Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?
civileats.com
civileats.com
This.
I don't know what the solution to this is. I have a small farm, and raise meat sheep. But it's very much a hobby. The problem is, though, that almost all of the other farmers in my area, the ones I meet at the feed store or the livestock auction, they're also hobby farmers. There is exactly one “real” farmer (meaning that it's his full time job) in my area. He raises specialty row crops and runs an agricultural co-op, the kind where you pay a certain amount a month and get a box of fresh vegetables every week. But hobby farmers can't feed the country. We can't even feed ourselves, if it comes to that.
The problem is that these vegetables, which don't have to be shipped any distance and don't have the overhead of a grocery store, are still more expensive than the equivalent groceries in the local Safeway. The economies of scale in agriculture have become so strong that there's no way to compete on price any other way. And people understandably don't want to double their grocery bills just to buy local.
I grew up on a 300 acre cattle farm. Fifty years ago a family could make a living on a 300 acre, well situated east coast farm. Not any more. You'd have trouble just paying for gas, groceries, and medical care. Forget paying down a mortgage or god forbid buying new farm equipment. The only way to even stay on the farm, is to either walk into a situation where everything - land, house, barn, equipment, everything - is already paid for. Or to get a full time job in town and farm on the weekends. That's what my dad did. And it's what my sister and brother-in-law do now.
We have a situation where we've harnessed economies of scale so much that we have only a small handful of corporations producing our food. They mainly want to grow exactly the same small number of crops, to keep supply chains simple. We've wrung all of the redundancy, both financial and biodiversity, out of the system.
So what happens if someone figures out how to weaponize that against us? What happens if Chinese investors own half the farm land and we go to war with China? Or what happens if we encounter this generation's version of potato blight on corn or wheat? This is not just a human tragedy. It's a huge national security issue, and it looks like nobody is paying attention.
> We've wrung all of the redundancy, both financial and biodiversity, out of the system.
I have similar concerns, not just about farming but other parts of a globalised economy. It is far more efficient to have everyone very specialised, with long-range dependencies. It is far less resilient to have one huge coupled economic system than a number of smaller, approximately independent systems. [+] Similarly, it's more efficient (in the short run, or the lucky case) to not leave any contingency or insurance against rare events.
> What happens if Chinese investors own half the farm land and we go to war with China?
I wouldn't worry about this one -- unless foreign investors have a means to enforce physical security of their ownership claims, there's always the option of the government with control over the physical assets to expropriate them, either by simply changing the law, or declaring special war time powers. For example, re: WW1
> the attack on enemy aliens and their property involved diverse institutions (governments, parliaments, the judiciary, armies and administrative bureaucracies) and actors (local businessmen and entrepreneurs, lobbies and interests groups but also ordinary people animated by patriotism or who saw in the attack on enemy property an opportunity to improve their own economic status).
https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/property_r...
edit: [+] to call myself out for claiming things based solely on intuition, it's not at all obvious that many smaller independent economies are necessarily always more resilient than a single arbitrarily structured large economy -- it might depend on the structure of dependencies, and how much choice there is for alternatives if subsystems fail, and how much slack is in the system, and dynamic factors. To argue in the other direction, smaller, isolated economies also tend to be at more risk of failure if any of their larger participants fails (see also: common wisdom about risk of buying real estate in small single company or single industry towns and so on...), so there's probably more robustness for those economies where the impact of failure of any single participant upon the overall system is roughly negligible. but i think there is usually a pretty strong conflict between efficiency redundancy.
It's mostly the market price of outputs. As was stated in the OP, producing a gallon of milk costs $1.90 or thereabouts. The cost in the grocery store is $2.59 in my area this week. This price has to cover not just the farmr's costs, but the shipping, packaging, and grocery store overhead. The farmer is lucky to break even, and often doesn't. I've read elsewhere that to guarantee a dairy farmer a living wage, without government subsidies, a gallon of milk would have to go for closer to $5. If you want organic, non-feedlot milk, that cost is even higher.
In my sister's case, our 300 acre farm can support around 75 breed cows, which means you could expect about 65 heifers and steers born every spring and sold every fall. These will be around 1200 pounds, at a “dressing percent” of 63% which means you get a 750 pound carcass. 490 pounds of this will be meat - let's call it 500 as a round figure. So she could produce 32,500 pounds of beef a year. The vast majority of this, over 75%, is going to be ground beef. A small fraction of it will be filet mignon.
If you figure that her business expenses are going to be in the neighborhood of $150,000, which is going to include equipment upkeep, fuel, fertilizer, seed, feed milling costs, farm maintenance costs, vet fees, medication per animal, and so on. She is going to need $50,000 in income to support her family, so that means her price per pound of beef would have to be about $6.15. Not including the cost of butchering, transport, auction fees, and all of the upstream costs (packaging, grocery store overhead and profits, etc). Now if you walk into your grocery store you will find ground beef commonly going for $5 a pound or less.
The 4-H says it costs about $7 a pound to produce beef, so that's a pretty good estimate.
And note that this does not include buying new equipment. A new tractor of a size that would let her bale hay starts at $50,000. Paying to have the farm re-fenced would be somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 depending on specifics. It also does not count all of the horrible things that can and do go wrong farming. If she cuts hay and it gets rained on before it dries, she loses that crop. You get three hay cuttings a year. That's a third of your hay crop gone, which means you have to buy hay. If there's a drought, you might have to buy water by the ton and have it trucked. If you get an outbreak of hoof rot, you lose a significant number of your animals and a significant amount of your pasture has to lay fallow for years until the pathogen dies. The number of horrible things that can go wrong that are beyond your control means that the above prices don't provide enough financial cushion to make it through a bad year or two.
That isn't a good scenario. Foreign? There were no white men in america, no black men either, so everyone is a foreigner, and the natives should expropriate them all? Dangerous ideas. That's how a war turns into a nightmare.
There are plenty of very positive stories about significant profits on less than five acres, even less than one acre. I'd like to hear your take on it.
This means that rural areas will continue to depopulate and that farming will either be industrial or bespoke.
The guy across the road from me, the “real” farmer, has 90 acres. He seems to do ok. He runs old tractors, and he lives in a simple one story brick house, so he isn't living large. His land was placed in the local agricultural preservation program, which means it can't legally be developed, and hence cost him a lot less than what would otherwise have been the going price in this area.
He makes money by raising hyper-local, organic specialty row crops on a subscription basis to extremely wealthy households in the Washington DC suburbs. That's a sustainable business plan, but only for a very small number of farmers. It's only possible because he was able to buy a farm at an extreme discount in a rapidly gentrifying area that is now one of the wealthiest counties in America and is getting wealthier by the year. If he was in Iowa that whole business plan falls apart.
Out of curiosity, how would you rate the quality of the soil in today's agribusiness farmlands? Seems food production now involves clones fed on ammonium nitrate derived from natural gas and mined potash. This suggests the crops of today are being raised on junk food.
What are you talking about? Some hand-wavy paleo theory that isn't scalable?
I wouldn't go so far as to say they're not edible, but criticism of grains doesn't seem like outright crazy talk either.
I don't care what "some folks" beliefs are, I care about the ground truth.
It doesn't take a lot of equipment to deduce that billions of people eating grains consistently over the course of millenia means that people are in fact well equipped to eat grains.
The Semmelweis effect is regarding rejecting new evidence -- and yet you provide no evidence, while dismissing mine.
Perhaps you should question your beliefs.
"Bread and Other Edible Agents of Mental Disease
how cereal grains—the world’s most abundant food source—can affect human behavior and mental health. We present the implications for the psychological sciences of the findings that, in all of us, bread (1) makes the gut more permeable and can thus encourage the migration of food particles to sites where they are not expected, prompting the immune system to attack both these particles and brain-relevant substances that resemble them, and (2) releases opioid-like compounds, capable of causing mental derangement if they make it to the brain. A grain-free diet, although difficult to maintain (especially for those that need it the most), could improve the mental health of many and be a complete cure for others."
http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in...
People live to be 100 and happy and productive on largely grain-based diets, not thanks to the grain, but thanks to the modern world it allows. Pre-grain, we didn't live so long.
On balance I think grains are a no-brainer. Maybe there is some extraordinarily minor benefit to the individual not to eat grains, but, obviously, in light of the past 10,000 years of history, grains are fine for you and will keep you both alive and happy.
On the other hand, it's certainly true that these producers are not implementing anything like a closed-loop nutrient plan. They're absolutely trucking in fertilizer from somewhere else to keep yields high. And they're producing monocultures, enforced with chemical pesticides and herbicides, to keep expenses low. Neither of those things strikes me as good in any possible way other than cost efficiency.
"Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm — which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems."
Is this actually true that small farmers can't feed the country? Farming productivity even on small farms is at an all time high. It's probably higher than the 1970's.
Gas will likely flatline as electricity takes over more and more. Health care is an issue for everybody that needs to get taken care of.
My math on farms always seems to tell me that labor is the primary problem. Why work on a farm which is really hard work when just about any job will pay better?
How far do food prices have to rise to reverse this?
> Or what happens if we encounter this generation's version of potato blight on corn or wheat? This is not just a human tragedy. It's a huge national security issue, and it looks like nobody is paying attention.
Maximally efficient is minimally robust. We learn that, painfully, over and over and over ....
But I'm surrounded on all sides by other families. There are 13 people in addition to my family of four within shouting distance of my back door. They aren't farmers. Some of their land is theoretically arable, if they knew how to do it and had the equipment, which they don't, and if they had already improved their soil to make it amenable to subsistence farming, which they haven't.
Small farmers could have fed the country fifty years ago, when there were a lot more of us and when many more people who weren't farmers nevertheless substantially supplemented their diets with family gardens. But there are far fewer farmers and far more people to feed now.
It could be done - it has been done in the past - but we are heading in the opposite direction and have been for several decades.
I have been wondering why there isn't a mandate that every tree on public land must be food-producing. In a day I must pass hundreds if not thousands of non-edible trees and shrubs just lining pavements, dotted about on business parks, on little bits of nowhere-ville grassland.
If they can grow so readily, why couldn't food producing plants grow like that, in their millions all over the country?
The main threat to agriculture in time of war used to be dependence on foreign oil, but the US has largely solved that.
See, the 'peak oil' people were wrong; turns out that if you are willing to pay more, there's a lot more oil you can extract (albeit at a higher cost)
I actually think it was a self-defeating prophecy in a way. The peak oil folks actually had some mindshare for a while, and there was a lot of investment in more expensive ways to get oil out of the ground that had the assumption of long term oil prices being over a hundred bucks a barrel. This, I think, caused over-investment in new ways of extracting oil, which drove up production and drove down prices. (I mean, there was also a lot of investment in renewables, and I imagine that is also putting downward pressure on oil prices.)
I don't think that actually refutes "peak oil" suggestions that there's a price curvature that's going to keep going up.
Peak oil was this idea that both supply and demand were largely inelastic. In that case, when those curves crossed, you'd have the figurative unstoppable force and the immovable object; the price of oil would climb out of control, the economy would grind to a halt.
The primary thesis of 'peak oil' was that we couldn't extract more oil from the ground than we already were extracting. Through fracking and the exploitation of oil shale and oil sands... we did, in fact, extract more oil.
Turns out, the supply of oil is, to some extent, elastic. Yeah, we're going to run out some day, but with our current tech... it's starting to look like we might have trouble dealing with the atmospheric carbon output before we have serious trouble with the supply of hydrocarbons.
Well, not really. Yes, it's true that a substantial fraction of current US food production goes to animal feed. Yes, it's true, theoretically, that you could turn all of that into human food production instead. Of course, that would mean we'd all need to become vegetarians, but of course that's better than starving.
But this elides two important points. First, humans can't survive on what is currently being grown. In other words, we can't just stop feeding all of that corn and soybeans to animals and give it to humans instead. We can't live off of a diet that is 75% field corn and industrial soybeans. We would have to change what is being produced, and that would be like turning a battleship. It's doable, but it would take time.
And second, without animals in the loop it's very hard to have a sustainable nutrient cycle. Animals, especially ruminants like cattle, sheep, and goats, can turn otherwise inedible vegetation on unarable land into manure which can be used as fertilizer. So if we do away with the animal agriculture, and turn entirely vegetarian, then we are as a side effect reinforcing our dependence on industrial fertilizers.
Of course, you can argue that that nutrient cycle is already broken in our current system, and you'd be right. But if you want to look at what a truly sustainable, environmental agricultural system would look like, it almost has to have ruminants.
Look, for example, at how Amish farms work. Those guys do it right. Their crop yields are on par with the best yields in big ag. It's a sustainable model.
Why not? Beans and rice, potatoes and milk, bread and peanut butter. Those are all nutritionally complete diets, as in you won’t get any deficiency diseases eating nothing else for a year. Feed corn and soybeans has carbs and protein. It might be nutritionally complete by itself. Add cabbage or some other leafy green vegetable and 100g of meat a week and you’ve got a monotonous, bland, healthy diet.
I’m not saying this is pleasant, feed corn tastes pretty awful but you absolutely could live off a diet that was mostly beans and corn.
We don't have the equipment to do this at the necessary scale. Corn just isn't used as a survival crop this way, so there's never been an economic need to invest in the machinery to do it.
We probably do have the infrastructure to keep producing wheat bread in mass quantities. Do we have the peanut production and processing infrastructure to handle peanut butter becoming our primary protein source? I doubt it.
And of course with soybeans... they would need to be dried or canned, packaged, stored, and shipped. Doable but different from what we are currently set up to do.
And of course there's the psychological impacts of all of that, which again are probably oreferable to starving but wouldn't be good. People fight wars (or gang wars)over this kind of thing.
As a soybean farmer, and one who has focused on IP soybeans for the human market for most of my career at that, unless I am misunderstanding you, that is exactly how we do it. The beans are harvested dry, packaged, stored, and then shipped (primarily) to the Asian markets who are interested in such product.
The trouble in North America is that few know what to do with them. To be honest, I have never even tried my own product. I also grow navy beans and have cooked with them. They are more of a common staple in these parts. But they are also a much more fickle crop. You're not going to easily replace soys with other edible beans.
Both feed corn and industrial soybeans yield their deliciousness to the power of the chemical engineers. Both are processed into food you and I eat every day. I bet you a dollar that your last piece of chocolate had lecithin in it, and you have to go pretty far out of your way to get lecithin that isn't from soy. And corn syrup. I'd bet a fair number of dollars that you've consumed some corn sugar product today, and that can be made from feed corn.
TVP is a common ingredient in meat substitutes, and it is a pretty heavily processed food made from what's left over after you extract the soybean oil from the industrial soybeans.
My favorite preparation is the "Morningstar farms" "Grillers Prime" vegieburgers... but you can also buy tvp bits at the health-food store, and I know people who use 1/3rd ground beef, 2/3rds TVP bits in their spaghetti sauce, and it pretty much tastes like your regular beefy spaghetti sauce. My mom used to make TVP sloppy joes that were sloppy joe sauce with TVP instead of meat. (I personally think meat greatly improves that recipe... but you can add a lot of TVP in with that meat without ruining the flavor, if you ask me.)
(To be clear, I'm not actually arguing that TVP is as delicious as actual meat. It's... usually not. But it can be quite palatable, and it is unquestionably nourishing, and it is made from the soybeans you grow for oil; stuff that would otherwise be used in cattle feed.)
I don't, but I would, if I were hungry enough. Most of the stuff we mix corn syrup with we mix in to make it taste better. If you've ever had straight corn syrup on your pancakes, (It's commonly sold under the brand Karo for this) you'd know it's fine. It's not maple syrup, but it's certainly something you could eat just fine, if you were hungry.
I think that's true of most of these things. If you are hungry enough, you'll take your macro-nutrients as they are.
I don't personally know how to make soy protein isolate, but I do know how to make tofu. If you gave me my 3000 calories a day in buckets of dry soybeans, I wouldn't be happy about it, but I wouldn't starve.
I grew up on a UK small holding sheep farm (2-400). In the 80s it was possible to raise a small family largely thanks to the benefit system.
As I see it hobby farmers are all we need for sheep production. I agree that we need a degree of livestock but we need to transition to reducing our consumption of meat hugely. Much of the land currently used for livestock should be converted to forest and forest garden communities as soon as possible. There a problem with consumer awareness. If consumers cared about pesticides in their food, or food miles, or dependence on foreign imports (on an island nation) then the locally produced food would be more viable. However most consumers are so heavily hypnotised by modern consumerism there only desire what is persuasively advertised which means sexy new 'phones' and not poison free vegetables. Control of food and water gives certain control of people. Only a small percentage of the population is really aware of what it takes to make enough food to stay alive. Large corporate forces now control policy and effectively the market condition in most respects so small scale passionate farmers are best of not trying to engage with the commodity markets. If the UK leaves the EU and there is a major global conflict people will quickly start to realise the value of local food.
I'm mostly interested in how we can reduce the labour overhead in the this kind of small scale farming. At EMF camp I saw an brilliant example of someone building their own open source horticultural robot. It will be at https://pretix.eu/farmhackwales2018/fhw2018/
I have major concerns with how automation and interconnectivity have taken off faster than security efforts can keep up. It needn't be a state actor, even - a disgruntled worker at John Deere might push an update to a million tractors that burns out their motors, for example.
The next World War might just be us waking up one day and the lights don't work.
https://www.netflix.com/watch/80149707?trackId=13752289&tctx...
Disruption or destruction of key transit or water infrastructure in California would be a crippling blow to the US.
The infrastructure to farm is gone. I worked on a farm as a teen in the 90s. There were 10 active farms in my town then (down from dozens in the 70s). Now there is one. I don’t think there are more than a half dozen dairy operations in the county left.
The money bought out smaller farmers and created the great latifundium slave estates. Some of these estates survived in various forms into the 20th century.
I doubt that the US is that dependent on California. For lettuce and strawberries, yes. Not for wheat, corn, soybeans, or cattle, though. We won't starve without salads or strawberries.
I know that I'm missing some of what California grows. Losing it would hurt. But it's not vital.
Isnt this the reason for barter communities; bater some of your meat for some other veggies... or farm products.?
When people want half a beef, they pay cash.
The old style barter systems require scale just like the OP said. That scale no longer exists. Everybody is either too small or too big. If you are small enough that I can barter with you, you don't have enough of what I need. If you are ADP, you don't have a human who can interact with me to execute a trade and you have no interest whatsoever in my goat.
It's the continued consolidation that will result in cartel/monopolies and their catastrophic outcome. That combined with unlimited finance in politics to protect these interests and we have a perfect storm. Unless anti-trust is zealously enforced and quickly, we are facing a future a lot rougher than today.
The problems you mention are very real. I am not in farming, so a noob, but it is clear to me that significant change in food production is a requirement.
I see some positive trends (at least here in The Netherlands). On the one hand the awareness that industrial-scale production is unsustainable. There is a Guardian article on that today: 'Europe's meat and dairy production must halve by 2050, expert warns' [0]. Also there was talk on potato farmers getting only 0.09ct per kilo for their produce, while in the supermarket it costs $1.80 (this for local production, NL is quite small). Even large farmers are selling below cost price. Furthermore they throw small potatoes back on the field to rot, because they do not match supermarket criteria. Etcetera. NL is 2nd-largest food exporter (in a bunch of markets) in the world, after US [1]. A system under strain.
On the other hand - at the consumer side - there is growing awareness of the problem, more willingness to pay more for local and organically (eco) grown foodstuffs.
I think it should be possible for different models to be profitable. Besides the bartering communities mentioned by sibling, your small farmers could all arrange yourselves in co-ops, both to the supply-side (buy machinery together) as towards consumer-side (e.g. run/finance a co-op supermarket).
Regarding produce: Diversifying, and offering stuff that is not in supermarket can be a unique selling point. Good cooking with proper ingredients has become a hype in NL (stimulated by countless TV programs). Now take cucumber. The supermarket only has the long green, rather tasteless kind. But there are countless varieties. Different forms, different flavors, more tasty. Sell it as a specialty. Tell a good story with them (i.e. marketing storytelling), 'The good country life'-idea. Have people be willing to pay a premium.
I realize that in Netherlands this may be easier, because of population density, and production being always very near to consumers.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/15/europe-m...
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-...
No it's not, it's a relatively tiny food producer with high yield rates per unit of area. Take their best yielding crop, tomatoes, they're not even in the top 10 producers worldwide. Uzbekistan produces more tomatoes than we do.
We do have high yields, but that's mostly for food that are 96% water like tomatoes, as there's barely any solids to grow, you can just stack em in a greenhouse. Nothing too innovative going on there, in potatoes for example we're well below the number one in area-efficiency.
And even the high yields in things like tomatoes or cucumbers isn't special in any way, it just optimises for area. The US has about 30 people per square kilometer, the Netherlands has over 400. Some countries don't have a priority for production density because they literally have 10-15x as much land. Besides, the vast majority of agricultural land is used for livestock anyway, if you take meat out of the equation, we could feed tens of billions of people easily. That's really where the problem lies, in meats. The source of all issues in production really lies with us, in our diets. You could spend less money if you ate better food as long as we all cut your meat consumption, and to get there we need to start pricing in all externalities because right now we a high price pay for shitty food we shouldn't eat through our taxes, and then overconsume by paying a low price in the supermarket after subsidising it with said taxes.
Not exactly the same but as long as we have national reservoirs and get politically enforced sustainability and diversity we should be fine.
This is important, and politically difficult. I mean, we subsidize farms to farm in America because it makes us much more secure against all sorts of potential problems. I, for one, think farm subsidies, if well done, are a very good use of my defense tax dollar.
But it's important that we see those subsidies as a defense subsidy and not, you know, just a handout to a particular class of people; This means that we need sustainable farming practices and we need crop diversity, as those are the only way to defend against some of the threats we face.
(I mean, I personally see it as "you don't want a subsidy? do what you like. But if you want a subsidy? you have to follow these best practices." then you set the subsidy numbers based on how many acres you think we need for that sort of thing.)
I think that could be the root cause. People are used to food not costing enough, a living animal should be costly. I don’t understand why food should not be important in a budget.
And since we need to eat less and better, it could even help making transformed products uneconomical and we would mostly stick to raw products, and get back some consideration for what we eat.
The richer classes eat more well and buy more expensive food even when they have choice. They are also healthier and eat healthier.
There's also demand for locally produced organic food by health & environment conscious folks.
If they owned half the land for anything inside the territory of a potential rival, they would definitely be aware of their advantage and keep some cards up their sleeve for the possibility of losing access to that land.
Doesn't sound like much of a problem to me. Those economies of scale mean cheaper food.
> They mainly want to grow exactly the same small number of crops, to keep supply chains simple.
Is there any evidence that variety of, say, produce in markets/grocery stores is less now than a hundred years ago?
> Or what happens if we encounter this generation's version of potato blight on corn or wheat?
Then we switch crops, like what happened to bananas before? It's not like we literally have no access to seeds and whatnot for other crops.
Not in markets, because a hundred years ago most people didn't get their produce from a market. They got it from their own gardens or the local farm.
The issue here is that back then, there were lots and lots of different varieties of a given crop, all of them grown regionally. There are thousands and thousands of varieties of corn. In 1915, 200 of these were grown commercially in Kansas. Today, Reid Yellow Dent, a type of field corn, has basically take over the market. 99% of all corn grow in the US is a subvariety of yellow dent.
Walk into your market. When it's in season you will find a bin of sweet corn (which is not field corn). There will be one variety. Thre will be one variety of broccoli. Three or four varieties of potatoes. Two types of summer squash, one of which will be zucchini.
At a high end market you will be given a choice between two types of beef: “beef” and “angus beef”. One type of lamb, and one type of chicken. But there are hundreds of varieties of beef cow, tens of varieties of meet sheep, and at least fifty different varieties of meat or dual-use chicken.
Look through a good heirloom seed catalog some time (I like Southern Exposure Seed Exchange). You'll find a hundred types of tomato, fifteen or twenty types of potato, ten types of sweet potato, twenty varieties of corn, ten varieties of broccoli. Plus some crops that you just can't find in a market.
It's not that any individual's food choices are more constrained now than they used to be; that's clearly not the case. It's that the total amount of genetic diversity in corn, potatoes, or whatever, as a fraction of the total acreage of those crops, has dropped precipitously.
Heck, if anything, we're probably more flexible now since it's now possible to directly genetically engineer new varieties and we have massive seedbanks around with modern infrastructure for distribution.
> Not in markets, because a hundred years ago most people didn't get their produce from a market. They got it from their own gardens or the local farm.
For people in rural areas, sure, but in more urban areas I'm sure they had markets of some sort.
TLDR; among other issues, a lot of the seeds for varieties we used to grow actually don't exist anywhere any more.
https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/07/19/loss-of-gen...
https://www.croptrust.org/our-mission/crop-diversity-why-it-...
The reason for this is automation, though it isn't really touched on by this article. At some point in the near future robots will not only be able to construct greenhouses for growing crops with hydroponics but they'll also be able to do most of the work too.
Look at these examples of hydroponic (vs soil) yields [1]. Hydroponic yields are in typically in the order of 3-10+ tims that of soil. In greenhouses you can control temperature, grow year-round and not have your crop wiped out by inclement weather (barring hurricanes/tornadoes, which may destroy your greenhouses but this is less of an issue than a frost or snowstorm destroying your crop).
When human labour is only minimally required to construct a greenhouse or man it you'll see (IMHO) the biggest change to human food production since the advent of agriculture.
It's also why I'm not particularly worried about the ability of the planet to feed itself. If food were produced this way, Earth could easily support a population of 50-100 billion.
The article mentions that two bad years can lose the farm. The only way to counter such risks is scale. That's why mega-farms are becoming and will become the norm.
Of course along the way I fully expect massive increases in government subsidies because of the political power of farmers (in the US and EU) but you just can't turn back time.
And for automation, yes it is a threat, but often times more expensive than just paying cheap labor, which it seems the world won't be running out of in the short term
Does that take into account all the externalities that are currently still ignored in standard farming? I mean, one could argue that they'll continue to get ignored indefinitely sure, but I wonder if we're starting to reach a tipping point there again and while cletus didn't mention it I think that's one of the most compelling arguments towards hydroponics. Pure physical barriers could mean the elimination of pesticide and herbicide requirements for example, and both of those hide and enormous amount of expense upstream and downstream. Nutrients (fertilizer) can be applied vastly more effectively and efficiently, and possibly at least as importantly excess can be recovered or processed before any emission which can entirely eliminate runoff issues and entry into the environment.
Even thinking politically, the general public often enjoys the views and imagine romanticism of farming, but the general public can also quite easily notice and hate algal blooms, outbreaks shutting down beaches, nutrient baths causing explosions of invasives like zebra mussels, etc., and just general reductions in recreational water quality even beyond any other effects. Those also represent big, powerful industries as well. And there is the land itself, hydroponics means arable land is unnecessary for basic food production, and there are other compelling uses for said land.
Also land-wise and politically, one argument that frequently gets brought up is "food security" and governments reasonably worried about having enough basic food available in an emergency. But at least for rich countries, if anything LED hydroponics could offer a better story there (at a price), since the facilities can even be put underground/underwater or in other non-arable, dense and defensible positions. They can be protected from new forms of diseases and pests far more effectively. Small developed countries that currently must import might be able to achieve that politically attractive (whatever the practical merits) "food independence" that is current infeasible for them.
I mean, I don't think there will be any super rapid changes here, and I do think many places will continue to have some agriculture as a boutique offering, but hydroponics long term looks pretty compelling in a lot of major ways.
One guy I was good friends with would always sell enough of his crop ahead to pay all his bills if the price was above his cost of production. Sometimes he'd sell two or three years ahead when prices were good. He said in a ten year period he had lots of neighbors who made more money than he did some years only to lose it during the bad years. He said that gambling with borrowed money didn't make any sense, only with your profits.
Knew two guys who let their wives do all the farms marketing. They went to school for it and would network online with other farm marketers. They felt that they were too emotional about it and that it helped their wives feel like true partners.
[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1350485080229797...
In the UK, economists say QE has been a success to the point where some say we have learned how to print money without creating Weimar-style inflation. However it looks like the inflation has simply transferred to assets, particularly property including farmland. And we don’t yet know what the impact is. Again in the UK, we might say in the future, increasing property prices resulted in a reduced birth rate, and an increased need for inward migration to plug the gap. Just speculation, but we don’t yet know how this experiment plays out - and with your interesting insight, we might ask whether the end of mid-scale farming was the impact. Given the importance of this group, for many reasons, on American culture and identity, what will be the victim of QE?
Farm lending is not nearly so highly leveraged as home lending. FmHA equity requirements are much larger than on home loans.
Farm land prices are driven by commodity prices. When corn and soybeans were high, Iowa cash rents went up, and land prices followed. Commodity prices have come down, cash rents have come down, and land prices are following.
There is some speculation on price appreciation -- just about any Iowa farmer will tell you about "the piece of ground he wish he had bought", but didn't have the stomach to bid higher on at the auction. Most farmers are buying land with the idea that it is a multi-generational investment, and when good ground near/adjacent to your current farm comes up, you tend to dig deeper into your pocket and hope your children will see the value appreciation -- because that piece may not come on the market again in your lifetime. So there is a certain psychological component priced in to the bid, but mostly it has to pencil out.
If you think land prices are completely unhinged, then here is an anecdote: I own some ground in Winnebago county Iowa. When land in Winnebago county was selling for $11K/Ac there was land 5 miles north on the Minnesota side of the state line selling for about $10K/Ac. Same soil type. Same weather. Same local market elevators to sell crops to. Same local market seed/chemical coops to buy your input. Why the difference in price? Minnesota real estate taxes are higher (I won't go into the politics of that.) The taxes are a per-acre annual production cost, and get priced into the land value.
Commodity prices are coming down, that is causing the income squeeze. Leveraged farmers are going to feel a squeeze, certainly. But the amount of leverage is nothing like what was happening to home owners during the housing crisis. Farm land owners simply can not borrow at those kind of loan-to-value ratios.
(Source: Owner and/or partner in several pieces of farm land in Iowa and Minnesota, some inherited, some purchased.)
Oh.. about corn prices... back when there were enough ethynol plant building permits on file to eventually make Iowa a net importer of corn... yeah, that was a corn price bubble. Those days are gone. (Let's not diverge into the silliness of ethynol, we all know it defies physics.)
>A gallon of milk costs a farmer approximately $1.90 to produce, but in the last year, farmers have been receiving as little as $1.35 per gallon.
But they don't explain the underlying economic forces. The only possible reason (I think) that a farmer can't charge more than $1.35 for a gallon of milk is that some other farmer is able to produce a gallon of milk for less than $1.35.
So, clearly, some farmers are quite successful, and their success (or maybe just their efficiency) is part of the reason that other farmers are having a hard time? But the article doesn't talk about that much.
Slightly off topic: I pay my local supermarket $3 for a gallon of milk and now I'm curious about the breakdown of what that markup is spent on.
Not necessarily - if you have demand for 300 units of milk and there are enough producers to match, then when demand halves, the producers are still producing 300 units of milk and paying for the costs to produce that amount of milk. To offset those costs as much as possible, they'll willingly momentarily sell under marginal cost - the production costs have already been spent anyways
A sibling comment lower down the page provides some links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17996881
In our area of Michigan a huge new cheese plant is going in and the only justification I can see for that large an investment is they already know the dairy tariff is ending.
https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/2018/08/09/55...
St. Johns is a small farm town North of Lansing which is Michigan's state capital.
If you're producing something that's consistently being over-produced, what do they expect to happen?
Don't get me wrong. Obviously, the food supply is important. It's also difficult (i.e., weather). None the less, running full force into producing a commodity can't be the best option they have. Is it?
Wheat was back to levels we haven't seen in a long time. Corn has held a little above average. Soybeans have taken a big hit in the last couple of months, but there were some good marketing opportunities earlier in the year. Unless harvest is a complete failure, there doesn't seem to be much to worry about. A welcome change from the last few years when the price was lower.
Not being in the US, I don't necessarily see the effects of the trade war like the US farmer is seeing, so I am unable to comment about that. But as far as the regular market price goes, which the article also raised concern about, I really don't see the issue. The grain farmers should be positioned fairly well right now.
Update: this is discussed in another sub-thread on this page.
For example, I didn't see a single mention of "...so we're going to go organic..."
Again. Don't get me wrong. Food supply is important. One article does not a trend make. That said, sharing a bad idea with 100 or 1000 other people (farmers) still makes it a bad idea.
I realize change isn't something most farmers seek, none the less, they are not immune to the definition of insanity.
Convert your wheat crop to mint?
Commodities are commodities because there is such a huge demand for them. Niche products are not some super easy to get rich with scheme.
If you want to succeed in the mint market, you'd better do you homework, execute perfectly, and get lucky. Just like in the commodities market.
True. However, that doesn't mean, per the article, they are profitable. And if they are unprofitable, doesn't that mean supply is greater than demand?
Growing an unprofitable commodity and then saying "I'm not making money" doesn't make sense. Even if there oversight (e.g., Uncle Sam) and you trust that oversight (which we know is inconsistent) I would think it makes sense, if you want to be legitimately profitable, you'd try to mitigate the risks.
Farmers are being paid to grow food that gets destroyed. The masses are eating so much cheap food they're becoming ill more often and/or dying younger. The status quo doesn't feel sustainable.
Going organic is nearly a decade long process during which time you are paid regular market price while having to burden the added cost of organic processes. If you have the millions to get going it can be a good deal long-term, but a farmer who is already struggling is going to be broke long before they ever meet certification.
Do we have a robust network of state-funded plumber advocates or cashier advocates? If farming is unprofitable for many, then the expected market response is people exiting the market, which itself will make it more profitable for those who remain.
Farming is largely a commodity game. That we need fewer farmers over time due to technological advances is entirely expected and even good! A society where a large percentage of people still had to be farmers to have enough food to eat would be a poorer one.
If it cost more to make it than they are getting, why are milk prices not higher?
https://www.realagriculture.com/2018/02/u-s-dairy-subsidies-...
Also, farmers are a powerful special interest group. I know a dairy farmer who was invited to meet with a state governor one on one. The farmer flew to the meeting on his family's private jet.
Hard to argue against that logic.
Cheap food is great for votes. Unfortunately, it also seem to often have ill health consequences.
I hear ya. But that does not diminish the consequences and real cost of subsidized foods.
Fact: Worldwide, more people die from the effects of too much food than not enough.
The situation would sort itself out better if we’d left it the hell alone, but now the pain that correcting this situation will cause is significant
Oh America...
> Under the system established in the 1930s, the farther a state was from Eau Claire, the higher were the federal price subsidies paid to its dairy farmers on milk sold for bottling.
> For example, the maximum subsidy, or differential, paid to Wisconsin dairy farmers is $1.20 per 100 pounds of milk, while farmers in southern Florida are paid $4.18 per 100 pounds.
California is even further away.
The particulars of it are at https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GAOREPORTS-RCED-95-97BR/html/G...
It is still based in part on Eau Claire. https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/06/08/what-does-bo...
Between water policy, oversupply during the Eau Claire Base Point and existing subsidies... California is a very odd place to produce milk and the cheap milk is a legacy of those policies.
And the last spring and hot summer in Eau Claire ( http://www.aos.wisc.edu/%7Esco/clim-history/stations/eau/eau... & https://madison.com/wsj/business/usda-wisconsin-milk-product... ) will impact the price of milk there, along with the tariff spat with Canada... which in turn changes the amount of the subsidy across the country.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/31/643486297/epis...
Let's say producing a product costs $5 in fixed costs (interest, depreciation, etc) and $1 in variable costs (labor, raw material, etc), for total of $6 per unit. If you can sell the product for more than $6, you make a profit. If you sell the product for $1-$6, you lose less money than you would if you didn't sell it, because you have to pay those fixed costs even if you don't produce any units. You should only stop production if the price falls below $1.
Roman food distribution was anything but efficient or fair
Inequality essentially lead to the famine indirectly. If the major buyers were the people enmasse wine would be less prioritized. Grain shipments would still happen given relative advantage in trade but it wouldn't have had such a dysfunction as food demand would have the proper 'clout'.
I recall hearing about one further irony later in history. One reform that made things even worse for equality was having state supplied armaments instead of citizens being expected to provide their own. It has long been essentially common sense and the way a military seems like it should work. One would think that would be better for equality by allowing rich and poor to fight and advance in status but it helped set up a proto-generalismo situation by having the power derived by the state instead of citizens.
You can do it yourself if you learn hedging. Iowa State has https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/crops/html/a2-60.html and University of Missouri https://extension2.missouri.edu/g602
You can also hedge risk against changes in production cost by using instruments that track the difference between raw grains and their immediate products (e.g. Soybean Crush). But that's not really a game the farmer might play.
These systems have their limits, and are really there to protect all parties against sudden shifts caused by external events like drought and international trade. When the trend is long and smooth in one direction there's very little the farmer can do to fix their situation via purely financial means. No baker is going to pre-purchase their wheat at old prices when the market price has been slowly declining for a decade.
https://www.amazon.com/Futures-Speculator-Origins-Biggest-Ma...
(no affiliate link)
This is why TV and radio stations in the breadbasket states air daily crop price reports around sunrise.
But consider that many farmers only have a high school education, and are managing operations with millions in assets/debt, hundreds of thousands in revenue per year, and razor thin margins. A lot can go wrong.
Many understand the benefits and dangers of financing, but many don't.
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/mobile/farmers-ranchers-a...
It's not that farmers are particularly uneducated as a class of people. It's that they run complex businesses relative to their formal education. A minority of people finish college, but only a small number of high school graduates are farmers. Most who become farmers learn the job by growing up on a farm.
I worked for a company that tried to insure farmers so they'd be profitable even in bad years, but the reduction in profit on good years (i.e. cost of insurance) was too much to sell well.
<i>My favourite story is about the contract between the farmer and the devil. The devil says, "sign this contract and I'll triple your farm's profits". But there are 25 footnotes, as there always is with the devil. Footnote 22 says that 1% of your soil will be eroded each year, which is actually horrifyingly close to the real average over the past 50 years. The farmer signs and makes a fortune on a 40-year contract. And his son then signs up for the next 40-year contract and makes a fortune. And his son then signs up for the third and final contract. He still does very well, and in the final 20 years the family has accumulated enormous wealth, but the soil has gone. It's the same story for all his neighbouring farms and everyone is out of business. My sick joke is that at least he will die a rich farmer when all the starving hordes arrive from the city.</i>
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2013/apr/16/jer...