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Comment by tdb7893 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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...

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.

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.

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