Rise of the High-Profit Micro Farm (2016)
modernfarmer.com
modernfarmer.com
There is something very human about one person teaching another person to produce food in the kind of detail he goes in to, and I think time farming lends itself to quality thinking and reasoning for a philosophically inclined intelligent person.
They are essentially rediscovering the way humanity grew greens before tractors and herbicides, but there are some new innovations that are making these farms work:
1) Growing things like romaine lettuce in holes cut in landscape tarping is eliminating weeding.
2) They are cutting time from harvest to plate by a few days, and the resulting quality is much better, and they are not using toxic chemicals to control pests and weeds.
3) They are using no-till methods, the only input is compost and earth worms do the tilling work.
I wish that there were more farms like this in my area, because I really hate the selection and price of organic produce in my supermarkets. It is very much lacking, or insanely expensive.
In the meantime I'll just continue trying to grow more for personal consumption. Along those lines I've found OneYardRevolution[1] to be a nice channel.
Actually they do use tillers. They use walk-behind tillers like BCS which are common in Italy. These dont compact the soil as much as a full tractor and are cheaper.
My wife and I have a 1000 sqft garden and have been watching Curtis' videos as well. We are considering building a mini-farm business on our property. Other good resources are Jean Martin's farm (http://www.themarketgardener.com/) and Eliot Coleman's (http://www.fourseasonfarm.com/)
Interesting to see the contrast - on one side, the funded Silicon Valley "everything you need in a (very expensive) box"; on the other, just a few people sharing knowledge they've acquired through decades of practice without using any significantly new technology.
My money's on the latter when it comes to long term impact.
it is not very clear from the article how these people managed to achieve such high profits. Because of a big demand for organic food? And due to their proximity to a large metro area?
As of the technology they are using, it is not that special... my parents used to have an extensive vegetable garden (as a consequence of living through a very hungry period of the USSR collapse). When I was still living with them, about 20 years ago, they already had these technologies: walk-behind tractors, vegetable pairings, composting, hand tools. They could feed 4-5 ppl family but that was it. I remember it required A LOT of manual work non-stop all year around. We, their grown-up kids, were highly suggesting them to stop brother and simply go to the local market and buy the food there. Pretty much the same price, much less labor.
I want to say people left farming for a reason and it looks like now the new generation either does not know or forgot how hard it is to grow food.
When technology driven high intensity automated farms are able to output yields orders of magnitude greater than these people digging in the dirt with hand-tools are able to output, at a commensurate if not substantially higher quality, they'll be able to undercut the prices of these "micro farmers" by significant amounts and all consumers will care about is that their organic heirloom greens taste just as good but cost half the price. Not the mention they'll do so with a substantially reduced environmental impact, requiring less water per unit of output and requiring substantially less space allowing formerly agricultural lands to be returned back to their natural state.
Small scale agriculture is a fantastic solution to the problem of disaffected young people who want to be farmers, but doesn't really offer any practical solutions for the rest of the world.
Without all of this nonsense, these folks are successfully growing greens through the winter in a harsh northern climate, using high tunnels and fans with simple timers and sensors. It's totally doable and scalable without wasting lots of money on equipment and tractors.
In terms of cost -- most of the cost gets piled on in the supply chain. I get milk delivered twice a week for a slight (15%) price premium compared to the grocery store. The farmer's gross is about 40% higher than what it would be if he were shipping to a co-op or commercial dairy. We do most seasonal vegetable shopping from non-organic, local farms and conservatively pay 75% less as compared to the stuff shipped in from California or Chile.
Small scale agriculture is going to be huge IMO as the ability the sustain the miracle in the desert in California and the costs of fertilizer rises.
The capital costs of the building and infrastructure and lights and most importantly the input costs of the power are going to have a very hard time beating what is essentially free energy from the sun, free land, free growing medium in the form of soil and virtually free water everywhere but in very dry climates.
These farmers also grow year round, even in places like Canada with very low tech solutions, which are basically plastic sheeting and metal tubes fashioned into low tunnels that cover the rows of crops.
When you factor in labor costs it might be hard to scale it over a certain size, but for a person that owns a half acre lot that came with their house and wants to farm instead of commuting into the city to a cubicle, that economy is going to be hard to beat.
Also, the cost of produce at your stores is more about the cost of transportation. The current cheap gas prices are due to fracking, which in turn produces wells which taper off far faster than traditional drilling. That will end, and prices will go back up. And food costs will increase. Just like they did back when gas was twice its current cost. Even in the past few years, there have been specific shortages in commercial ag, such as eggs last summer, when many commercial chicken farms had problems with disease, which is another cost factor. Large-scale ag means large-scale transportation and logistics and THAT is where costs come from, not the labor cost of digging up dirt.
That is also why the micro-ag folks can undercut prices despite higher labor costs (if they even hire out labor at all) -- they sell locally, and their transport costs are minimal. Often as simple as throwing produce in your truck and just delivering it across town, or to a local market.
And on the labor question, the next 4 years may change costs if Trump really does cut down on illegal aliens. Wherever you stand politically, they are the source of cheap agricultural labor in the USA.
All of this does not mean that tech won't change things in the future - it very well might. But that same tech will be available to small-scale ag, so there is no reason to assume that production gains will only apply to commercial farming. The disruption that could change the picture is cheap, renewable energy propelling self-driving trucks.
You are assuming that the markets and economy even play a role in small scale agriculture.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
I shop from local farmers in California all the time but they are rarely as inexpensive as SuperKing or Vons except when their produce is in season and they cut out all the grocery store middle men like the produce stands peppering the California freeways. I know that a lot of our best produce is exported because the farther they travel, the higher the profit even when accounting for transportation costs, so Id be surprised if transport is ever particularly significant. The cost of energy (electricity and fuel for equipment) is also higher than cost of transport so fuel costs will have an impact regardless of how far you move the end product.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
I see nothing that matches the numbers you gave. The only one I see that even talks about farm costs vs. other costs shows the farms at just over 10%, not 60%. And this is 2016 data, not a historical comparison over years to see how the costs change as energy prices fluctuate.
I ask because in the steel industry the opposite happened. Minimills started by making limited easier to produce steel goods. They improved their process and mills to be able to offer more difficult types of products and could compete against the larger mills.
My assumption is that as the technology improves and gets cheaper, the ability for someone to enter the market will go down. Getting higher yields with less expense will lower the cost, and will allow smaller plots of land in/near the city to provide for a more local customer base.
People around the world have phones because the tech has become so cheap. If micro-farming tech continues in that same path, then around the world, micro-farms can be installed by local entrepreneurs at a much cheaper star-up cost with an higher yield. Though I suspect government regulations will play a more limiting role in a lot of countries.
As a side note one of the things I've always wondered is how cheap does crop production need to get before the food can just be given away. If it gets to where it costs $0.05 to produce a head of spinach on the city lot down the street, is there a point it's free.
When marketing and selling the thing is more expensive than just giving it away while making money on something else.
The rise of industrial farming can be attributed more to transportation than automation because it allowed corporations to form that could finance hundreds or thousands of farms across a region or continent. A disease or drought impacting the yield in one area no longer meant that those farms were doomed to bankruptcy because the profits from successful farms paid for natural volatility. In this sense, agricultural conglomerates are essentially insurance companies.
Automation and other technology would have to help farmers deal with the financially ruinous harvests to really help local farming become competitive.
Isn't the whole plot of The Grapes of Wrath about how the rise of industrial farming was due to the dust bowl disaster? Prior to that most citizens were small farmers, but with so many people intensively tilling grasslands a massive self-reinforcing dust storm formed and destroyed any ability to farm profitably at anything but a huge scale.
I have no problem finding mediocre produce at a low price point, but quality produce at a reasonable price is often hard to find in major north american metros.
I'm open to the idea that technology will continue to change the landscape here, but I think you are underestimating the difficulties. I may be missing something here, but the successes I see touted in areas as you describe are things like the plethora of nitrogen bagged greens all over the continent these days from California. Certainly a commercial success and for access, but the produce itself is often pretty dismal and the process I understand is very specialized. Not a categorical win, then.
Have you ever been to a Whole Foods or Sprouts store?
(I know someone who switched from organic to 'local' because of that)
All the excess hormones in some milks and meats can cause issues.
Additionally, one thing that micro-scale farmers are doing is experimenting with new and different breeds of vegetable. Some are even breeding their own crosses. Some of these are substantially different in taste and texture, and most are visually appealing. You might not care about that, but to people who enjoy cooking, this is great, and worth paying for.
Small scale agriculture has a good future. People seem to be into the whole local thing, vegetables (and vegetarianism) are getting trendy, there is a huge surge of food culture. All good for the small boutique producer, who can offer higher quality and more exotic products.
Why is "organic" even remotely important? It's a meaningless marketing term. Study after study proves there's little to no difference other than price.
I set up a slack a few months back for a few friends to chat on this topic, but we didn't have critical mass.
If anyone wants to chat about coders who farm at https://codefarmers.slack.com/ send me an email at tjic@tjic.com and I'll invite you in.
Regardless, I am always amazed by the HN community. You aren't even the original poster and yet have a direct connection to this random non-tech story. It is so humbling.
> Though his book The Urban Farmer still similarly emphasizes minimal machinery and biointensive growing, Stone sticks to the highest profit crops—baby greens, microgreens, and tomatoes, for example.
The other part of this is having a strong local customer base willing to pay a premium for fresh ingredients.
A fresh tomato, ripened on the vine, and picked and eaten the same day is much tastier than a store-bought one shipped a thousand miles. Taste-wise it's almost a completely different foodstuff.
But location is key for this type of business. If there's 200 restaurants within 20 miles of the microfarm the customer base is good. If there's only two it's going to be much more difficult.
More a church.
Says me who earns less money than they do, religion pays big I guess.