Time for lazy/ignorant farmers to switch to cover cropping with rotational grazing, which is just a better system as long as you're not financially dependent on planting your entire acreage every growing season.
If you want to see a profitable, productive mid sized farm, check out Polyface. Joel makes a good living while treating his land and animals well.
I'd argue that our mega-ag model is a big part of the problem, it's given us stupidly cheap corn/soy while causing a lot of health and pollution problems, and basically ruining farming as an actual profession.
The economics of farming are all fucked up, because our current farming practices have a lot of externalities that aren't priced into conventional produce, and producers who try to improve things to remove these externalities either have to take a loss versus the producers who say "fuck the future, fuck everyone who isn't me" or create new markets for their goods (which is where the whole farmer's market movement and the local food guilt thing come from).
You don't really need to be able to compete if you aren't looking for a massive exit, though. My ~150 acres (most of it rented, no less) of corn/soy/wheat provides enough for me to live off of comfortably enough. For about a month's work a year, that's wonderful in my mind.
It seems you're just getting caught up in the capital building frenzy that I talked about earlier. If you want to have the huge payday when you sell then you take on huge debt, grow to massive scale, use all of your income to service the debt and then you're sitting on a fortune at retirement. This is what attracts most people to farming, seemingly you included, which is fair.
If you are content to stay small you can avoid the debt and what the big guy is giving to the bank you can pocket and live well off of. That's where I've settled and it works fine. I won't have the huge payday later, however. It's a tradeoff.
In 2007 I invested $12,000 in a small parcel of land I found to rent, rent for the equipment I needed to do the job (along with hiring some customer operators), and lost money doing it! But then 2008 happened, sending commodity prices through the roof. I was able to turn a small profit the following year and used the proceeds to start to buy some equipment, and slowly started to grow from there.
So, some definite luck, an investment, and most importantly having family to answer questions. I think it would have been impossible for me without that wealth of knowledge to draw on.
For rent? $265-275/acre, depending on the landlord.
> Also, I assume you're not selling to a coop or other large scale buyer?
No, that's where it all goes. There is a co-op grain elevator. All of my IP soybeans go there as they pay a nice little premium. Pretty much everything else, including crusher soys, is sold to the closer-to-home commercial grain elevator.
Crops prices have priced in the increased fertilizer cost already, so it is what it is. We're used to it.
Even in this case, the farmer who are farming on their own land are under no obligation to change their way of life or farming process. Even though we know that the methods they are using may be sub-optimal and a net-negative in the long run, we simply cannot make them change it, and certainly never by labelling them negative. We can make them see the benefits, or how it plays out in the long run and help them choose a better solution but ultimately, it's them doing the choosing.
At the end, if something is really really required, then it must be the Governments making regulation. This is how it generally works (I'm not saying I like it).
Can the bad farmers continue to farm debt (primarily)? Sure, but if they're doing it to themselves we shouldn't feel bad for them, or bail them out.
People only do what a) They are taught in the first place (programming classes, reliable blogs etc.), b) Their work environment imposes on them (organizations having coding practices or standards), c) They, through some personal experiences, find out that it makes their job easier down the line, or d) It is the right thing to do.
Expecting everyone to follow (d) is out of the question and in my experience all "good" work happens via (b) i.e. rules, regulations and standards that have been enforced. If some sub-optimal choice minimizes effort while maximizing rewards, then that is not sub-optimal, at least for the individual, even though it clearly could be a sub-optimal for the collective.
Now myself, I like hobbyist diversions that involve growing food, but farmers don't farm because they want to have fun. They farm so they can make money. If they stop making money, or if they don't make enough, they have to go into some other line of work, and typically sell the farm to someone who does make money.
And when you're not just selling gourmet vegetables to HN hackers making $200k+ a year, you're selling generic commodities like corn and grain and soy, where the competition is fierce.
And you're selling it to a world where the poor have a hard time affording food as it is. If this can't compete with conventional fertilizer, then even if everyone switched, people would starve.
Joel is the best known example of informed, conscientious farming paying the bills, but certainly not the only one.
>as long as you're not financially dependent on planting your entire acreage every growing season.
which to me suggests that it isn't "lazy/ignorant" farmers, but rather farmers who are economically entangled in the current system.
Maybe the place to start would be objecting to i.e. Monsanto, or to producer demands such as McDonalds who require only a certain kind of potato grown under certain kinds of conditions (so all the fries look the same).
What's the befit if fertilizer helps?
That it looks more natural?
It does require letting some land lie fallow to regeneration, so you need to devote more total land to agriculture, and it also requires fencing and for someone to go move the livestock to a new paddock every few days (though you save on tilling/herbicide application costs). On the plus side the unit cost of everything you produce is lower, and meat is typically much more profitable than vegetables so you've diversified.