Isn’t the solution to increase these farms’ economies of scale? So the same civilisation-enhancing forces that drove development 10,000 years ago can show their force more broadly?
Oh no, it's 8,000 acres or so and they have a staff of workers to maintain it.
If the former, would you say what kind of farm it is, 1000 acre farm that’s easy enough to spend 15 hours a week seems interesting to me.
The time spent is kind of an interesting question because they could spend either time or more money to solve many issues. It was enough time to break even, but not enough profit to live on. However, a pure corn farm would taken less work, so they chose to spend more time than needed to make it more interesting.
AFAIK this describes most small-scale farmers. They're only doing it because of inertia (eg. they inherited the farm and they don't want to sell it), not because it's actually profitable.
During most of the growing season it's just sitting there without intervention. And all winter. A huge burst of activity in the spring with tillage / planting and/or seed drilling & spraying / fertilizing etc. Maybe a couple passes over for herbicide application. And then combine harvesting in the fall and maybe some tillage and planting of winter rye, etc. Then some machine maintenance, outbuilding maintenance, accounting / bookkeeping, seed and other inputs purchasing thrown in here and there throughout the year.
I can see it being as little as 15 hours a week if you averaged it over the whole year. But it would have moments of intensity.
But the reality is that most of these farmers around in my area are contracting out portions of this work, because owning the equipment ends up being a huge capital investment that only makes sense for very large plots of land.
The amount of work involved in that process is simply staggering. There are principals that can be effectively integrated to a backyard garden. But, to have as close to a self-sustaining cycle as you can, you're going to invest thousands and thousands of hours. Honestly, I have never figured up how many hours we've spent on this, just because it's a hobby and quantifying it would spoil part of it for me.
Everything I've seen there echos your sentiments. An incredible amount of work - and knowledge - to achieve a rather peasant-level existence.
That said it's amazing seeing anyone live a genuinely sustainable lifestyle. I always think that if everyone lived and thought like these guys, our environment would be recovering nicely.
That's the problem.
>to achieve a rather peasant-level existence.
Without massive, massive disruption to the way people live, this is not a thing that will happen.
This is why I'm very negative about the prospects of climate change and the future. I don't think there will be a stomach to change to a lifestyle that supports climate improvements until such time as we're already fighting world wars over land, water, and food.
We also run tours, but in conjunction with the local state university extension office, for free. We could charge, but that defeats the purpose of getting the principals we believe in out to the world.
That is not a moral judgment on the people running the one near you. My partner and I have full-time jobs that support our lifestyle - the 'farmette' is just a hobby.
No time for make work. Bring in machines to quickly shape the land. Borrow some pigs or chickens to root through the ground and then sprinkle random seeds all over. Spend your time on observation, avoid working on the land for a couple of years, etc. See what comes up and where.
There is not really a way to create a space for growing food and/or cultivating anything that doesn't require time. The weather, weeds, pests. These things do not care for the calendars of men.
>No time for make work.
This is the main difference between farm life and work life. Most of my work life, in the office, is spent finding work, or creating work. New initiatives, better processes, etc. These are all things to either improve what already works, or fix what doesn't work that well. Either way, it's make work.
On a farm, the tasks you engage in (outside of hunting or fishing or other fun endeavors) exist solely because the need to exist. I have to create a dead furrow or swale (sp?) or berm, because otherwise the soil will furrow and wash in the next spring rains. I have to build fence on the back 15, because otherwise I cannot pasture that ground in the spring and cannot have cattle. 'I have to' guides the daily/weekly/monthly plans; there is no strategic planning process to keep middle managers busy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24827234
Most of them have YouTube channels with a number of videos each, so you can see that they are actually walking (or plowing or no-tilling :) the talk. They also do invited talks and run internships. Gabe, Richard, Geoff and many others also use conventional or adapted machines (traditional heavy machinery or lower-cost appropriate technology), too, so it can be a hybrid what-makes-sense-as-well-as-is-sustainable approach; it is not a totally back-to-nature hippie kind of thing. In fact all those I mentioned are highly educated (whether college- or self-taught), and well aware of critical modern scientific discoveries and development in ag-related sciences (plural) and use them as appropriate in their operations. One big such example is Elaine Ingham's work (a Ph.D. soil biology scientist, founder of Soil Food Web, Inc.), which I also commented on in the same thread as the one I linked to above (it is very significant, and they all quote her and apply her results):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24828524
There are many more, doing their thing successfully and quietly, although there certainly are talks, books, videos, conferences, associations, courses, etc.
And some of them claim that their approach is lower effort and / or lower cost than so-called "conventional" farming. In fact, Gabe says that it is their approach (permaculture / regen ag) which is closer to "conventional", since it mimics nature, as much as feasible, and nature has been at it for millenia before we even walked the earth. And in a holistic sense, it is actually more efficient.
Edited for typos.
Permaculture is well suited for home gardens, where you want to maximize land use and fun involved. It is not going to feed the population.
Grow what grows well in your context and locality, part time. Additionally, a focus on perennials will significantly chop the work hours needed to just reaping the harvest.
For more subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RussellBallestrini
A farm is not a factory where you can create a uniform process...
Same thing goes for purchasing equipment or supplies, you can buy in bulk for a large farm.
Modern farms ARE factories.
Historically agricultural workers were slaves or at best serfs. In any case, a brutal lifestyle, generally for someone else's benefit.
Well, what you're saying does apply to a category of countries, underdeveloped ones. Countries at very low levels of what we'd consider civilization. There people were either shepherds or subsistence farmers but closer to what we'd call hunter-gatherers.
This was certainly common, but e.g. England hasn't really had serfdom for 5 centuries (after a gradual decline). Quite a lot of the labor was hired servants, perhaps a majority, although (IIRC) the median servant worked alongside only one or two others. So not family, but still a lot of family-sized groups.
Not really. It's a myth that farms were made solely to support "the 1%." In fact research suggests that work hours were often less in those days than in modern times.[1]
To be sure, part of the farming produce was taxed in various ways (legitimate or not) during a lot of history, and there were disagreements about how big that tax was supposed to be that sometimes even lead to revolt, but then there were no real alternatives either. In short, farming was the best possible life to be had during most of history for most people, unless you were part of the nobility or some trading class. For most that just wasn't attainaible in any meaningful way, except perhaps through the participation in wars, or for some, marriage.
Indeed, until very recently most farms were "subsistence farming" (historically speaking, of course), but that isn't to say that it was necessarily a "bad" or gruelling life, considering the technology that existed at the time. At best that assertion is anachronistic. Of course the farming of yesteryear is worse than more modern farming methods! On the other hand you have to remember that living in a society where most people do something else than farming is a very recent developement. This means that most people grew up on—or close—to a farm throughout history.
Living in a family, perhaps close to a village, while growing plants and tending to livestock, was an integral part of life for most people. Thus, the way of structuring life on a farm was the main bearer of culture and tradition to new generations in those societies. I'm of course not speaking of "high" or "fine" culture here, which was the domain of the cities and various courts, but the traditions, social rules, and work ethics instilled in farmer families, who then brought it into the cities; much of it coming to pass exactly because there were no safety nets like a welfare state back then. So you either worked your farm, or subsided to begging or famine. In that sense you could say that there was a rather strong selection towards that kind of ethics too.
Today, most of that "folksy" ethics and culture is dying out, if it's not dead already, as more and more people are solely living in cities over multiple generations. This is why so many are completely out of touch with how things like dairy, meats or grains are even produced. Moreover they never got to take part in the family cooperation required to run a farm successfully, which both requires a certain kind of morality and work ethics, and not least an up-close and personal knowledge of how nature works. All that vanishes when agriculture becomes just another market share for the industrialist.
I'm not saying that it's all bad. Certainly the most obvious gain is that more people, at least in theory, should be able to work less to get food on the table, as it were. But there are also certain very healthy and good things that are lost in the process too, and I think it's important that people are at least aware of it.
[1]: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...
Industrialized.
Source?
> For thousands of years the farm was the producer of civilization and culture.
The producer of "civilization and culture"? In what sense? Farms produce the goods we eat, how does that lead to culture and civilization? I'm not that knowledgeable at history - if that is the case, then I'd really like to read more about it.
> Today, on the other hand, it has been reduced to a factory
Given your previous assertions about farms losing their status as cultural hotspots, I bet you hate Andy Warhol :)
Well, I recommend any history book about the Fertile Crescent and Ancient Egypt.
If you have 1 hour, hear/listen to this podcast/video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA
Of course most of them don't appear in history books so they are easy to forget about.
Yeah, but I'd rather go to a supermarket and buy 5lbs of meat than go hunting. Things change.
Small plot of land keep people where they are with zero hope or mobility. You cannot buy equipment and the tractors are best used in fields 1 mile wide or whatever.
When people talk about the hollowing out of the middle class, this is exactly what they mean. Capitalism is very efficient at producing wealth but extremely inefficient in distributing it.
In short your ideals sound good, but they just don't work out. Too many people are needed off the farm to pull it off, but you put them on their little farms.
What is the local vs remote system? When you have small farms local is you, and remote your neighbors who you walk to. When you have large enough farms you can generate enough surplus that the world cares - and they are generating enough that they can afford to play nice. Small farmers in general don't generate enough surplus that they can feed each other across the distance of a continent.
Support from a galactic cluster is nice in SciFi, but in reality space is too big. It is questionable if Earth/Venus could support each other, as our orbits are often too misaligned to do anything in time. (the fast trip to mars involves Venus so things are even worse). Going between stars - forget it, by the time we find out about a problem they are dead or have survived.
You incorrectly inferred my meaning from my original post and are now doubling down, I'm not sure why.
It's as simple as this: We want to produce as much food as possible from as few natural resources as possible, emitting as little carbon as possible in the process. Large fields are more efficient at this, for reasons I've spelt out already.
Even in a fully communist society this would be true.
This is not an anti-corporate slur, I am just pointing out that if you have n acres of land under big ag, you would need to implement a more boutique ag operation on the same piece of land to come up with a sane comparison.
Since this is really not feasible generally I would like to know has someone actually studied this.
For example, soil is not necessarily uniform, and smaller scale operation might utilize the specific area of land for a mixture of landraces that might improve the yield than the monocrop that was designed to be able to produce crop in a generic industrial process, but not might for example be optimal for any soil.
But, it’s also little things like the distance a tractor travels before it needs to turn around. Picture painting a a wall with and without windows using those long rollers. The simpler the shape the faster you can go.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm for the broader question of why we have (big) companies at all instead of everything being organised on eg a project basis and people and equipment hired just as needed.
A farm is very similar to a factory in many ways. You buy inputs (especially Nitrogen) and convert those into a usable output using biological machinery. This becomes especially true for people planting permanent crops (I.e almonds) where you also need to consider the maintenance on the plant (pruning, etc) as it ages. Uniformity of process is actually another place that large farms benefit. They can afford the quality managers capable of designing such systems. An owner-operator with one guy working part-time for him is less likely to bother.
Agriculture isn’t just a numbers game for production, but also for spreading risk.
It would be reasonable to assume that the farming of many other crops will eventually transition to fully automated indoor formats.
Don't get me wrong: there are a number of crops where it makes sense. They are an important source of nutrients (and taste!), but a poor source of calories overall.