless number: Small farms are generally on much more fertile land, I'd guess, so relative income means little. I'd really like to see some data on this, controlling for other variables.

Not to mention that doing everything that way would require massive amounts of farm labor. Either import massive amounts of foreign labor (overall a good thing IMO, but not a simple issue) or expect a very large number of Westerners to return to the land.

(I'll assume we're focusing no agriculture and leave aside the issue of who currently owns the land.)

[Vinay Gupta]

Actually, the Guptastan Embassy recommends comprehensive land reform, with conversion of land ownership to a form of leases which both protect the land (environmental protection covenants) and raises revenue for the government. The leases are auctioned which means the prices will always reflect real value rather than somebody's guess at what the tax level should be!

However, such dreams aside, we've got 3 billion people who are on these little farms, and I'd guess that just making their labor much more effective in creating food would be a great start on all kinds of global problems. I really worry that if these people are cleared from their land to make room for big, modern, "efficient" farms, a lot of them will die and there will be a lot of political unrest.

The best antidote to that scenario is for them to be producing enough food, and enough money, to be too expensive to buy out to make room for large farms.

[Chris Watkins]

The best antidote to that scenario is for them to be producing enough food, and enough money, to be too expensive to buy out to make room for large farms.

I can subscribe to that vision!

This is something I see Appropedia doing - focusing on the technical side, of compiling the best agriculture info, free, and supporting literacy, education and publishing and distribution programs (offline content) that get people better informed.

What else do you see playing a role in this?

[Vinay Gupta]

http://www.precisionag.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_farming

Which more or less requires a govt. to release imagery and somebody has to crunch in into farming recommendations that can be given out by SMS message from GPS-enabled cell phones.

Past that, I don't know!

[Chris Watkins]

Thinking: could wikimapia be used for precision farming? It would require making wikimapia as loband as possible, and it increases the technology requirements of users. But it could be part of the solution.

[Vinay Gupta]

global precision ag is a job for major governments

that might change as supercomputing gets cheaper, but it's a long ways off

right now we just need to start getting Perfecto's paper properly analyzed and figure out how to implement it!

[Mamading Ceesay]

This Guardian article by George Monbiot refers to Amartya Sen's 1962 finding that there is a reverse economies of scale in effect between farm size and crop yields with a recent study showing a factor of 20 difference in productivity!

[Vinay Gupta]

That's pretty much a Global Swadeshi manifesto right there in that link you found, Mamading. Good find!

[Mamading Ceesay]

This is a repost of the same article to Monbiot's blog with one critical difference, it cites references, e.g. Sen's article on the reverse economics of scale is Amartya Sen, 1962. An Aspect of Indian Agriculture. Economic Weekly, Vol. 14!
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/06/10/small-is-bountiful/

[Woody Evans]

$1400 vs $39?
I don't doubt it.

I've worked on big traditional mechanized farms, and the thing gets cumbersome -- profit dwindles even as gross income may increase, but then your soil starts to fail (die) and the price of chemical input gets to be overwhelming. The farm buys more land, dumps more chems. The tomatoes get pethy, mashy, pale. Your brand begins to underwhelm buyers.

But the small organic farm works, humming along at a very high labor input, but the soil tilth improves and maintains. This is soil equity. This is green gold. I used to work for the Dana farm near Lumberton MS... hand plows, hand mulching, hand planting, hand harvesting, hand everything. Unbeatable food. Very little overhead for equipment or infrastructure. 80 acres of living land, tipped in a direction and tended to by Tom and Sue Ann -- and sometimes it was a real struggle for them. Tom had to put up an 8 foot creosote barbed wire fence on the eastern edge of his land, where it borders the DeSoto National Forest, by hand in the winter to keep a herd of deer from eating crop.

Anyway, over time the value builds. Little or no debt in their farming model. This opens opportunities for investment in solar power to take them off the grid, solar water heating, and frequent trips to work and share knowledge on farms in India.

Similar to "buying out at the bottom"...

This from a Best of New Orleans story: -- Tom and Sue Ann Dana own one of those models [small organic farms]. The Danas live on the agricultural fringe by most standards: they are veganic farmers in Mississippi who farm organically without using the animal products -- such as blood meal, bone meal, manure and fish emulsion -- permissible under certified organic standards. The Danas also belong to a minute group of Southern organic growers for whom farm profits provide the sole source of income; the couple has stayed solvent for 26 years and put their daughter through college on farm profits.

"I manage the thing very carefully," Sue Ann says. "My husband complains about my prices, but if we're going to make this thing go, we've got to pay our bills."

--

It's true, their eggplant is pricier than the one you'd get at Target, but the quality is not comparable; folks in Hattiesburg, Jackson, and the Gulf Coast keeping asking for Dana produce.