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Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

Please explain.

Because what I'm seeing is a pivot in exactly the other direction. Near urban centers you're seeing more 'specialty' farms like you spell out. These farms cater, almost exclusively, to the wealthy.

But out in the breadbasket, there has been an absolute crush of consolidation. Fewer, larger farms are producing the goods.

I argue that we're going to see (or rather are already seeing) the wal-martization of farming. Few, HUGE scale producers who work at a scale that is just so much larger than what we have now they can still turn a profit.

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Yes. You just described the split perfectly.

Small scale production is going for specialty products, at higher prices, to specialty consumers. Think of a local vegetable farm that sells to farmer's markets, or a goat dairy that's making chevre to sell at specialty groceries in a 50 mile radius of their farm.

On the other hand, gigantic companies are increasingly controlling land used for industrial agriculture. Near me, a recently incorporated LLC (aka holding company for investors) just paid $171-million for 14,000 acres of irrigated farmland in Eastern Washington [1]. At that scale, there's simply no way that the traditional "small family farmer" can compete with industrial ag.

The few that have near me, are large families that essentially operate like a business. They've managed to hold on to their traditional farmland, and then expanded into what are essentially family-owned large-scale industrial ag operations. Good for them, but they're the strong minority.

[1] https://www.heraldnet.com/business/big-farm-deal-171m-for-14...

It's this - the margins are so slim on commercial farming that they are in the grocer range (1-7%) and the only way grocers make money is on volume.

The one-off farms are great for those that can spend extra but they are not the ones feeding America right now.

I agree. At my local farmer's market, pretty much all the vendors sell their produce at a loss because they can't compete with big agri-business. (They continue to participate though, mostly for fun.)

It’s a common bias to think that everyone I know eats organic, therefore everyone eats organic. From that point of view, it makes sense to predict the demise of big farms.

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