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.
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).
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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 :)
> 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.
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.
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.
>>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.
To be clear, when you say efficient, you mean percentage of profit (value produced/costs) is lower in aggregate than if that same patch of land were part of a much larger farm. I submit this definition of efficiency ignores the distribution of those profits, which currently support a group of people owning the fruit of their labor - as opposed to those people being locked into dead-end wage labor jobs working at a much larger farm, while the real profits flow to a single entity.
When people talk about the hollowing out of the middle class, this is exactly what they mean. Capitalism is very efficient at producing wealth but extremely inefficient in distributing it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
If you have 20,000 acres and equipment failure means you don’t harvest the last 1,000 acres before a rain that’s a problem. But for smaller farms it’s more binary where either 100% is on time or 0% is. You can bet people are more willing to let the first happen than the second.
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?
Individual farms aren’t simply a single open field. So, you need to physically drive between locations, verify that this is the correct location, enter the correct settings, ensure each farms resources are separate etc.
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.
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!).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
I commonly hear farming described as "Geographically distributed manufacturing" in the industry. It's a lot closer to a uniform process than people think.
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.
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.
Same thing goes for purchasing equipment or supplies, you can buy in bulk for a large farm.
Modern farms ARE factories.