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...

[Vinay Gupta]

I had no idea you'd been a farmer, Woody. I think you told me about it once, and I'd forgotten.

Cool perspective. I wish we could find easier ways of getting this understanding out there...

[Taran Rampersad]

Actually, de Tocqueville wrote something interesting about this in 'Democracy in America':

"Great landed estates which have once been divided never come together again; for the small proprietor draws from his land a better revenue, in proportion, than the large owner does from his, and of course he sells it at a higher rate*. The calculations of gain, therefore, which decide the rich man to sell his domain will still more powerfully influence him against buying small estates to unite them into a large one.

* [ I do not mean to say that the small proprietor cultivates his land better, but he cultivates it with more ardor and care; so that he makes up by his labor for his want of skill.]"
(http://www.knowprose.com/node/19544 )

My practical experience has been somewhat similar. The more land one occupies, the less time one can spend per square foot.

[Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson]

When they say "small farms generate $1,400 per acre; large farms only $39 an acre" what do they mean by this? I went looking for an explanation. Per year? Per hour? Profit? Gross income? What are they talking about?

In the Netherlands, a horticulture grower makes at least 300,000 Euro gross sales per hectare and should make at least a 7% profit (based on the interest rate he has to pay back on his loans, a rule of thumb used by bankers in the Netherlands lending to horti business.). A hectare is about 2.5 acres. So 300,000 x 0.07 / 2.5 = 8400 Euro net profit on an acre. And at the current dollar rate that would be more than $11,000.

You can obviously not grow the same crop in a greenhouse as on the field and investments and the overheads are different etc. etc. but it would be interesting to see what this snippet actually means.

[Vinay Gupta]

In fact, small farms are the most productive on earth. A four-acre farm in the United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an acre. Big farms have long compensated for the disequilibrium with sheer quantity. But their economies of scale come from mass distribution, and with diesel fuel costing more than $4 per gallon in many locations, it’s no longer efficient to transport food 1,500 miles from where it’s grown.

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So looks like they're measuring profit after everything else is paid for. Clearly there's an order of magnitude difference between these numbers, I don't know what's going on with that.

[Lucas]

I'll have to ask my farm-knowledgeable persons locally.

What I heard just today was this: "the price battle is done, and farmers are willing to go the A4LM (agriculture for local markets) way - now it's a distribution issue".

A4LM must have a better name, much more catchy, or else it won't be successful. And the equivalent of Tux, Linux's mascot. I mean, seriously, how do we expect to achieve world domination (a frequent tongue-in-cheek comment in the free software world) if we don't have a catchy logo? :-P

[Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson]

In the US they call them "farmers market" I think. The idea is that the farmer comes himself to the market, like in them olden days. The funny thing is that it appears that quite quickly what I have seen in both London and San Francisco, middle men crop up and the farmer doesn't come to the market anymore. But sells to the middlemen. Or, at least that was the impression I had when viewing a couple of these markets for a couple of months.

[Lucas]

Well, I guess it depends on a number of factors: how many middlemen layers, how useful they really are, how trusted, how replaceable in a rush if they don't do their job, can the customer still go see the farm and know who is who, etc.

The last point is from the customer's point of view: we don't want bundled-anything cos then we can't chop off the rotten wood, just like with the financial mess we're in. A public health issue, among other things. If some food is not good, just part of the whole market, then we want to let the healthy remainder of the market, the part of the market where the food is still good, go along.

[Josef Davies-Coates]

Some good links Vinay e-mailed me and I e-mailed him on this topic earlier today (some of which may have come up before, but for good measure :) ):

http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/backgrdrs/1999/w99v6n4.pdf
http://www.feasta.org/documents/feastareview/guenther.htm
http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/policy_library/data/01382
http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/policy_library/data/01382/_r...

And a couple more from Vinay's blog post about the disappointing Royal Institute talk he attended:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12245
http://www.paulpolak.com/

Enjoy!

Josef.

[Josef Davies-Coates]

See also this nice new report from the Ecological Land Co-op:

http://www.ecologicalland.coop/projects-small-successful