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Comment by acconrad | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't work in farming because it isn't a free market. Most farms are owned by Cargill or Monsanto. And they are all propped up by the federal government.

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"Cargill is America’s largest privately-owned company, surpassing the second place Koch Brothers by billions of dollars in annual revenues. Cargill is the corporate behemoth at the nexus of the global industrial agriculture system, a system that it has designed to convert large swaths of the planet into chemically dependent industrial scale monocultures to produce cheap meat, palm oil, and chocolate."

http://www.mightyearth.org/cargillreport

Cargill has also slowly but steadily increased its presence around my parts of the world (Romania), taking advantage of one of the most nutrient soils on this planet, chernozem [1].

If you look at this map [2] is the stuff colored in green. Most of it can be found in the US Great Plains, and the second such zone comprises South-Eastern Romania + most of Ukraine + the plains North of the Caucasus (which are part of Russia). Making money out of Romania is easy, we are already a NATO and UE member, but the great stake for companies like Cargill is to be able to invest and take money out of Ukraine's plains, I think there are hundreds of billions to be made out there, not to speak of the strategic advantage of having Tsarist Russia's former bread-basket under your economic control.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem

[2] http://i.imgur.com/TmKdaFz.jpg

Oh jesus, TIL. Thanks for sharing.

Most farms are owned by Cargill or Monsanto

Can you supply some citations for that statement?

[edit] Wikipedia would indicate Non-family corporate farms account for 1.36 percent of US farmland area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_farming#North_Americ... [/edit]

Well, technically Cargil's are family farms since it is a privately held corporation (150k employees on $115B revenue) owned by a family which owns and operates the farms. Most (unbiased) estimates are closer to 70% family farms although those have also grown extraordinarily large in the last few decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill

https://newfoodeconomy.org/who-really-owns-american-farmland...

Uhm... I've worked at Cargill. You are quoting the whole value of a corporation not the total dealing with farmers. In fact, Cargill's grain division doesn't own any farms. Pork does, but that's not the type of farm we are talking about. Nothing owned by Cargill is listed as a family farm.

The article actually says United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that at least 30 percent of American farmland is owned by non-operators who lease it out to farmers. Yeah, that is a common arrangement that's been with us for decades.

Also, in some states, such as North Dakota, corporate farms are illegal http://inthesetimes.com/rural-america/entry/19224/north-dako...

All this does is cause relabeling of "corporate" farms to "family" farms since a privately held corporation held more than 50% by a single extended family is a "family" farm. They still end up being so large for economies of scale that no single mulit-generation family (of 20) could possibly farm them. The smaller farms are stuck in debt and poverty or sell out to the other "families". In my experience it's true for almonds, rice, corn, wheat, cotton, hogs, cattle. When you can't see the edge of the farm from the top of a pickup and talk about size by number of wells... it is a "family" farm in name only.

You really are going to have demographics to back that claim up. Technology has been amazing for the family farmer as it has allowed the purchase of machines that allow vast areas to be farmed by far less people. Farmers, unlike their typical portrayal, are pretty savvy about new technologies[1] and can manage both the land and financial tools such as hedging. Its still a lot of families that have been doing this for years and years.

1) although I content the six foot drone the folks here were playing with has a bit of a fun factor too in addition to mapping the fields for their crop forecasts and planning.

Beef grazing would need to be accounted for. Land under agistment, set aside and out of production too, but for rate purposes assessed as agriculture? I think you need to focus on cultivated/cropping.

> Most farms are owned by Cargill or Monsanto.

No, they aren't. Seed companies like Monsanto don't generally own commercial farms. Most farms buy seed from a small set of firms like Monsanto (well, Bayer), and sell to a small set of firms (I think Cargill and ADM are in this group.)

Most farms are owned by Cargill or Monsanto.

I know I shouldn’t care, but it’s comments like this that irritate me. Inaccurate to the point of being silly.

Cargill (especially) and Monsanto are pretty large, but combined they account for around a quarter of the total revenue.

Those companies breed seeds, they don't farm them.

... or Tyson.

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