[gloverkcn]

Are you really familiar with the industry?

I ask because in the steel industry the opposite happened. Minimills started by making limited easier to produce steel goods. They improved their process and mills to be able to offer more difficult types of products and could compete against the larger mills.

My assumption is that as the technology improves and gets cheaper, the ability for someone to enter the market will go down. Getting higher yields with less expense will lower the cost, and will allow smaller plots of land in/near the city to provide for a more local customer base.

People around the world have phones because the tech has become so cheap. If micro-farming tech continues in that same path, then around the world, micro-farms can be installed by local entrepreneurs at a much cheaper star-up cost with an higher yield. Though I suspect government regulations will play a more limiting role in a lot of countries.

As a side note one of the things I've always wondered is how cheap does crop production need to get before the food can just be given away. If it gets to where it costs $0.05 to produce a head of spinach on the city lot down the street, is there a point it's free.

[akiselev]

You can't compare value-add manufacturing to agriculture because former is demand-driven while the latter is supply-driven. If a mill has a customer, its ability to make money depends on expertise and equipment but a farmer can only sell what nature allows them to grow. Modern agriculture is a balancing act between the forces of nature and financing so if a farm's output one year is bad enough they are almost certainly doomed to bankruptcy within a few years unless they have a miraculous turnaround. The vast majority of farms take on debt every year for fertilizer, seasonal labor, maintenance, etc and if they have a bad year, the extra debt makes it much harder to make a profit the next year when they again take on even more debt for the growing season.

The rise of industrial farming can be attributed more to transportation than automation because it allowed corporations to form that could finance hundreds or thousands of farms across a region or continent. A disease or drought impacting the yield in one area no longer meant that those farms were doomed to bankruptcy because the profits from successful farms paid for natural volatility. In this sense, agricultural conglomerates are essentially insurance companies.

Automation and other technology would have to help farmers deal with the financially ruinous harvests to really help local farming become competitive.

[omegaworks]

>The rise of industrial farming can be attributed more to transportation than automation because it allowed corporations to form that could finance hundreds or thousands of farms across a region or continent.

Isn't the whole plot of The Grapes of Wrath about how the rise of industrial farming was due to the dust bowl disaster? Prior to that most citizens were small farmers, but with so many people intensively tilling grasslands a massive self-reinforcing dust storm formed and destroyed any ability to farm profitably at anything but a huge scale.

[hkt]

+1, insightful.

[eli_gottlieb]

>As a side note one of the things I've always wondered is how cheap does crop production need to get before the food can just be given away.

When marketing and selling the thing is more expensive than just giving it away while making money on something else.