How much of this is because of hobby farming and kids inheriting the family farm?
Going back a couple hundred years, ~80% of the population was a "farmer". But by any standard, they had "multiple jobs".
I.E., they were doing a lot more than just growing food to sell.
You probably had a sweet spot somewhere between the 20s and 60s where you didn't yet have mega farms, but also <20% of the population was a "farmer" - so you could actually make a living off that.
Now, most of those farms have been sold off to mega farms or handed off to kids that don't really want to be a "farmer".
With the mega farms came efficiency, and if you're trying to be an inefficient small farmer, you're going to have a bad time competing. Hence, the need for a second job.
Anyone under 30 trying to compete with a mega farm is like some solo developer trying to build the next Google.
It's never going to happen.
Either you're doing it as a "hobby", or you REALLY want to farm.
"Now, most of those farms have been sold off to mega farms or handed off to kids that don't really want to be a "farmer"."
It's common practice that the person doing the farming may not be the land owner. Field leases are extremely common. So they can inherit the land and just lease the fields until they decide to sell to a residential developer for big money as the urban sprawl encroaches.
My parents farmed their whole life and had part time town jobs primarily for health insurance.
>With the mega farms came efficiency, and if you're trying to be an inefficient small farmer, you're going to have a bad time competing.
Essentially over time you had to work more land or raise more livestock in exchange for a steady quality of life.
The cost of food people ate did not at all scale down with the profit the folks working the land. The cost of inputs went up, yields went up, prices went down, and entities higher up in the supply chain took an ever increasingly large amount of the pie.
At the same time farmland became an attractive investment vehicle to store value so prices shot up so that it will take 30-40 years to pay for the land you bought by working it, before considering interest. (which is much much worse than many other investments)
You don't want this because smaller farmers can pay more attention to their products and create food with higher quality and more variety than corporate farming with industrial methods.
As for my going back to the farm eventually, honestly just the concept of making my career producing the inputs for ethanol, feed for confinement animals, and industrial food products (soybean oil, corn syrup, etc.) doesn't seem to be of particularly high value.
I disagree with this post not because it is completely wrong but because of its dismissive tone. Many important aspects are not mentioned or detailed. Dependencies of subsidies from gov, price pressure from large supermarket chains, large farms are corporates VS small family farms, responsibility regarding soil conservation, Methan emissions, dependencies or lock in from Monsanto and similar grain and fertilizer suppliers, inability to repair modern tractors due to DRM and so on.
I think that you are comparing un-comparable. No, farmers back then, regardless of what unclear period you talk about, did not had two jobs. They had one job.
Also, I suspect you don't have actual concrete place and time in mind. How farming and economy worked varied widely between times and places, you cant just cherry pick small anecdotes from span over 500 years and two continents and create comfortable picture.
A lot of time businesses that farmers could do as side gigs become the primary gig over the generations but the farm just has to stay there and keep doing farming things so you don't get screwed by the municipality or state on zoning or facility related compliance BS.
That's often how it goes. The market starts out with lots of small businesses, but over time it ends up up with a few giant companies. Economists call it industry consolidation. There are some interesting nuances at the beginning and the end of the "consolidation curve" [1].
A farmer wins the lottery. When asked what he's going to do, he replies, "I'm going to keep farming. And when the money runs out I'll find another way to keep farming."
How many of these farmers are hobbyists, though? Or, use the farm land to offset their taxes (like they do a lot where I live)? Maybe farming is their second job, rather than the other way around?
If you go to the actual report, you'll see that the "very large scale farms" have the smallest percent of acres while also providing the largest value. Maybe the small-scale farms are inefficiently managed and operated.
Not quite true. He can take that 2 head of cattle to the bank for a loan for 40 acres and that will make money - not a living but a profit. Then a few years latter more land and now he is a farmer.
i work with a number of people on that plan. It is an open question how many will complete it and become full time farmers.
Thing is you can't get an ag exemption without provable business. Not sure what that looks like elsewhere but here you have to do a minimum of $10k gross sales. As small as that number is it's surprisingly difficult to hit fucking around.
I certainly am no expert but Dr. Sarah Taber talks about how many farms, especially small to mid sized, are effectively tax write offs and that the "put upon" farmer is a myth [0] [1].
Again, not an expert but Dr. Sarah Taber claims that number is inflated by considering farm employees, not farm owners [0]. The claim is that farm owners are no worse than the baseline but that farm employees, often times low wage, migrant or undocumented workers, are the ones that suffer from a high suicide rate.
From the archived Twitter link:
"""
In other words, the farm lobby has stolen farmworkers' deaths as their own.
"""
This is "normal" - clearing, ploughing, seeding are short intensive bursts, harvesting the same.
Much of the rest of the year it's maintaining equipment, fences, and twidding thumbs, except that's boring and unproductive and so there are "filler jobs" - running a small business (welding, rousting, wall building, landscaping), renting properties, etc.
It goes wider than farming; for decades most rural areas I've lived and worked in have had most of the locals having several overlapping jobs each - too few people, much to do, no one task takes up full time, etc.
I stayed with a succession of farmers while cycling across South Africa (with all the land fenced off, your only choice at the end of the day is finding a driveway and following it up to the farmhouse in order to ask for lodging), and what really impressed me was how much reading every one of these farmers was doing. Soil science and so forth is apparently a continually evolving field, and a modern farmer has no choice but to keep up with it. It really challenged my citybred prejudice of farmers as somehow uneducated.
Here in New Jersey our property taxes are crippling. However if you have a big 5+ acre yard and can sell $1k worth of produce you are "farm" and taxed at a much lower rate. You might need a second job to stay afloat...
Readit News
Going back a couple hundred years, ~80% of the population was a "farmer". But by any standard, they had "multiple jobs".
I.E., they were doing a lot more than just growing food to sell.
You probably had a sweet spot somewhere between the 20s and 60s where you didn't yet have mega farms, but also <20% of the population was a "farmer" - so you could actually make a living off that.
Now, most of those farms have been sold off to mega farms or handed off to kids that don't really want to be a "farmer".
With the mega farms came efficiency, and if you're trying to be an inefficient small farmer, you're going to have a bad time competing. Hence, the need for a second job.
Anyone under 30 trying to compete with a mega farm is like some solo developer trying to build the next Google.
It's never going to happen.
Either you're doing it as a "hobby", or you REALLY want to farm.
It's common practice that the person doing the farming may not be the land owner. Field leases are extremely common. So they can inherit the land and just lease the fields until they decide to sell to a residential developer for big money as the urban sprawl encroaches.
Deleted Comment
>With the mega farms came efficiency, and if you're trying to be an inefficient small farmer, you're going to have a bad time competing.
Essentially over time you had to work more land or raise more livestock in exchange for a steady quality of life.
The cost of food people ate did not at all scale down with the profit the folks working the land. The cost of inputs went up, yields went up, prices went down, and entities higher up in the supply chain took an ever increasingly large amount of the pie.
At the same time farmland became an attractive investment vehicle to store value so prices shot up so that it will take 30-40 years to pay for the land you bought by working it, before considering interest. (which is much much worse than many other investments)
You don't want this because smaller farmers can pay more attention to their products and create food with higher quality and more variety than corporate farming with industrial methods.
As for my going back to the farm eventually, honestly just the concept of making my career producing the inputs for ethanol, feed for confinement animals, and industrial food products (soybean oil, corn syrup, etc.) doesn't seem to be of particularly high value.
Also, I suspect you don't have actual concrete place and time in mind. How farming and economy worked varied widely between times and places, you cant just cherry pick small anecdotes from span over 500 years and two continents and create comfortable picture.
Citations needed about any historical claims.
Also, show me yours about serious farms vs hobby farms and I'll show you mine about century farms...
[1] https://hbr.org/2002/12/the-consolidation-curve
A farmer wins the lottery. When asked what he's going to do, he replies, "I'm going to keep farming. And when the money runs out I'll find another way to keep farming."
If you go to the actual report, you'll see that the "very large scale farms" have the smallest percent of acres while also providing the largest value. Maybe the small-scale farms are inefficiently managed and operated.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/108074/eib-263...
i work with a number of people on that plan. It is an open question how many will complete it and become full time farmers.
[0] https://open.spotify.com/episode/41G5sIcfrno0EXiYK8LUnh
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201102173736/https://twitter.c...
From the archived Twitter link:
""" In other words, the farm lobby has stolen farmworkers' deaths as their own. """
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201218002926/https://twitter.c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farmer%27s_Wife_(1998_film...
This is "normal" - clearing, ploughing, seeding are short intensive bursts, harvesting the same.
Much of the rest of the year it's maintaining equipment, fences, and twidding thumbs, except that's boring and unproductive and so there are "filler jobs" - running a small business (welding, rousting, wall building, landscaping), renting properties, etc.
It goes wider than farming; for decades most rural areas I've lived and worked in have had most of the locals having several overlapping jobs each - too few people, much to do, no one task takes up full time, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz#Secretary_of_Agricul...