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Supply chain resilience is a requirement for agritech hardware

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59 pointsideadibia23 comments

I'm all for improving the success of local agricultural efforts, and the 2.5-acre farms held by many people in the article seems like an improvement over the gigantic thousand-acre ones here in terms of sustainability, but it's hard for me to generalize how something like small scale thresher manufacturing would work in America. The average commercial farm in the US is a much larger operation and has millions of dollars of very high-tech machinery from my understanding.

Why would you need to?

Western agriculture as you point out is very different to somewhere like in the article.

You fit the product to the market not the market to the product.

We definitely still need very large farms with big machines to feed the world; but nowadays, with climate problems, droughts, smaller and diverse farms resist better, are more productive by surface, have a better quality of soil, better quality of food, they are literally carbon sinks, it just requires more manual work

> it just requires more manual work

Oh, is that all :-)

yes but is it a problem? there are many jobs that require to walk and move your legs/arms several hours per day, e.g. cleaning, selling those farm products at markets, .., and this one is a very useful one, with a negative carbon impact

There is more than enough workforce and this job is very interesting on all aspects, it's not something that breaks your back after 10years if done properly, it's just natural efforts

A 2.5 acre farm in the US is a hobby farm. You might get a bit of income from canning or selling exotic meat, but I cannot imagine 2.5 acres of anything being enough for a basic income to cover land taxes, equipment, and basic essentials for the family.

If you have a scroll through the episodes of Country Calendar (https://www.tvnz.co.nz/shows/country-calendar) you'll find examples of small farms definitely produce enough to make a good living.

Maybe in NZ, but some of those crops would be illegal here (mussels in particular are a protected species, and farming either native or non-native species would be extremely illegal), and the others are really commonplace. Apples, flowers, cows, we've got it all but kiwi and sheep, and there's not really much of a market for either.

Yeah you are right. One of the most profitable crops is cherry tomatoes and you can make $1400 per acre on a good year, $900 on average. Saffron, with optimal yields at the most expensive prices per lb, will get you $125k from 2.5 acres.

My dream is to have a farm with enough crops to cover my food & maybe sell a little extra. Out of interest does anyone know a good place in Europe where that's possible for a good price?

Land prices in Portugal (away from the coast and from bigger cities) are pretty cheap for western European standards. It's getting noticed though - a quick YouTube search will show you plenty of examples of expats jumping on the opportunity.

IMO making a profit would be the hard part - the internal market is small and in general produce prices are low.

I'd be content with a small loss to be honest, I'd still be working as a remote engineer. I just would like more nature in my life!

I am curious, but surely the $900-$1400 an acre is based on rows configured for tractor-based tilling/plowing, fertilizing, herbicide etc.? As I understand it, the nice thing about a smallholding is that you don't have to mechanize near as aggressively, and therefore can plant much more densely than a tractor-based farm would.

Perhaps? This was based on google top-link data which may not be reliable for a small farm but I assume it's within an order of magnitude!

While hand grown can be denser it’s not an order of magnitude denser. The main advantage is being able to combine/layer different crops.

Look at machine farmed fields just before harvest; the fully grown plants will often be quite close together.

Except for market garden operations, which can produce a decent quantity of garden vegetables out of an acre or two. You could probably get $20k, $30k.

But labour costs and capital costs are very high. It's not a really profitable operation. Labour of love really.

Most organic market garden type places are only a couple acres.

2.5 of premium wine grapes with on-site winery could also be profitable except around here and in most places regulations explicitly forbid wineries that have acreage that small. Around here it's a 5 acre minimum and then most townships have much more stringent regulations on top of that yet.

In general anything "value added" (jams, wines, bread, butchered/prepared meat, whatever) can be used to turn a a pure small "farm" into a more profitable operation. But again, costs.

(I have a 6 acre property, with about a 3/4 acre of grapes for my own use).

> 2.5-acre farms held by many people in the article seems like an improvement over the gigantic thousand-acre ones here in terms of sustainability

Smaller farms -may- have less vast monoculture sustainability issues. However, how do the 2.5 acre farms achieve the efficiencies that scale affords the massive farms in terms of water, energy, and fertilizer use?

Something like the Vietnamese VAC (garden/pond/livestock) system[1] is the ideal in terms of efficiency and complete nutrition in my opinion:

> In many villages, 50-80 percent of families have the full VAC system. Figures show that 30-60 percent of income of most village families may come from the system; in many cases, it may be 100 percent.

> The pond is constructed close to the house so that the domestic and kitchen wastes are drained into the fishpond. The livestock pens and garden are also situated near the pond. The 1000-5000 m2 garden includes a variety of vegetables (i.e. green onion, sweet potato, watercress, etc.) and fruits (i.e. banana, orange, peach, apricot, etc.) and other crops, including sugarcane, tea and cassava. This provides a mix of perennial and annual crops.

This is all on generally less than an acre (1 acre = 4000 square meters)! Fish, crops, and livestock in one self-contained system.

[1] https://www.fao.org/3/y1187e/y1187e10.htm

Where do the fish come from in these systems when they drain the ponds annually?

Unsure if these people specifically do it, but usually in both small and big productions we have a separate breeding pond.

Are there pictures of this? I can't seem to find any. I'm on an an acre and would love to see how others use a similar sized portion of land to do such a thing. I might get some ideas.

Thank you for sharing this! Are there additional resources you would recommend checking out to learn more about different agricultural approaches like this one?

I often refer back to Open Source Ecology when agricultural hardware is brought up: https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/gvcs-machine-index/

Also: parts one can obtain at a local Ace Hardware. Forget your pentalobe 1.27mm screws

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