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Comment by nanomonkey | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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/

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