[Dylanfm]

Farms have continued to grow, echoing Earl Butz' (Nixon's Secretary of Ag) "get big or get out" philosophy. However, there are several studies out there showing that a greater portion of the world's population is fed by small farms:

- https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5... - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/12/1... - http://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/284666/

Small farmers need support, it's worth learning about local arms of organisations such as https://viacampesina.org/en/, for example https://landworkersalliance.org.uk

[wsc981]

I'd like to see more people do small scale farming anyways, mainly to support themselves, not in the first place as a business to get rich from.

Big farms tend to focus on a few crops (cash crops). Small farms that are meant to support a family would do better by having a great variety of crops. It's also nice to support a local community this way, by selling some extra produce to local markets or people in the local community.

My girlfriend has a small 3 rai (~5000 m2) farm. Originally she only grew rice ... or rather some Myanmar people grew rice on her farm for a small amount of money. In the past 1.5 year my girlfriend transformed the farm to support our family. Now about 1 rai is used for rice (enough for our family) and the remainder is used for growing fish, fruits (bananas, coconuts, mangos, ...) and vegetables (Thai aubergines, long beans, cauliflower, spring unions, ...).

Having a greater variety of crops also protects a bit from bad harvests or bad market prices. It makes one more anti-fragile.

In the future we should probably buy some land to grow the farm to about 5 rai and from then on we should be able to fully support ourselves with fish, fruit and veggies.

I think Jon Jandai has some nice ideas on setting up a small scale farm [0].

---

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2eoQyYoUww

[JumpCrisscross]

Isn’t the solution to increase these farms’ economies of scale? So the same civilisation-enhancing forces that drove development 10,000 years ago can show their force more broadly?

[Retric]

My old boss operates a 1,000 acre farm as a hobby due to that efficiency. Sure it was a “family farm” but it was a trivial portion of their income and involved 10-15 hours of work a week. It’s hard to argue that’s a bad thing.

[mabbo]

Had an old teammate who would talk about his "family's farm" back in Kentucky. Got the impression he meant some 500 acre plot of land they were just getting by on.

Oh no, it's 8,000 acres or so and they have a staff of workers to maintain it.

[prepend]

When you say operate do you mean do all the work? Or manage the farm and hire people to do that?

If the former, would you say what kind of farm it is, 1000 acre farm that’s easy enough to spend 15 hours a week seems interesting to me.

[Retric]

Operate as in he and his wife did 95+% of the work so it was more like 20h/week total. As to the type of farm, they had some beef cattle and mostly grew corn.

The time spent is kind of an interesting question because they could spend either time or more money to solve many issues. It was enough time to break even, but not enough profit to live on. However, a pure corn farm would taken less work, so they chose to spend more time than needed to make it more interesting.

[gruez]

> It was enough time to break even, but not enough profit to live on.

AFAIK this describes most small-scale farmers. They're only doing it because of inertia (eg. they inherited the farm and they don't want to sell it), not because it's actually profitable.

[cmrdporcupine]

Probably the latter, but that said, a modern cash crop monoculture farm involves just a few high intensity bursts of activity a year.

During most of the growing season it's just sitting there without intervention. And all winter. A huge burst of activity in the spring with tillage / planting and/or seed drilling & spraying / fertilizing etc. Maybe a couple passes over for herbicide application. And then combine harvesting in the fall and maybe some tillage and planting of winter rye, etc. Then some machine maintenance, outbuilding maintenance, accounting / bookkeeping, seed and other inputs purchasing thrown in here and there throughout the year.

I can see it being as little as 15 hours a week if you averaged it over the whole year. But it would have moments of intensity.

But the reality is that most of these farmers around in my area are contracting out portions of this work, because owning the equipment ends up being a huge capital investment that only makes sense for very large plots of land.

[fouc]

There's definitely lots of low effort options for farming. Look at permaculture farming for example, key ideas behind it involve no-tilling, sculpting the landscape with various shapes like berms, which create microclimates, arranging rows of trees to retain moisture, etc. There's a lot of ways to make the land work for you, but can take a few years to get it to a highly productive state.

[Loughla]

Just for reference, I've lived on our current place for 20 years or so, and it has taken absolutely every one of those years to get to a point that our 'permaculture' farm is anywhere near running efficiently.

The amount of work involved in that process is simply staggering. There are principals that can be effectively integrated to a backyard garden. But, to have as close to a self-sustaining cycle as you can, you're going to invest thousands and thousands of hours. Honestly, I have never figured up how many hours we've spent on this, just because it's a hobby and quantifying it would spoil part of it for me.

[beachy]

We have a great permaculture farm near us, they run classes, tours etc. (Apparently a popular joke in the permaculture world is that the only way to make money off permaculture is to run permaculture courses).

Everything I've seen there echos your sentiments. An incredible amount of work - and knowledge - to achieve a rather peasant-level existence.

That said it's amazing seeing anyone live a genuinely sustainable lifestyle. I always think that if everyone lived and thought like these guys, our environment would be recovering nicely.

[fouc]

Let's say you had the same piece of land, but you put a hard limit on how much time you'll spend working on it every year.

No time for make work. Bring in machines to quickly shape the land. Borrow some pigs or chickens to root through the ground and then sprinkle random seeds all over. Spend your time on observation, avoid working on the land for a couple of years, etc. See what comes up and where.

[vram22]

Right. I had given a few examples of quite successful long-running permaculture / regenerative agriculture operations here - people like Gabe Brown (Brown's Ranch, ND, US, ~5000 acres), Richard Perkins (Ridgedale Permaculture, Varmland, Sweden, 25 hectares?), Geoff Lawton (NSW, AU, well-known permaculture pioneer, 66 hectares/acres - countries consult him, even):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24827234

Most of them have YouTube channels with a number of videos each, so you can see that they are actually walking (or plowing or no-tilling :) the talk. They also do invited talks and run internships. Gabe, Richard, Geoff and many others also use conventional or adapted machines (traditional heavy machinery or lower-cost appropriate technology), too, so it can be a hybrid what-makes-sense-as-well-as-is-sustainable approach; it is not a totally back-to-nature hippie kind of thing. In fact all those I mentioned are highly educated (whether college- or self-taught), and well aware of critical modern scientific discoveries and development in ag-related sciences (plural) and use them as appropriate in their operations. One big such example is Elaine Ingham's work (a Ph.D. soil biology scientist, founder of Soil Food Web, Inc.), which I also commented on in the same thread as the one I linked to above (it is very significant, and they all quote her and apply her results):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24828524

There are many more, doing their thing successfully and quietly, although there certainly are talks, books, videos, conferences, associations, courses, etc.

And some of them claim that their approach is lower effort and / or lower cost than so-called "conventional" farming. In fact, Gabe says that it is their approach (permaculture / regen ag) which is closer to "conventional", since it mimics nature, as much as feasible, and nature has been at it for millenia before we even walked the earth. And in a holistic sense, it is actually more efficient.

Edited for typos.

[svieira]

There's also Ernst Götsch down in Brazil and Joel Salatin in the Eastern Seaboard.

[xyzzyz]

“Permaculture” is opposite of low effort. No tilling is not going to save me much effort, given that I can till 200 acres a day with a tractor. Sculpting the landscape of the same 200 acres will take incomparably more effort.

Permaculture is well suited for home gardens, where you want to maximize land use and fun involved. It is not going to feed the population.

[foxhop]

Any monocrop or one sufficiently subsidized is my guess. I grow a lot of food for myself and my family on less than an acre using hand tools. I don't focus on single crop because that would yeild a feast-or-famon phenomenon.

Grow what grows well in your context and locality, part time. Additionally, a focus on perennials will significantly chop the work hours needed to just reaping the harvest.

For more subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RussellBallestrini

[tengbretson]

The problem is that the economies of scale are invested in and enjoyed by the biggest players first, so by the time they can be enjoyed by the smaller farms the markets have already adjusted to make it a necessity just to stay above water.

[legulere]

Do you mean agricultural output per money or agircultural output per area? The latter one does not scale with bigger farms but shrinks.

[fsloth]

What economies of scale specifically do farms have?

A farm is not a factory where you can create a uniform process...

[oblio]

Well, as a simple example, you can't efficiently plow or mechanically harvest lots of land which are very small or have a weird shape. If you aggregate them, it becomes much more efficient.

Same thing goes for purchasing equipment or supplies, you can buy in bulk for a large farm.

Modern farms ARE factories.

[kebman]

What you are saying is true, but a lot of people hate the thought, since a farm has historically been a family working within a small community or a village, first and foremost for their own benefit, with the surplus going back to the village or greater society through trade or cooperation (or later by force through taxation by the Lord of the land). This was a good and healthy life that produced strong people. For thousands of years the farm was the producer of civilization and culture. Today, on the other hand, it has been reduced to a factory, and culture and tradition is increasingly molded by political organizations who sometimes don't have the family's best intentions at heart. The unit has been operationalized and a big part of what it once meant to be a farmer in a close-knit community has instead been reduced to being a factory worker on minimum wage (or less, if you're an illegal immigrant).

[oblio]

That's a "Golden Age" perspective. At best it was true for a minority of people for a rather short moment in time, compared to the time agriculture has been around.

Historically agricultural workers were slaves or at best serfs. In any case, a brutal lifestyle, generally for someone else's benefit.

Well, what you're saying does apply to a category of countries, underdeveloped ones. Countries at very low levels of what we'd consider civilization. There people were either shepherds or subsistence farmers but closer to what we'd call hunter-gatherers.

[iguy]

> Historically agricultural workers were slaves or at best serfs.

This was certainly common, but e.g. England hasn't really had serfdom for 5 centuries (after a gradual decline). Quite a lot of the labor was hired servants, perhaps a majority, although (IIRC) the median servant worked alongside only one or two others. So not family, but still a lot of family-sized groups.

[kebman]

> Historically agricultural workers were slaves or at best serfs. In any case, a brutal lifestyle, generally for someone else's benefit.

Not really. It's a myth that farms were made solely to support "the 1%." In fact research suggests that work hours were often less in those days than in modern times.[1]

To be sure, part of the farming produce was taxed in various ways (legitimate or not) during a lot of history, and there were disagreements about how big that tax was supposed to be that sometimes even lead to revolt, but then there were no real alternatives either. In short, farming was the best possible life to be had during most of history for most people, unless you were part of the nobility or some trading class. For most that just wasn't attainaible in any meaningful way, except perhaps through the participation in wars, or for some, marriage.

Indeed, until very recently most farms were "subsistence farming" (historically speaking, of course), but that isn't to say that it was necessarily a "bad" or gruelling life, considering the technology that existed at the time. At best that assertion is anachronistic. Of course the farming of yesteryear is worse than more modern farming methods! On the other hand you have to remember that living in a society where most people do something else than farming is a very recent developement. This means that most people grew up on—or close—to a farm throughout history.

Living in a family, perhaps close to a village, while growing plants and tending to livestock, was an integral part of life for most people. Thus, the way of structuring life on a farm was the main bearer of culture and tradition to new generations in those societies. I'm of course not speaking of "high" or "fine" culture here, which was the domain of the cities and various courts, but the traditions, social rules, and work ethics instilled in farmer families, who then brought it into the cities; much of it coming to pass exactly because there were no safety nets like a welfare state back then. So you either worked your farm, or subsided to begging or famine. In that sense you could say that there was a rather strong selection towards that kind of ethics too.

Today, most of that "folksy" ethics and culture is dying out, if it's not dead already, as more and more people are solely living in cities over multiple generations. This is why so many are completely out of touch with how things like dairy, meats or grains are even produced. Moreover they never got to take part in the family cooperation required to run a farm successfully, which both requires a certain kind of morality and work ethics, and not least an up-close and personal knowledge of how nature works. All that vanishes when agriculture becomes just another market share for the industrialist.

I'm not saying that it's all bad. Certainly the most obvious gain is that more people, at least in theory, should be able to work less to get food on the table, as it were. But there are also certain very healthy and good things that are lost in the process too, and I think it's important that people are at least aware of it.

[1]: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...

[vagrantJin]

> Countries at very low levels of what we'd consider civilization.

Industrialized.

[xenocratus]

> a lot of people hate the thought

Source?

> For thousands of years the farm was the producer of civilization and culture.

The producer of "civilization and culture"? In what sense? Farms produce the goods we eat, how does that lead to culture and civilization? I'm not that knowledgeable at history - if that is the case, then I'd really like to read more about it.

> Today, on the other hand, it has been reduced to a factory

Given your previous assertions about farms losing their status as cultural hotspots, I bet you hate Andy Warhol :)

[oblio]

> The producer of "civilization and culture"? In what sense? Farms produce the goods we eat, how does that lead to culture and civilization? I'm not that knowledgeable at history - if that is the case, then I'd really like to read more about it.

Well, I recommend any history book about the Fertile Crescent and Ancient Egypt.

If you have 1 hour, hear/listen to this podcast/video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA

[bluGill]

Historically more than 95% of the population had to live on a farm to support the 1%ers who didn't. Most of them were slave labor. this farmers did define the dominant culture.

Of course most of them don't appear in history books so they are easy to forget about.

[triceratops]

Without farming, humans were hunters and nomads, had comparatively very few possessions and left behind few artifacts. It's likely that writing was invented after humans settled down on farms, possibly for bookkeeping.

[onetimemanytime]

>>since a farm has historically been a family working within a small community or a village

Yeah, but I'd rather go to a supermarket and buy 5lbs of meat than go hunting. Things change.

Small plot of land keep people where they are with zero hope or mobility. You cannot buy equipment and the tractors are best used in fields 1 mile wide or whatever.

[secondcoming]

I'm pretty sure I've seen farmers in rural Ireland successfully ploughing fields that aren't 1 mile wide.

[fsloth]

Modern farm business is made to look like a factory by the big business, but that is not a proof that this maximizes yield per acre, or makes food as cheap as possible.

This is not an anti-corporate slur, I am just pointing out that if you have n acres of land under big ag, you would need to implement a more boutique ag operation on the same piece of land to come up with a sane comparison.

Since this is really not feasible generally I would like to know has someone actually studied this.

For example, soil is not necessarily uniform, and smaller scale operation might utilize the specific area of land for a mixture of landraces that might improve the yield than the monocrop that was designed to be able to produce crop in a generic industrial process, but not might for example be optimal for any soil.

[opencl]

Ecen a pretty basic set of modern farm equipment and facilities will run into the millions of dollars, and will have very low utilization on small farms. A single modern combine can harvest >100 acres per day. With multiple big fields of crops that have different harvesting times your equipment will spend much less time idle.

[yorwba]

That's right, but it's not necessary to aggregate small farms into large ones to maximize machine utilization. It's also possible to separate the machine-owning part from the other aspects of farming and aggregate only that, by forming an association of farmers who share equipment. (Shared ownership of the means of production, so to speak.) In German, that's called a Maschinenring. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maschinenring Not sure whether the concept is unpopular in the English-speaking world, or just not considered noteworthy enough to warrant its own Wikipedia article.

[mywacaday]

In Ireland we have agricultural contractors who specialise in owning/operating big equipment that are only contracted in when needed but they are then very busy at certain times of the year an 18 hour days for a few weeks wouldn't be unusual. Literally making hay while the sun shines I guess.

[Retric]

The overhead of transporting this equipment between farms makes the process significantly less efficient. The difference between harvesting 2,000 acres a day and 1,700 might not seem like a lot, but add in transaction costs and you can be talking 5+% higher food costs ignoring subsidies.

[phpnode]

It's not just that, certain pieces of equipment (combines in particular) are needed at the exact same time in multiple different places, and a delay of a day or even a few hours can be ruinous (if you don't harvest wheat at exactly the right time it can be more or less destroyed by the weather)

[yorwba]

If you merge multiple small farms into a single big one, the overhead of transporting this equipment between farms turns into the overhead of transporting this equipment between different parts of the farm. The distance that needs to be covered remains the same. Sure, the hand-off between farmers needs to be scheduled, but is that going to make the difference between 2,000 acres a day and 1,700? Do tractor drivers on big farms never take a break?

[eru]

There are transaction costs to these arrangements.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm for the broader question of why we have (big) companies at all instead of everything being organised on eg a project basis and people and equipment hired just as needed.

[usrusr]

But there's only so much farmland. Those super efficient machines increase the efficiency of its operator, not the efficiency of the land.

[bluGill]

they increase the efficiency of the land too. By doing perfect spacing between plants they ensure optimal growing conditions for each which in turns increase yields greatly. Two plants in the space of one shade each other and the net result is a lot more than half the harvest is lost since each needs to put the same amount of energy into making a plant before they can put any into creating the crop. Too far apart and sunlight reaches the ground uselessly (or worse a fast growing weed that will shade your plants!).

[spurgu]

Well, there's this: https://www.opensourceecology.org/

[opinion-is-bad]

Just a few: Tractor amortization over additional acres. Administrative overhead rarely scales linearly. Better prices on inputs from ordering in larger quantities. Access to new tech that is too expensive for smaller operations to justify.

A farm is very similar to a factory in many ways. You buy inputs (especially Nitrogen) and convert those into a usable output using biological machinery. This becomes especially true for people planting permanent crops (I.e almonds) where you also need to consider the maintenance on the plant (pruning, etc) as it ages. Uniformity of process is actually another place that large farms benefit. They can afford the quality managers capable of designing such systems. An owner-operator with one guy working part-time for him is less likely to bother.

[AmericanChopper]

Harvesting, planting, fertilizing, irrigating... are all uniform processes. Larger farms can invest in more machinery (and more expensive machinery), and build more infrastructure for themselves. They can do more sophisticated testing of their crops/animals, can monitor the things they need to monitor to a higher level, they can absorb loss-incurring seasons more readily. All of that is economies of scale.

[fennecfoxen]

Others pointed out the economies of scale in terms of production. I will point out that a large farming operation also has more resilience against risk. If some minor disaster takes out one of the fields on this farm, a blight on the one field, there are many other fields that may still be intact. This is even more so when you are Big Ag and you have multiple farms in different states. You might lose 5% of your crop to a bad hailstorm or an early frost in Oklahoma, but 95% of it is intact, while the small time Oklahoma farmer has no such consolation.

Agriculture isn’t just a numbers game for production, but also for spreading risk.

[bluGill]

Which is why historic small farms tended to be a lot of small fields. You didn't only only one patch of ground you had several. If the wheat field failed, maybe the barely elsewhere did okay and so you can at least survive until next year.

[jbj]

I'd imagine a lot of things can be streamlined from big companies that individual/independant farmers can't keep up with; one thing that came to mind was those big circles visible on aerial photos like those pictured here https://www.quora.com/Why-do-they-make-circular-crop-fields-...

[refurb]

Buying a $500,000 machine (that has massive throughout) makes sense when you’re farming 10,000 acres, but not so much when it’s 20 acres.

[estsauver]

I commonly hear farming described as "Geographically distributed manufacturing" in the industry. It's a lot closer to a uniform process than people think.

[javiramos]

Leafy greens production is quickly being standardized and automated in a highly controllable format. e.g. [0]

It would be reasonable to assume that the farming of many other crops will eventually transition to fully automated indoor formats.

[0] https://infinite-acres.com/

[bluGill]

Not really. Leafy greens are expensive in the store for what you get: a lot of labor required, and spoil quickly after harvest. It makes sense to automate indoors. Most crops need a lot more space, and a lot less labor. Indoor farming is not economical for these.

Don't get me wrong: there are a number of crops where it makes sense. They are an important source of nutrients (and taste!), but a poor source of calories overall.

[onecommentman]

Or to grow in a small home garden. Leafy greens are the easiest crop to grow in a small plot, or even indoors. Greens, fruits and tomatoes/peppers are the easiest for home growers to become self-sufficient. The labor is credited as exercise and therapy.

[cm2187]

Not a farmer but I imagine better amortise the cost of machinery, better optimise a process when done at scale.

[refurb]

I think you lose a lot of granularity when you just measure a farm by size.

A 20,000 acre “farm” that only grazes a few thousand head of cattle because it’s practically desert could be much less productive than a 100 acre farm in the most fertile region of the world.

So it wouldn’t surprise me that the smaller farms feed an outsized proportion of the population.

[3pt14159]

I know a guy that set up a food operation in a sea container in Toronto. It was a whole ecosystem of food producing organisms. Fish in the water, herbs like dill, tomatoes, all sorts of stuff. He'd sell it at 4x grocer prices to pricy restaurants near-by. His reasoning in putting it in a sea container was that he could always find a spare place to park it / electrify it with all his friends in the construction industry.

Made enough to live in Kensington Market, which is a hipster / hippy part of Toronto.

[wolfram74]

I grew up in Iowa, so my fascination with hydroponics is partly from the technical intrigue, but also an egalitarian philosophy.

A locales food security with conventional agriculture is heavily dependent on the quality of their soil, while with hydroponics and derivatives it's more a function of their engineering prowess (and available infrastructure).

[EdwardDiego]

Exactly, there's some rather large farms in the NZ high country, and they tend to measure stocking rates for their more marginal land as "hectares per head" - much like measuring an M1 tank's fuel consumption in "gallons per mile".