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Comment by nanomonkey | Hacker News Reader

I personally would love to work on a farm, but not the type you see today. Monoculture and pesticide laden farming practices make for boring work with little to no cultural value.

It seems to me that we would see more adoption of farm positions if we provided smaller, integrated farm plots where folks that had their fill of urban living, wanted to raise a family and be closer to nature could be apart of a community. Sort of a replacement for the sterile suburbs where people go to raise families, only with flexible family focused farm jobs.

I realize there are intentional communities that provide this, but I wonder if the ag industry is missing out on an opportunity also.

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I think the issue is that small farms aren't very efficient. My wife's father owns a small farm in Iowa but has another job because it just doesn't make enough money to afford even his pretty meagre lifestyle. Having been around farms in small communities I think that people in cities have idealistic views of what farm life is like.

They're almost talking about a fundamentally different type of farming. If your just plowing, growing a several crops and using fertilizers and pesticides, your highly dependent on things like price of fertilizer, price of seeds, price of diesel, price of pesticides. Now the hard goods manufactures are killing the secondary market for farm implements and building implements that can't be owner serviced, which makes the farmer even more dependent on price to service those equipment from the dealer only. All of these easily surmountable in a big operation, but stacked against the farmer next door.

I think this depends on your definition of efficiency. For food production to land use, small polyculture farm techniques have been proven to produce more yield. If you're only interested in man hours to yield, then yes large scale farming techniques are more efficient.

By efficiency I mean food per $. I met someone who runs a small organic dairy farm and each small container of yogurt was 12$ and it's not like he was making tons of money (and that was after years getting organic certified).

Edit: it was super cool to meet his cows but the market for 12$ yogurt is so small that it would he hard to break into that market. He only got there because his family has run a very natural dairy farm for decades (or at least that's what he told me).

I wonder if we will learn to value food again, meaning what portion of our earnings would be willing to pay, if say we all got healthy, very fresh, organic, non-pesticide food that we know isn't contaminated - and if we factor indirect costs of not eating the "safest" and healthiest food throughout our lives? Maybe "$12" can be considered a "good deal" or reasonable. With automation, cost of unit produced can reach "$0" - so long as we pass all of that value created to the consumer. We're going to see more and more layers converted from jobs requiring manual labour, to not requiring it - like one example soon to rapidly scale is Amazon Go stores.

Truth in labelling will help. Labels that stretch the truth to the limit make us all cynics, and you wonder if this pricey organic chicken was really raised any differently from the cheap chicken.

food per dollar is one interesting measurement, but products like yoghurt are not fungible, no matter how much we would like to treat them that way in industrial agriculture.

So the real question isn't can someone produce yoghurt cheaper than this person (they can) but is the product they produce worth the $12 for enough people to make a go of it.

Yeah, I agree that it's not a great metric and you can aim for a more expensive market but one thing I was pointing out is that the market for significantly more expensive food that this sort of farming would entail is really hard to break in to and also once you break in it also isn't hugely profitable (the guy compared it to the restaurant industry, which is a famously bad investment for inexperienced people). Anyway this is just one conversation I had with one guy to take it with a grain of salt.

Yeah, going into this sort of thing to get rich is probably going to make you sad.

The real question is if you love doing it, can you support yourself...

Like Polyface farms here in Central Va: http://www.polyfacefarms.com/

I grew up on a farm, so I have a pretty good idea of what goes on. Not sure why I'm being down voted, do people always assume that folks post about things they have no experience with?

Sure it was boring as a kid, but I got a lot of hands on training fixing machines and working with plants and animals. It was also much safer than the last 25 years that I've lived in Oakland.

I think you got downvoted because your statement about safety of the farm vs Oakland is off topic and irrelevant to to parent post's statement about the economic inefficiency of small farms.

Thanks, the downvote that I was referring to was the original post which was being down voted. That post was meant to be linked to that post not the above. My bad.

I can see that I'm touching on a heated topic (Rural vs. Urban living) that people feel strongly about.

My original point is that there appears to be people willing to work on farms, but not the types of farms that build culture and invite communities to be a part of. So we are left with migrant workers which in this day in age are probably largely illegal.

I would assume that this is an untouched labor force and economic niche that is being underutilized.

It can work, but the part that is missing from most people's thoughts is the amount of self-sufficiency you need outside of farming to live such a life style. You certainly aren't going to make a lot of money doing such a thing, but you will make some if you pick the right crops. However to be able to afford everything you need you will need additional tools and skills. You won't be able to afford getting your house roofed or your tractor repaired by somebody else, you will be roofing your own shit, fixing your own tractor, you are going to want to be canning or preserving a lot of your own foods, you might need to switch to wood heat and cut your own fire wood or otherwise have a MUCH smaller house, fix and maintain your own tools and equipment, ect.

If you can do all that, it is a good sustainable life, but if the most you can do is grow some garden crops and shit, you will not be able to afford the service costs of everything else you need to survive. You won't be able to sell some tomatoes and afford all the same services as before, especially out int he country where land is cheap. It takes a lot of fuel to get in and out of the areas where land is cheap enough to do any of that also.

There's something so weird about seeing HN readers saying "I'd love to live on a subsistence farm" when there's so many people in the world struggling to survive on the food they farm themselves.

HN readers are mostly imagining growing botique organic heirloom vegetables and that sort of thing- high end, high margins, very possibly as a hobby farm. Nobody here writing about how they want to work on a farm is imagining monocropping ten thousand acres of corn or living hand to mouth subsistence farming. IMO.

A fair number of people are doing this in small CSA operations, etc.

The main issue isn't can you do it, but can you make anything like a living wage doing it. Lots of variables in that equation.

*In San Francisco. My friend lives exactly the lift GP describes, but in the Hudson River Valley, in a beautiful Victorian house (with roommates). He's also incredibly jacked now. It's totally possible.

The people I know are averaging $100k/acre a year doing intensive farming and CSA, which doesn't seem bad to me. Examples would be Jean Martin Fortier style farming techniques.

People you know of, not people you know. If you knew him, you would know he doesn't actually farm, his money comes from selling overpriced lettuce to expensive restaurants. And that the entire market in Montreal is saturated just from his operation. A single person can make a living that way in each market of a few million people. That does not provide a path for 99.99% of the people who would like to get into farming. We can have about 10 people doing that in all of Canada. There's a lot more than 10 people who would like to be farmers, and most of them would like to actually be farmers not lettuce salesmen.

Some people obviously do ok at this. Others work hard for a decade and end up bankrupt.

I'm certainly not suggesting it's impossible, but it clearly isn't easy.

The ag industry doesn't care about what some people would like to do for a living, they care about making money. That's why they shut out small operations deliberately rather than supporting them. As an example, the big pork producers own all the pork processing plants. They set the rules, and the rules require very uniform hogs. So small farms who grow heritage pork breeds on natural diets instead of growing the single commercial pork breed on a corn+soy diet can't get their hogs slaughtered and processed. Everything in agriculture has been massively consolidated into a small number of huge corporations who exert tremendous influence in trying to make it even more consolidated. Small farms have to market directly to consumers and jump through lots of hoops to work around legal barriers lobbied for by huge agricorps. We end up spending more time as food salesmen than as farmers, which is far less enjoyable.

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