What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living
salon.com
salon.com
> As the average age of the American farmer neared 65, I knew young farmers were badly needed in this country.
If they're truly in demand, one would expect wages or profits to signal that.
> none of these things address the policies that dictate how our country’s food system works, policies that have created a society in which the small farmer can’t even earn a living.
Some of the policies might not help, but the fundamental reason small farms can't compete is that farming has large economies of scale. Some people may be able to find a niche charging high prices for uncommon goods, but that's never going to be the bulk of the industry. Expecting small farms to be profitable in that way is like expecting cobblers to make a comeback.
There's a lot more to the story of what our agricultural system looks like, and this article only touches on it from one personal, anecdotal, perspective, but it's simplistic to dismiss this perspective and the concerns it raises about our food supply. Michael Pollan has been writing compellingly on the subject for many years, and I recommend you check out The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. They provide a well-research view of why things are so skewed in our food system, and why that is dangerous to our current and future health.
"If they're truly in demand, one would expect wages or profits to signal that."
On that point, we're agreed...there has to be a way to correct the incentives so that a competitive agriculture market can exist, given the fact that we all need to eat, and ethically speaking, it'd be good if the most affordable foods were among the most healthy and least damaging to the environment. That's not the way things are incentivized currently. As it stands, there's a strong cartel of very large farms and animal agriculture companies that stack the deck in their favor. It isn't merely a story of efficiency of scale, it also includes lobbying, anti-competitive practices, etc.
Can you share any examples of these things that specifically favour large farms? The two books you mention seem to be focused mainly on different issues (corn subsidies, large scale feeding, food labelling, ethics, ...).
It takes the form of favoring monoculture farms (where economies of scale are more pronounced, but also the environmental impact is largest), or requiring significant compliance expenses and bookkeeping that smaller farms cannot handle (because the cost of bureaucracy is often fixed, so it is relatively higher the smaller the farm), or have been designed to favor farms in specific regions (where the majority of farmable land is already owned by a few large farm corporations).
This is one of the better sourced articles on the subject I could find in a quick googling (interestingly, it comes from a libertarian think tank, which makes them interesting bed fellows with the food justice and local farms movement): http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies
Here's one from another, more left-leaning, source (but with almost no references, just opinion): http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/dont-end-agr...
The Michael Pollan books (specifically, The Omnivores Dilemma) do actually cover this in some detail, as well, and with good references, though it is a small part of the book.
I'm surprised so many people on HN think it is even a little controversial to suggest that large farms are favored by current regulation, enough that several people are requesting references. I kinda thought it was widely known. So, that's an interesting bit of news for me.
Can we just stipulate that commodity crops are indeed locked up structurally for giant agribusiness cartels, and keep focused on the small family vegetable and livestock farming this Salon article is talking about? I feel unprepared to discuss the public policy implications of wheat and cotton farming.
Certainly. I think I've been making that argument all along. And, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that being a problem (I think it probably is, if that wasn't clear).
"and keep focused on the small family vegetable and livestock farming this Salon article is talking about?"
So, we should exclude everything that supports the notion that big agribusiness has significant anti-competitive advantages, and only talk about the miniscule segment of the market that has not yet been eaten by big agribusiness and still has a few small farmers able to scratch out an existence?
Also, I'm not arguing that the author of this article should expect to make a great living off of a 10 acre farm. Obviously, that's silly (though I know people who do think that a small farm on that scale can be some sort of sustainable existence, and this article is probably useful for them from the perspective of bringing a little reality to the fantasy of retiring on a little farm).
But I think many readers would have an intuitive sense that if you're going to try to go into business selling products whose prices are set not by local buyers like restaurants but rather giant exchanges --- and for commodity crops, that's been the case for much of the last century! --- you're going to need all the economies of scale you can get, because your only axis of competition in those markets is "price".
It's for similar reasons that we tend not to be as concerned with the plight of small family oil well operators.
This article isn't lamenting the fate of small family cotton farmers, or even small alfalfa farmers. They're outraged that it's impossible for small vegetable farmers to make a living.
What moved me to comment is that I think they're wrong about that, and, in the fashion of many Salon-featured essays, are substituting the experiences of "mid-20s-to-early-30s" dilettantes for those of family farmers for whom this is a life-defining vocation.
This article doesn't claim that large farms are subsidized disproportionately, which is the claim you made when you said,
I think the danger in our agricultural policy is that large farms are favored (through subsidies, tax breaks, regulation, etc.) to an extent that small farms can't exist profitably, even charging higher prices at market
Are you claiming that large farms are being subsidized non-linearly? I.e. out of proportion with their size and output? That is certainly not the claim that's being made by that Cato article, and its not born out by the USDA page that the Cato article links to.
I'm surprised so many people on HN think it is even a little controversial to suggest that large farms are favored by current regulation, enough that several people are requesting references. I kinda thought it was widely known. So, that's an interesting bit of news for me.
Agriculture is subsidized - I think that much is well known. Perhaps I wasn't clear - I was asking for sources that would indicate that subsidies favour large farms. In many other places around the world, like in Europe, agricultural subsidies are perceived as helping to protect small farms.
Most California farmers, who grow mainly fruits and vegetables, do not get direct subsidies from the Depression-era programs, which remain largely targeted at grains, cotton, dairy and a handful of smaller crops.
In fact, these subsidies are handed out based on land area, and seem to have a penalty against large farms which operators have been circumventing by legally subdividing their farms to collect more.
Anyways, I think we can agree that these subsidies aren't relevant to the farmers in the article, who have chosen not to grow grains and other subsidized crops and are not in competition with these large farms.
Food production scales up nicely, and it has many other potential benefits than just being cheaper. Say we fixed incentives that promote low-quality food (we have to do it either way, since small farmers are as much incentivized to sell crap as big ones; a big part of "organic food" industry seems to be about that). The big AgriCorp, if incentivized to make good food, can actually care about it better. They have more money to get top-of-the-line tools, or build their own. They can use them more efficiently. They have enough resources to monitor and control the farm in much greater detail. They have more expertise on hands. Am I seriously supposed to trust a Joe Random Farmer more than a professional biotechnologist or agriculturist from Monsanto or DuPont? If so, why bother with this whole thing called "science" at all?
It seems to me that the work needed to restore the quality of our food makes big farms an even better option than they're now. The issues are, ultimately, with economic incentives that promote everything but health aspects of food.
I'm genuinely curious whether this is actually the case. Can you cite some examples? My google-skills don't seem to be adequate.
In particular, sugar should be taxed like tobacco, with a sin tax, rather than subsidized. But that's not what we do.
Everything should either be taxed equally or by at all. The American system is about protecting people's rights and protecting freedom. The Founders never had any intent to become the parents of the American people. I sure as heck don't appreciate Washington, DC telling me how I should live my life, including dictating a diet using taxation as a tool. It's nobody's business what I eat.
So cigarettes and alcohol should be taxed equally with baby formula ?
(I'm joking. I think.)
Once you start playing these games with the tax code, you end up with the laughable system we have now that only benefits tax accountants and politicians.
There's also something called short-sightedness, which involves people exercising their freedom to predictably do stupid things to themselves and those around them. There's also this concept of "coordination problems", which explains how people choosing out of self-interest what looks like the best for them, when aggregated, end up creating misery for everyone, including themselves.
Then finally there's this realization that life is a PvP game, not PvE. There are countless of professionals who earn their living by convincing you to exercise your freedom in a way that hurts you. Many have near-infinite budgets and apply state-of-the-art technology and research into psychology and neuroscience to achieve their malicious goals. (Surprisingly, this is not only legal, but also considered a respectable career path.)
Given all that, it's naïve to expect that a civilization, especially as complex as ours, will run itself well if you just leave everyone to do anything and everything they want.
I'm not saying that sugar tax in particular is a good idea. But there are many benefits in taxing specific things, and we're all better off because of them.
The government has no business telling me what to eat. If it costs 'society' more, then charge people for the actual cost at the time the cost is incurred. Sugar isn't 'bad' any more than alcohol is 'bad.' However if you drink so much that it causes liver failure, then charge people for the liver failure.. Don't spread that cost among the responsible people who don't drink to excess. Higher insurance rates for gay people and alcoholics -- absolutely. Higher prices for alcohol to effectively punish everyone for the irresponsible actions of the few.. Completely anti-freedom.
I agree that their agendas are often problematic, but then again people can't exactly be trusted to decide what's good for them either. Regulating food may be too much, but check out things like e.g. vaccines, effectiveness of which depends on everyone who can taking them, whether they like it or not. For the most prominent examples of people who absolutely should not be let to decide what they can or cannot do, see drivers. The flippant attitude to traffic laws is what causes lots of unnecessary deaths and injuries, as well as economic losses in unnecessary traffic jams.
> If it costs 'society' more, then charge people for the actual cost at the time the cost is incurred.
It's complicated. Sometimes charging at the point of purchase is exactly the right way. For instance, taxing fuel is a good idea, because it's directly related to the environmental damage it causes. A CO₂ emission tax would be a great way to internalize the cost of externalities, have the price reflect the true costs for everyone.
Other times, it may be a choice between what's "most free" and what's most effective. You're right that as a responsible person you should not be punished for irresponsible actions of the few. It seems fair to put the cost of e.g. alcoholism on the people who actually suffer from it. But I'd argue that in practice, it's too late. The goal should not be to wait for the irresponsible people to get in trouble, but to prevent them from it in the first place. Prevention is more effective than a cure; not to mention that there's no point in charging an alcoholic extra for treating liver failure - they won't be able to pay it anyway.
By the way, how is the society supposed to know that you are the responsible person and you won't become an alcoholic? It can't. Some people become alcoholics every year and others don't, but we can't tell beforehand who will be in which group. So the simple approach will be probabilistic - assuming that everyone has the expected-number-of-alcoholics/total-alcohol-consumers probability of becoming one, and taxing this fraction of the costs out of everyone. Where to best put that tax? On alcohol purchase directly; that way you fairly exclude people who don't drink at all, and thus will never cause costs to other people because of an alcohol problem. Could we make it "more fair"? Probably, by means of making it more complicated. But complicated means overhead and inefficiency, which is something you want to limit too.
Finally, I disagree with the idea that the government has no business telling you what you can or cannot do. I get that it has to be limited as much as possible for citizens to be happy, but in the end, bossing people around is the sole and only reason we have a government. It's their raison d'être. Solving coordination problems and seeking globally optimal outcomes involves infringing on peoples' individual freedoms - or to turn it around, living in a society involves giving up some of individual freedoms. It's the so-called social contract.
So go ahead and think it's obnoxious. We're even. Seeing as the vast majority at that time had no say in the political process because they didn't have a penis, or land, and weren't white, it's a pretty ignorant and obnoxious appeal to authority you're making via The Founders who were fat white rich men.
A bigger possible reason farms tend not to join co-ops is that they integrate vertically and do direct marketing both to chains like WF and to farmers markets and, particularly, restaurants. For vegetables, there are a lot of farms like this in the Midwest.
Obviously, if you're growing soy or corn or wheat, it's a different story. But I think nobody is particularly surprised that you can't readily make a living selling crops that are standardized and bid on in commodities exchanges.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/02/04/171051906/can...
http://eatocracy.cnn.com/2012/08/08/where-does-your-grocery-...
But it's not my argument that small family farms are likely to supply a significant portion of all the produce the median American buys at a grocery store.
Rather, my argument is that there are steady, high-volume buyers for small family farmers. Whole Foods can constitute a tiny fraction of the produce sold in the US (though: they don't; they're extremely popular) and still be one of several means by which it is viable for small farmers to be in business.
And, I guess my point is, this seems to be the case.
When you read this Salon article, you didn't get a bit of a "Brooklyn" vibe from this particular "mid-20s, early-30s" farmer outraged that their watermelons and lavender flowers buttered by the Sacremento sunlight on their less-than-one-city-block farm plot couldn't pay all their bills?
From the time that my grandfather homesteaded in 1911, productivity of all farms, large and small, increased by almost two orders of magnitude over the next 50 years. Increases in technology, including mechanical, chemical, and electrical drove the price of wheat and other crops down.
So it is simply a matter of scale. It should surprise no one on hn. For me, my parents saw the writing on the wall and sent me off to engineering school. There is some romance associated with "going back to the land" but you know we haven't been there all that long.
What I wonder, in the sense of sustainability, if the ecology of the earth will be able to withstand the savage damage caused by agriculture.
As with so many of these things, there's this idea floating around that the factory farms must be "bad" because they are big and wealthy, and that smaller, less efficient farms must be "good" because they are small and poor. Much like with all the other cases, this idea is somewhere between confused and blatant denial of reality.
Money is the unit of caring. The amount of money that you're willing to spend on something is how much you care about having it, as precisely defined by the point at which it's too expensive and you don't care enough to pay that much. The factory farms are big and wealthy because they provide what people care about: an efficiently produced, consistent solution to the problem of what to have for dinner.
If people really cared about their food coming from small, inefficient, "organic" farms then they would pay for what it really costs to produce food in that manner. The fact that people aren't willing to pay for it tells us that they don't actually care as much as they claimed. This is normal: most people will tell you they care deeply about something up until the point when you ask them to open their wallet, and then they remember that they don't care all that much.
It seems to me that what's really wanted here is better factory farms with modest adjustments to reduce pollution, antibiotics use, and improve animal welfare. That's entirely achievable. It won't be achieved by things like this article; it'll be achieved by somebody who sets out to make a better factory farm and builds a business around that.
This is already happening. http://spread.co.jp/en/ plan to have what could be a game-changing approach to vegetable farming up and running in 2017. Whoever gets that system to work well enough at scale seems likely to sweep the 1990s-style farms off the map. It's the exact opposite direction from what the "organic" farmers have been doing: no low-wage labour, no battles over land, no getting caught up in politics.
The next couple of years will be an interesting time for the food markets.
That's something I felt was missing from the article: No talk about their pricing. People pay (or not pay) the price they are asked to pay, not the price the thing costs to make (and have no idea how high that is).
Probably doesn't compare to the typical software-freelancer stories of "You should try to charge more than you think, clients pay that!", but it still would be interesting.
Logically speaking either this is bullshit or everybody who has ever said that they are struggling to give up smoking is lying.
In other words drug addicts really want to be addicts. Otherwise they would have given up already.
I suppose it's a useful canard if you're trying to justify American pro-corporate agricultural policy.
That is a reasonably accurate definition of the word "addiction", yes. When they no longer want the drug, then they are not addicted to it any more (this is a good example of how hard it can be to really change your desires).
You appear to have some unstated objection to the notion that a dysfunctional desire is still a desire. I don't think this conversation can make any meaningful progress if you continue to avoid stating it.
Or that they don't know. Supermarkets don't usually label their vegetables "BigCo" and "littleco". The problem with the 'market solves everything' approach is that it requires perfect knowledge on behalf of all parties.
IIRC they just got rid of the necessity to put country of origin on food.
A claim is often made that modern agriculture and growing methods can decouple food's nutrition from traditional signals of nutrition like size and colour and blemishes. I don't know how true that is, but it seems like there's a branding failure here - that we somehow need to be able to select fruit and vegetables based on which specific producers made them rather than vague and inherently porous regulations governing what can be called 'organic' or 'natural'.
Supermarkets might not like that - they'd have to better manage sales space to accommodate multiple known 'brands' of apples or oranges, but consumers would have a lot more reason to 'trust' self-interested brands of farms than they would an 'organic' commodity label. Any kind of a label that doesn't involve individual self-interested reputation but instead involves regulatory compliance is going to be gamed and ultimately ignored.
Their biggest mistake was trying to earn money honestly without sucking the teat of the corporate-welfare bandwagon.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-09-09/farmers-bo...
The smart ones used it like a hedge fund where they guaranteed a profit and were mainly betting profit rates on how much supply there was going to be.
Insurance company was providing it at a very low cost as the govt sets the service charge over the coverage level. Insurance companies have to compete on how cheap they can make the offering to actually provide (good cheap IT, good cheap claims). Big insurance co I worked with did it just as part of their portfolio to make it easier to sell insurance on equipment and life insurance.
Really odd setup but made sense as an alternate way to do farm subsidies if you thought about it. But farm subsidies pay you not to grow, this pays you to grow and guarantees a certain income if you control your other costs (maintenance, overhead, etc).
Unless tax breaks lobbied for by the large agricultural conglomerates distorted the market.
For the two to make a small (by Northern CA standards,) salary of $80k per year that would mean they'd have to get a profit of $8000 per acre.
Carrots yield about 19,000 pounds per acre grown conventionally. Organic yields are less but the higher prices roughly offset the differential. NorCal wholesaler prices are at most .32 per pound for carrots sold in 50 pound boxes. (San Fran wholesale market price as of Dec 31.)
That's about $6000 yearly income (using carrots as a representative crop) per acre. That's $60k gross. That's assuming maximal efficiency which, given the obvious inexperience of these 'farmers,' would be irrationally optimistic to expect.
So now you're looking at a maximum of $60k gross for two people on ten acres. Even assuming they had zero overhead, that's $30k per year per person. They aren't picking ten acres of crops by themselves. They have to pay some help. They also don't plow the fields with shovels, so they have to have equipment, fuel, etc. So their profit is pretty much poverty wage. They don't apparently understand that 1 tractor can plow 100 acres and that same tractor could plow 10 acres. Economies of scale! That isn't some Monsanto conspiracy, it's just a fact of business. One they choose to ignore.
Are these people just stupid? Unless your ten acres are in Napa and you're growing grapes, you aren't making a living from renting 10 acres and growing beets.
The implicitly argument is that something ought to be done about this unfairness of how economics don't treat the 10 acre farmer very well. However, as a consumer, that isn't my problem. I don't care if a carrot has a parchment birth certificate and a pedigree or if it's just a carrot grown on a super farm somewhere. I don't have a responsibility to subsidize vanity farmers. I didn't make them rent land and try to grow stuff. They obviously don't think through the economics before they pulled the trigger -- I'm not feeling sorry for them at all. The interesting thing is that they blame the factory farms and the 'lack of a living wage' for their failure. While these same exact people are unopposed to illegal immigration which is the primary source of labor for these farms they abhor!
Am I assuming their politics? Yes, obviously.. But anyone who read the article knows these are the kind of people that would vote for anyone but the most liberal candidates on the ballot; the same liberals that want to increase the very immigration that results in the inexpensive labor that ultimately is putting them out of business.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/425146/or-my-people-say...
Farming on rented land seems like the original Uber. You're workers, with no guarantee of even minimum wage.
A couple of friends in the restaurant business have told me: Never open a restaurant if you don't own the building.
The building owners kicked them out and opened a similarly-themed restaurant with a very very similar menu. Even the names of the sandwiches were heavily derivative.
But he told me he thinks 200 acres is the bare minimum to see some money if you are smart about it. The more acres the better obviously. And the farmer in the article only has 10???
Don't get me wrong, farming is hard work, but the farmers I've encountered rarely have much positive to say about their work particulars. A bit like sysadmins, really.
And that assumes the person running the place is even a decent business person. Some won't succeed whether they own ten acres or a nail salon.
Something tells me you can do okay with a small farm if you're a poor German immigrant who fought in WWI because you're not expecting much anyway. Happy to not be starving. The woman in the article should've expected less from the beginning. They can chalk it up as a learning experience, I guess.
I still tend to think it will shake out similarly to tobacco, moreso than wine, but it's an interesting thought experiment to consider which substance it more resembles and how it will end up being regulated, taxed, and corporatized, in the long term as legalization spreads.
Even that was barely break even with 14 hour days in the summers. Equipment upkeep and maintenance is the worst.
You know what this[0] looks like? That nice "You may also like" box? Like a fucking end of the article. Except it isn't. It's only a half of it. Seriously, fuck you Salon. I guess you don't care if people actually read the stuff you post.
EDIT Oh, I know why it tricked me. Because the rest of the article only loads when you scroll past that ad. What the fuck.
[0] - http://imgur.com/SMBtRkO
On the former side, there are very well documented examples of commercial success from organic farming using naturally focused practices instead of the fertilizer and weeding processes common to traditional western-style farms. A good point to start reading there is the Japanese microbiologist that popularized the approach - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka
On the output side, direct supply deals with restaurants or consumers in higher income areas (ie. possibly not local, but a large city nearby ... SF comes to mind) could be an excellent way to get higher return on individual crops by volume. Yes, this would necessitate a drive. But they probably do it now and then anyway, and it might just pay for itself. As a bonus, the article mentioned that the author's husband was a woodworker: knocking together some rustic wooden crates for deliveries to look the part is not something difficult at scale.
As a bonus, these type of delivery deals can be worded "by the crate" and "in-season", allowing more reliable distribution of crops and releasing pressure to grow things on the edge of or out of their natural season, which can necessitate higher investment, time inputs and risk on a per-crop basis.
I firmly believe that being relatively close to SF, it must be possible to distribute organic crops and make money. The author simply hasn't figured out a working model yet.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Green_Revolution
And despite concerns about food security, the US has consistently used agriculture as a bargaining chip in its trade agreements and foreign policy, opening our markets to countries that can produce food more cheaply than US operations can. Reagan, Hollywood's rhinestone cowboy, did a lot to destroy cattle ranching in the US by opening the market up to Canadian beef. Same dynamic.
Small farmers will only make money by focusing on cash crops that are organic, local, and other adjectives that Whole Foods customers are willing to pay for...
According to USDA data from 2012, intermediate-size farms like mine, which gross more than $10,000 but less than $250,000, obtain only 10 percent of their household income from the farm, and 90 percent from an off-farm source.
The words "like mine" here are misleading, because this farm is nothing at all like the farms the author is referring to. For one thing, virtually all the farms the author is comparing itself to are an order of magnitude bigger. But then:
One day late into my second season owning the farm, a customer walked in while I stood behind the counter spraying down bins of muddy carrots. The man asked how things were going. Financially, I mean. He held a head of lettuce in the crook of his arm, a bundle of pink radishes dangled from his hand.
Most small family farms are not walk-up retail operations; they work through distributors and co-ops.
Modern farming is also intensely technical. There was a time in American history where you could make a living as a wheelwright, too. It's not an outrage that you need to be a major corporation to build vehicles today.
The average U.S. farmer could cash out, buy a house in Miami, and never work a day again in their lives. But they don't do so. They apparently like the country lifestyle and continue their struggle even though they don't have to.
Obviously the couple in the Salon article can't cash out and retire because they don't own their own land, and it's just a sliver of land at that.
Even people you'd never expect it of suddenly become experts in photosynthesis and hydroponics. Who'd have known that so many people discovered that they had green fingers after all when they can't distinguish a weed from a crop plant under other conditions.