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by rendaw 1146 days ago
Do you have any references on small farm size efficiency? In Japan ~90% are < 50 acre both by land mass and count, and seeing the 100m^2 farms in my neighborhood I can't believe it's anywhere near efficient, even when sharing farm equipment.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/agricultural-land-area-by... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-farms-size?country...

1 comments

Japan has a bunch of issues with agriculture and too-small farms is part of it:

* https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/11/25/japan-strugg...

* https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/japans-farms-wea...

* https://thediplomat.com/2014/09/japans-agriculture-dilemma/

Small family farms are good when a country is still developing and has excess labour, but once industrialization gets going folks move to urban areas for factory jobs and farms need to consolidate and mechanize. This has been the story over history for all countries have been 'developed', and in the post-WW2 is generally true of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Though this mechanization never really happened in Japan.

How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World's Most Dynamic Region goes over this quite well:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16144575-how-asia-works