[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.

[oblio]

Not even. Large farms first appeared in the Fertile Crescent more than 5000 years ago.

[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.

[phpnode]

Definitely, but smaller fields are a lot less efficient unfortunately.

[ahelwer]

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.

[bluGill]

Your system means that when your local garden fails your family starves to death. With the large farm we have insurance so that when (WHEN not IF) there is a crop failure we just buy something from a farm far away. Distance is important here: crop failures tend to be because of a situation that affects your entire village so you can't fall back on a local safety net, you need a large one with a distribution network. The distribution network in turns requires a lot of people not working the farm but instead distributing things around. To make this work you need large farms with surplus.

In short your ideals sound good, but they just don't work out. Too many people are needed off the farm to pull it off, but you put them on their little farms.

[phpnode]

No, I mean it's less efficient. A large field can be farmed with larger machinery which is more fuel, time (and yes, cost) efficient than smaller machinery. There is less time spent moving between fields which can be critical for something as weather sensitive as harvest. Large machinery typically produces bigger gaps between tramlines and reduces spillage when turning, leading to greater yields and less waste.

[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.