Comment by flyGuyOnTheSly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flyGuyOnTheSly | Hacker News Reader

This situation is a result of small farm consolidation and commoditization imho.

My grandfather was a small farmer.

He farmed about 120 acres in his retirement when I knew him and it was enough to keep his family well fed and well funded until the day he died.

He knew everybody in town. He went to all the farm shows. He bought the best animal breeds he could find and had a whole host of different animals, fruits, vegetables and legumes living happily on his farm at any given time.

Cows, chickens, ducks, wheat, peaches, onions, etc.

I remember he used to feed ground up eggshells to his chickens because he swore it made the strongest egg shells which could be shipped into town unscathed.

He fertilized his fields with manure.

And when a crop was lost to locusts... he didn't spray the entire field with insecticide.

He invited me out into the crops with a torch and we burnt it all down to the ground in order to kill off their eggs.

He lived where he farmed.

I couldn't imagine him ever agreeing to use the world's most dangerous herbicide in order to grow a crop that did not want to be grown where his farm was located.

What would his neighbours think? Where would his livelihood come from if he somehow poisoned his land?

Nowadays when most farms are 10,000+ acres in size and overseen by absentee landlords... I'm not surprised in the slightest that they are tossing around dangerous chemicals like candy without a care in the world.

Shame on them. And RIP Grandpa ;)

>Nowadays when most farms are 10,000+ acres in size and overseen by absentee landlords

I'd like to point out that this is not true. When I first moved from the rural Midwest to Silicon Valley, I quickly discovered this as a common misconception. The average farm is actually closer to 800 acres and still farmed by (in most cases) a single an owner/operator maybe with a brother or an uncle helping.

It is true that a lot of farmland is rented and nearly all of it is owned by someone like your grandpa that is a retired farmer now living off the rent of their land. I've found that this older generation is often the pickiest about how their land gets farmed and they often enforce practices that they prefer to keep their ground in good healthy condition.

About me: My family has been farming for 6 generations, my dad, uncle, and brother all actively farm and I am the founder of FarmLogs (YCW12).

This is my experience as well, although I am from rural Maryland rather than the Midwest.

10 000 acres is a typical size for a dry land wheat farm. That is also typically run by a single owner/operator. Today's machinery can plant or harvest at the rate of about twenty acres per hour.

The techniques your grandfather was using would have (and likely did) leave him at a terrible competitive disadvantage when trying to compete with those megafarms growing the same crops.

It's good to remember the past, but don't sugarcoat things either. Modern techniques grow more food, more cheaply, with lower economic footprint, less land used per output, less energy spent per calorie, etc...

And sometimes they mess up and poison soybeans, which sucks. But feeding chickens eggshells isn't the fix you want.

Yet there are questions about the sustainability of some modern techniques:

> Such weeds have grown stronger and more numerous over the past 20 years — a result of herbicide overuse. By spraying so much glyphosate, farmers inadvertently caused weeds to evolve resistant traits more quickly.

Alongside rampant antibiotic use for livestock which leads to antibiotic resistance in bacteria, and monocrops leading to poor nutrients in the soil, some things which can increase output in the short run and lead to disaster in the long run.

>>a result of herbicide overuse. By spraying so much glyphosate, farmers inadvertently caused weeds to evolve resistant traits more quickly.

That is my main concern, personally.

Why fight nature? It's futile. You can't win in the long run.

What are farmers going to do when dicamba stops working? Or it's offspring?

It's amazing that we as humans haven't developed a built-in argument against suppression-resistance technologies. After at least a couple of decades of race conditions in antibiotics, now we're importing it to agriculture. It has to be seen as a dead end. A profitable dead end, but a dead end nonetheless.

> Why fight nature? It's futile. You can't win in the long run.

What does that even really mean? Are modern childbirth techniques "fighting nature"? What about using soap? I challenge anyone to come up with a meaningful notion of "fighting nature".

Is it futile? Why? What's the justification for that claim?

>What does that even really mean?

My apologies, I should have specified.

By "fighting nature" I was referring to creating the worlds most powerful herbicide (that will become powerless in a few years because nature will force it to).

I was referring to spending hundreds of millions of dollars fighting the Asian Flying Carp species that literally are decimating our waterways in terms of enjoyment.

Stuff like that.

Everybody hates weeds, and nobody likes getting their neck broken when they are on a powerboat racing down the river because a fish flew up and hit them.

But we can't really stop the weeds from growing of the fish from spreading in the long run. So why bother?

It just seems like such a wasted effort.

But they might be pushing the actual cost of growing that food into the future.

About 300 years of rock phosphate left at current rates of comsumption. We need to start farming phophates in the sea, where all our water soluble nutrients eventually end up.

I think gvd was referring to herbicide resistance rather than fertilizer stocks.

Where does the phosphate go after it's used? Surely it doesn't disappear from the environment?

That's his point: It ends up at the sea. We'll have to spend muchblarger amounts of energy to recover a diluted resource.

In the US, much of it washes down into the Mississippi and Gulf of Mexico, where it kills the gulf and feeds algae.

Phosphates are water-soluble, they enter the hydrology wherever it goes, which means that long term they end up in the ocean.

But this isn't quite the big deal that it's made out to be. Mineral phosphorous mining is cheaper than other sources, but phosphate isn't rare or going away. It's literally present in all biomass by definition: phosphate groups are the bonds that tie the links together in RNA and DNA, and it can be extracted from biomass trivially (i.e. composting, or even incineration), albeit at somewhat higher cost. Given that agricultural output is currently almost free, that's hardly going to break society.

Maybe not, but it's yet another too-big-to-fail system with the costs externalized to everyone but Big Ag. We have no mechanisms to deal with the long-term fallout of these decisions. Our current economic and political system is one where we incentivize cancerous growth with no moderation or care for our own future. I can imagine a world where sustainability plays a role in what is commonly considered progress, but politically we've been moving in the opposite direction for a few decades now and it really scares me.

>Modern techniques grow more food, more cheaply, with lower economic footprint, less land used per output, less energy spent per calorie, etc...

Right now, that is true.

But what happens when Dicamba stops working?

What happens when the next Dicamba stops working?

We will be forced to return to the old ways of farming eventually whether we like it or not.

And by old ways I'm talking about polyculture and basically just growing what's right for your region.

Eventually we'll be good enough at genetic engineering to outpace evolutionary adaptions. We can't really go back to "The Old Ways". We wouldn't be able to feed everybody.

If that happens it will be the worst disaster in the history of humanity. Like 20x worse than Mao's great leap forward.

> Right now that is true

It isn't though.

> lower economic footprint, less land used per output, less energy spent per calorie

Small farms are actually a lot more efficient than large farms in everything but man-hours.

Think about it like this: If you had a 10 meters by 10 meters garden vs someone who had a 1km x 1km field. You would make sure every square cm in your garden is irrigated properly, that no insects are munching on your plants and each plant has the right amount of space and correct soil treatment for maximum yield. On a large farm, you cannot possibly do that. The total yield is a lot higher but the plants are not as healthy and are not living under optimal conditions.

We are not far off robots that can for instance weed fields.

We will do what we always do and adapt and continue to make the world a better place.

The past is an awful awful place why would you ever want to go back there.

I think that's rather short-sighted. All those gains come at the expense of "pests", or biodiversity, basically. All those flies and grubs would feed myriad birds and other insects, which would then feed into river ecosystems and support fish. Of course, if you want to live in a sterile world and grow old eating Soylent, then game on.

That's not true. Small farms are more efficient and productive per area. Therefore also more "green". I've read much about it but here's one link [1].

However, it is more efficient in terms of farmer-hours to have large farms and that's what really counts financially.

[1] https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/21085/1/sp06le03.pdf

No, that's not what that paper says. It even says "in the United States, non-family corporate farms control 1% of agricultural land and generate close to 7% of output (USDA, 2004)."

What that paper says is that 'large, corporate' farms perform worse than 'small, individual' ones. And it explicitly says "The different behavior may be understood if we recall that in our samples scale is a proxy for farm type.".

What performs better are individual-run farms, i.e. not collectives (which is pertinent in the paper because that style of farming is a holdover from Communist times) and not what is called 'corporate' farming in the paper where you have a bunch of MBA's and agronomists hiring cheap labor.

Essentially (going beyond the numbers of the paper), farms that are run by individuals who have (presumably) more 'skin in the game' and who know the land, the history and local conditions better than hired guns is what makes those farms more productive. But that also puts a cap on the maximum amount of land you can manage, hence the correlation between farm organizational type and its size.

So, to tie that back to the GP - it's true that it's not necessarily the 'megafarms' that he's at a competitive disadvantage to (depending on what market you're looking at - I mean a farm as small as that isn't competing for big Cargill contracts), but his mostly tradition-based management style (looking at the description of the ground egg shells) did put him at a disadvantage to the point that such farmers can't survive today. Today's farmers are agricultural engineers (more often than not literally - many farmers, and a growing percentage, have some sort of university education). Keeping a farm profitable today is about leveraging technology, keeping data very accurately and making the most of it. That includes local-scale sensor networks, microdosage of nutrients ('fertilizers'), very fine-grained crop rotation schemes. And in lifestock and dairy farming even more so. It's all romantic that GP's grandfather had bunch of chickens and some cows that he could milk by hand if he wanted to, but the economic reality is that no dairy farmer today can survive that way, regardless of farm size.

I think we're just talking about different things and my link wasn't very relevant.

If you actually visit the farms you can immediately tell the differences. When you visit a large farm, there is always things like tons of wasted space and water not covering some plants while others getting drowned. None of the plants are taken care of nearly as well as small farms (tomatoes usually aren't pruned for example). Overall, from what I've seen, large farms try to compensate for lack of individual plant maintenance by chemical treatments.

Here's a link to some "urban farming" that I think scales basically to other sizes: http://www.farmlandinfo.org/sites/default/files/Philadelphia...

Specifically, if you look at table 3, yield per crop area only decreases with size (1.2 for the largest farms and ~1.42 for the rest): https://seafile.entervice.com/f/175b18396c774698b6d2/

Then there is recent greenhouse indoor farming survey: http://stateofindoorfarming.agrilyst.com/

Here is comparison of revenue per square foot for large and small farms from that survey: https://seafile.entervice.com/f/c0a224916e6742ef9873/

It really depends on the crop but in this case everything but cannabis had higher yields in small farms.

Finally, if you're not convinced, here's some prose from cgiar regarding farm sizes and yields: https://wle.cgiar.org/thrive/2017/03/20/precision-agricultur...

select quote from there:

"In some ways, precision agriculture takes us back to the future. In some developing countries, very small farms tend to have marginally higher yields than somewhat larger farms. This can in part be explained by the relatively higher labor input on small farms, which can rely largely on unremunerated family labor. Under these circumstances, it is possible to check on every corner of the field on a daily basis, pull out weeds individually, and fertilizer precisely."

But here they're talking about very modern high precision farming which isn't actually taking place in many large farms. When it does take places it almost matches small farms.

I'm sorry but this is exactly the mentality that will drive us into a herbicide apocalypse. Farming food for the population is not a game. Stop looking at farming as some sort of equation on how to turn acres into dollars.

The measure of good farming should not be yield per acre, but nutrient density and food safety instead. It's completely upside down at the moment.

Do you think his grandfather would have cared about "competitive advantage" in favor of dropping the standard of produce quality? No. His grandfather had exactly the mentality we need in farming, which is quality before quantity.

You as a farmer are responsible for the health of the people you feed, and the health of the land and its ecosystem.

This mentality that everything has to be turned into dollars in the most efficient way, will lead farmers to sell us chemical bricks packaged as food if they just can get away with it, because..you know..it's efficient.

Think about that for a moment. When the only measure is dollars, you sacrifice everything that is important for humans and the planet in favor of profits.

Philosophically, I agree with you. But your refusal to measure utility (in dollars, because that's the unit of utility) hurts your argument.

When you make a folksy appeal to natural farming, imply that you don't have to assign utility to things, and then conclude by criticizing capitalism it... falls flat.

It's far more powerful to say that we are failing to price in the cost of monoculture farming, given the catastrophic effects it can have. But to say that you should measure yield based on nutrition per acre rather than dollars per acre? that just implies that you know better than the individuals who are making their own choices about what to consume (cheap food that you call non-nutritious, vs. expensive, organic-whatever that appeals to us emotionally).

with all due respect, I don't want someone else making my consumption choices. Let's just all agree to price it at the market.

And if you think that consumers are making the wrong choices, then the solution is to educate them. If you make your best case and fail, then you should consider whether your opinion should be changed, instead.

We know markets are bad at pricing in catastrophic very-low-probability events. That's why the lottery stays in business.

How do you price in dicamba use? It shouldn't quite be banned, but—silence isn't enough.

> That's why the lottery stays in business

and yet it's legal, and few argue for lotto prohibition

in the words of the initial reply:

> Do you think his grandfather would have cared about "competitive advantage" in favor of dropping the > standard of produce quality? No. His grandfather had exactly the mentality we need in farming, which is > quality before quantity.

...

> Think about that for a moment. When the only measure is dollars, you sacrifice everything that is > important for humans and the planet in favor of profits.

the best solution would be to internalize the costs: dicambia is going to cost the economy 5 billion dollars; therefore dicambia-based sales need to recoup that. And if they can't, then the companies should be fined if there is evidence they either knew, or fell short of their regulatory duty to look.

My point isn't that unfettered capitalism is good (it's not: it's terrible). My point is that the opposite extreme and emotional appeal is also not ideal: "when you only measure dollars..!" Well; there is nothing more appropriate to measure in. So let's just make sure everything is on the scale.

Education doesn't magically fix collective action problems.

Modern farming practices just allowed my father in law to take in a fifty bushel per acre wheat crop on less than inch of rain during the growing season. Traditional or organic practices would likely have resulted in total crop failure.

Organic practices use tillage for weed control rather than pesticide. That would have liberated the moisture from the snow melt leaving nothing for the wheat.

A bushel of wheat is more than a month of calories, so that's 10000 of the world's 7+ billion that my father in law is feeding single handedly with his 2500 acre farm.

Commoditization and industrialization is also just not good for farmers. Why are we growing all this corn? No one seems to want it.

Farmers can't make money when corn is down at $3.50 a bushel (futures). And local prices are much, much lower because the elevators are full from back to back record crops. We have a $.60 basis in my area, which is historically very high.

What's good for farming is no longer good for farmers. Their best recent year was 2012, a 100 year drought when corn prices went north of $8. We had 120bu corn in 2012, which is $960/ac revenue. This year even at 200bu corn we'd be looking at about $600/ac revenue. Good luck with that. You're just farming for insurance payments at that point.

And I forgot to mention that about 40% of all corn use goes to gas tanks as ethanol (the rest is about 40% livestock feed and 15% exports). So even with that demand source, which is itself a dumb idea, we can't clear the market at a price farmers can live on.

Scaling up at any cost - that's what biz "leaders" and b-schools have brain washed a generation of managers to do. We are going to be paying the price collectively for a long time to come.

Bless your Grandpa. Sounded like a great Pa to have.

I think his spirit and mindset is being lost in to the lust and herd mentality stemming from capitalism. Who would care throwing unknown molecules on your crop.

Thanks for sharing that.

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