The last days of a 350-year-old family farm
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
A couple towns south where I live there are many active small farms. They either specialize in CSAs or have farmstands that sell a mix of their own produce and imported (e.g California) produce. It certainly is possible to farm - but you have to adapt to the times I guess.
My family also has a large commercial dairy farm in upstate NY. Very different farm then when I was growing up. Went from milking 70 cows to 1100+. From what my cousin's say - the only way is to go big or go home.
The farm we used to own has gone towards organic milk to get a premium for their product, and the family that bought it now relies heavily on undocumented immigrants.
An open secret is that ICE doesn't touch meat ag's workers except for token enforcement. It's a dangerous occupation that includes underage child labor, deaths, and amputations without a social security net.
I have no idea if an open secret is like the open mystery of Ephesians 3:9,10.
As a person of faith, the reference listed above was in poor taste. Scripture should never be used in cryptic ways.
- climate change - 15% of GHGs not counting total inputs of fuel and feed
- antibiotic resistance - antibiotics are used excessively to raise production, similar enough to the ones used in humans to evolve drug-resistant pathogens
- pandemics - many animals peeing and pooping together, in close proximity, create an "institutional" Petri dish effect plus regular cross-contamination with humans and random wildlife
- pollution - of water, air, and soil
That must be why they can't hire help and want to hold onto the land to bequeath to their daughter.
Article says they used to farm two fields they owned and three they leased and have backing away from some of the leased land. From a quick search (unverified/fact-checked), it looks like it's a <20 acres of owned farmland, which would fetch close to $3M in all likelihood. Add $1M for buildings and equipment and, assuming no debt, it's a modest 7-figure estate, seemingly split two ways. Many regular employees on this board have more in investments than each of the owners of this farm and didn't have to farm for 60 years to get there.
It's mostly a very Bay area thing to imagine that being a 60-90 minute drive from the city means you're talking multi-million dollar real estate. That mostly isn't true of even relatively expensive cities.
But yeah my neighbor has scaled down you-pick apples over the years as it's really not worth the effort.
A lot of people who live that relatively far out just don't go into Boston much.
Even just a few miles outside NYC, you can get a decent house in NJ for 500K but the property taxes alone will be around 5-10K.
I don’t know about MA, but in NY for 7 acres or more you just need to average $10,000 in sales for 2 years. Interestingly if you have les than 7 acres the threshold goes up, but you can lease land to bring yourself over the 7 acres. Additionally, since property tax rates are set at the local municipality level an ag assessment uses state law to cap what the municipality can claim.
This is not tax advice, and I don’t know the law in MA, but probably not to far from NY’s.
No state income tax is a lie, it's paid through small home property taxes. Larger land owners invariably go for rural/ag exemptions and reductions.
From a personal standpoint, the sensible thing to do is to scale it down to subsistence gardening for yourself and your family. That is what my family does. I remember, when I was still young, they still used to sell some produce. Nowadays it is entirely consumed by the family or gifted out. The benefit of this, is that you are free from economic demand. You grow whatever you please, because you want to have it at the dinner table.
This seems to have all started when we turned the dollar into a melting iceberg jn 1913 (created the Federal Reserve, which is basicaly a cabal of private banksters with a veneer of government), and it intensified when we decided to make dollars our primary national export product in 1971 (when Nixon closed the gold convertibility window for foreign central banks). Since then, workers are squeezed for working hard and trying to save for the future, but not understanding that if they're saying in dollars they'll never get ahead.
My guess specific to farming is that federal subsidies for corn and energy have driven prices up in ways that price smaller-scale farms out of the market.
Second, the Federal Reserve is not a cabal, let alone a shadowy one.
Third, it's existence is to ameliorate recessions. Your great-great grandparents, if in the US at the time, were very much in favor of it.
Fourth, the US doesn't allow for sovereign banks, so a private Federal Reserve is already the classical liberal/libertarian solution (anarcho-capitalists are typically the ones calling for abolishing the Federal Reserve/returning to commodity as a standard).
Fifth, a lender of last resort is a fantastic backstop allowing more investment and risk taking, which has pushed the US' investment dominance for over a century.
Technology/automation is a commonly cited cause, although in this context you'll see references to mechanization.
But a diversified direct to consumer small farm is actually significantly better than the commodity farm business model.
Not to mention commodity farm businesses are Very dependant on debt and the hurt is only beginning for these types of farms as interest rates continue to rise. Small direct to consumer farms? They’ll be thriving
For those on the thread who keep pointing out that this is not in Boston and the real estate isn’t worth that much, I would counter that it’s difficult to believe that a family who’s held real estate in Massachusetts for 350 years is not doing ok.
This is exactly what it is here in NJ. They’re called ‘fake farmers’ here, and a quick google search will show you they cost the state tens of millions in lost tax revenue per year. Its all the usual suspects too, you know, the kind of celebrities that lecture you on giving and their politics. Those quaint farm stands are just a ruse to keep their tax bills to a minimum on >5 acres if expensive land in wealthy counties.
Ok, fine. They don't get the benefit, and they pay more in taxes...or they sell, the houses are demolished, and the land is put to more "productive use" (i.e. sprawl/suburbs). The county or the city or what have you gains more in property taxes, and the evil rich people are no longer getting away with not paying more taxes.
But now instead of uncultivated land (remember, it was a fake farm), you have concrete, asphalt, hardy board, one or two species of grass, crepe myrtles...you get the picture.
If anything, there should be a national wildlife sanctuary tax exemption program, so that this is actually codified.
So long as there is residual value in the "hand-me-down" equipment, there will be economic value in operating it. At the same time it is not economically sensible for large scale farming to continue to operate old and outdated equipment, so the smaller scale farm actually fills a useful role in the economy.
And those operating it will learn the cost of this the hard way when they fail to have access to the niceties of modern society that require exchanging what you've produced for something produced by others. Like, say, the computing device that you used to post your opinion.
Trouble is finding a better opportunity. From personal experience, my small acreage and old equipment, on average, nets me half of my developer income for just a couple of weeks per year of work. That's really hard to compete with. What else are you going to do instead?
It doesn't scale in the sense that if I put in more time I won't make more money, but the nice thing about small farms is that time commitment is also small. Fantastic income relative to the time commitment, and still leaves you the ability to do other things the rest of the year.
But not all decisions are purely financial.
That said, you can leverage the debt. It is much harder to get someone to loan you money to invest in index funds. With the huge run-up in asset values over the past decade, I expect the farmer with a small holding 10 years ago, who then bought up everything he could with the bank's money, is now considerably further ahead than he who invested the same amount of money in index funds 10 years ago and took a job at Walmart to try and top up those investments.
But you are right that not all decisions are financial. I expect the Walmart job is far less stressful and that is worth quite a bit.
That is a very high hourly wage. Wow.
Not everyone evaluates their life choices like an arid economist.
In particular, not everyone would regard leaving an outdoor lifestyle for sitting at a desk all day at someone's beck and call an "oppirtunity"
> And those operating it will learn the cost of this the hard way when they fail to have access to the niceties of modern society
Actually, in many places it is possible to operate a small farm without being destitute. The point is that all the "nicities" are particularly necessary, and outside of education and healthcare you can get by ok buying second hand and mending and making do.
Heck, even the homeless have mobile phones, so your example is pretty poor
I have vague recollections of our farm still pulling whites in the early-to-mid 80s, so perhaps not that far back. But that may have simply been a product of our farm being hesitant to try new things, which wouldn't be out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, I was a bit too young at that time to understand the motivation.
In eg Indiana and Iowa the growing season is long enough there's no need to desiccate -- the weather isn't going to turn before the crop has a chance to dry.
Then, e.g. during the cereal growing phase there are regular applications of fungicide, insecticide, growth regulators and so on.
Bottom líne, if you are not buying 100% organic this is the reality of your food chain.
(Full disclosure: I do not buy organic)
I don't think this is true everywhere. It likely requires the right supply chain to work, but here in France small family farms are doing fine for instance. They have to go sell their products to local markets on top of growing them, but it's a sustainable business.
Do you have sources?
Also people still steal chickens if its easy enough, so clip their wing and try to keep them on your property.
We do not eat meat really. Maybe at a restaurant, or some fish at home, but not really otherwise.
I could handle raising some chickens for eggs or otherwise as pest control when they are infertile. I used to tend to the chickens on my grandma's farm throughout my childhood. How many chickens for 5 ha of gardens+trees+berries, do you think?
And it depends on your needs in eggs too. 3-4 chickens for a family of 4 is enough if you only eat eggs occasionally. My grandmother bought 12 chickens every two years for a family of 3.
Small farms benefit from greater attention and incentives of their owners.
This is getting pretty old. Is it one person or several? Confusing readers just to be politically correct is not surprising coming from Smithsonian Magazine, but I just can't help rolling my eyes at this nonsense.
Well the singular use of "They" is actually pretty old [1]. I don't think it is confusing readers as they did mention a name.
> I just can't help rolling my eyes at this nonsense.
I get the frustration if you are not used to the usage of the pronoun in its singular form, but it is actually sensible
[1] https://www.scu.edu/media/offices/provost/writing-center/res...
The cardinal rule of writing is Serve the Reader — Don't Make Him/Her Do Needless Work. In modern parlance, "they" is an unobjectionable shortcut when you don't know who the person is, but it's just confusing to readers when it's about a known person. I'd be fine with a coined, gender-neutral singular pronoun, analogous to how feminists coined "Ms." decades ago and it's now practically universal.
https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
What part is vague?
The cited example is just the oldest known example of singular “they”. You’ll find more examples. You’d have to rip a lot of pages out of your history books in order to come up with a timeline where singular “they” wasn’t natural English. All that is happening now is that “they” is being used more often to refer to specific, known people, which is not much of a stretch.
That said, singular-they is pretty much the best alternative to dealing with a number of issues that copy editors have struggled with for years.
Like "Theya".
Theya is my friend. It's singular, non gendered, and then we can just get rid of every pronoun except "they" and "theya".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part_of_speech#Open_and_closed...
This really just a way of rephrasing what the parent comment says. By some reckonings, in English, pronouns are a closed class, and verbs are an open class. Some languages have it the other way around, where you can invent new pronouns but not new verbs (you have to take a noun X and say “do X” or something like that).
But honorifics are tricky and some people feel very strongly about them--e.g. Dr. for someone with a PhD.
Granted, I’ve seen some sentences that are more ambiguous. But most of the time, context makes it plainly obvious, as it does here. The benefit is that by using “they”, the writer is making fewer guesses or assumptions. So it’s a trade off - more ambiguity, fewer mistakes. I think it’s a win overall.
It was to me. Since I only read the quote I assumed "they" referred to Eleanor and Eleanor's partner or some other person that was mentioned before the quoted section.
That said, the particular paragraph has some problems with antecedents. It could equally have those same problems if you were using other pronouns, like he, she, or it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language
It is hard to make the argument that singular “they” is somehow an inherently confusing construct, especially given how prevalent it is in English, and how prevalent it has been for centuries.
I don’t have the background or inclination to prove it but my conviction is the death of the small town, and the ancillary costs like the meth and opioid epidemics can be traced directly to the “fence row to fence row” approach he pushed forward and still exists today.
[later] thanks nickt for pointing out I left off the footnote https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz
When speaking to opponents of utility scale solar on vast tracts of farmland, you see this when they’re upset about the land no longer being used to farm, but the farmer can make more from solar or wind than farming. Lots of emotion from tradition and history to make peace with. Change is the only constant, and everything dies eventually.
Moreover, cities are the economic drivers, even in the agricultural world:
https://www.zompist.com/jacobs.html
> But don't cities arise from and depend on agriculture? No: all economic progress originates in cities, [Jane] Jacobs tells us; and cheekily adds that all agricultural progress originates in cities. Great advances, such as mechanical reapers and electricity, were invented and adopted in or near cities before being applied to agricultural regions farther out. Productivity improvements in agriculture always begin near the cities and spread out.
> What we think of as purely rural activities often began in the cities. In premodern Europe, the quintessential cottage industry was weaving; but before cloth was woven in cottages the art was rediscovered and practiced in cities. Dark Ages peasants lived on gruel; the art of breadmaking was recovered first in cities (and based on city-grown bread; a medieval city had its own fields). In our own rural areas there are vast ranches where animals are fattened before slaughter; they are transplants from the city stockyards of Kansas City and Chicago.
> Driving the nail in the coffin of the spontaneous generation of cities from farmland, Jacobs describes the inability of Ireland to turn itself around after the disastrous famines of the 1840s:
>> There were no ports to receive relief food... There were no mills for grinding relief grain. There were no mechanics or tools and equipment to build mills. There were no ovens for baking bread. There were no ways to spread information about how to grow crops other than potatoes. There was no way to distribute the seeds of other crops, nor to supply the farm tools that were indispensable for a change of crops...
>> To be sure, the Irish had reached this pass because they were held in an iron economic and social subjection. But the very core of that subjection-- and the reason why it was so effective and had rendered them so helpless-- was the systematic suppression of city industry, the same suppression in principle that the English had unsuccessfully tried to enforce upon industry in the little cities of the American colonies.
> Closer to home, here's a report from one Henry Grady, speaking in 1880 about a funeral in Pickens Co. Georgia, some years before.
>> The grave was dug through solid marble, but the marble headstone came from Vermont. It was in a pine wilderness but the pine coffin came from Cincinnati. An iron mountain over-shadowed it but the coffin nails and the screws and the shovel came from Pittsburgh. With hard wood and metal abounding, the corpse was hauled on a wagon from South Bend, Indiana. A hickory grove grew near by, but the pick and shovel handles came from New York. The cotton shirt on the dead man came from Cincinnati, the coat and breeches from Chicago, the shoes from Boston; the folded hands were encased in white gloves from New York... That country, so rich in undeveloped resources, furnished nothing for the funeral except the corpse and the hole in the ground and would probably have imported both of those if it could have done so.
> Grady is eloquently describing the circumstances of a passive economic region: despite all its resources, it makes nothing.
So blaming it all on Nixon, which has an obvious appeal I admit, is a bit ahistorical.
In the former, where the agriculture is dominated by less commodity agriculture (dairy & fruit) small towns exist and thrive. In the latter dominated by the most commoditized crops in the world (feed corn & soy) they don’t.
(several hundred jobs doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a big deal in a small town)
Oh oops: It's not several hundred on site, it's ~1,000.
That has significant implications.
That's how I see the division: small companies invent and experiment, large ones scale and optimize, both are critical.
He has offered to let me use the land for free. I moved here for the scenic views. I don't want to farm. There's over 10,000 square metres of farm land right outside my window growing weeds as I sit here in climate controlled comfort in a HM chair, typing away.
edit: math is hard
I think the other side of the coin is the places stagnation and outright decay have set in, like many inner cities or rustbelt regions that have not thrived. The opposite would be places like tokyo where everything is turned over rapidly and the new is ousted to be almost immediately replaced by the newer and newest.
Notably, the Smithsonian article only asks about recent changes affecting the farm.
Slavery was common in Massachusetts through 1700s.
If the farm was made sustainable through slave labor in its first 100 years, it would have avoided the same concerns that the article says are doing it in now: dependable and low cost labor.
We need a new New Deal w/ UBI and just invest in ourselves.
Suffice to say the situation is complex and irreducible and does not yield to armchair quarterbacking.
That's the fundamental equation, and it generally assumes a vegan diet as well. Nobody has ever been able to reduce this value, it's related to the solar input and the ability of plants to capture carbon into a human-digestible energy source.
It'll be worse on Mars, of course, due to the reduced intensity of sunlight.
In any event, 17 acres could theoretically supply food for an enormous range from 15 to 170 people, depending on how intensively it's farmed.
[1] 4000 sq ft bio-intensive farming (http://www.growbiointensive.org/) [2] 0.44 acres permaculturism (https://permaculturism.com/how-much-land-does-it-take-to-fee...) [3] 1.2 from a 1994 study (and further discussion in this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1aozn1/how_much...)
And meat also provides an excellent nutrient:calorie ratio with extremely low upkeep. You can sustain around 50 free range chickens per acre, and they're ready for harvest in 6 weeks. That's more than a whole chicken per day, on a single acre. If you want to get real crazy you can also get into things like vertical farming/aquaponics [2] and more, where the densities are limited really only by cost. Though on the still very reasonable end, you can do things like potato boxes where you can get hundreds of pounds of potatoes in tens of square feet.
https://www.rga.org.au/Public/Public/Content/The_Rice_Indust...
I'm not sure where you get your odd notions from.
Of course you can also plant rice on flat fields (and China does as well), but this does skew the comparative ratios of acres of land use : people fed.
Maybe you're thinking of some specific subset of urban western non agricultural people.
Of course in western culture the "typical" westerner lives in an urban environment so perhaps that explains the disconnect.
Do better.
Everybody I've met in 60+ years considers the land that rice farmers farm rice on to be farmland.
Perhaps you might do better policing others less and working more on making a point.
Globalization displaces natural local supply and demand outcomes.
The above two factors result in some very complex status quos.
For example, take the country of New Zealand, whose significant apple growing industry is largely for export purposes - ostensibly, sending good fresh highly-valued NZ apples to other countries, where they'll fetch max $.
Problem: apple workers are minimum wage jobs. Over recent decades, the minimum wage in NZ has risen by a great deal more than the price of apples has. Profitability slumped.
The powerful industry, rather than cede ground or change crops, instead loudly complained and politically lobbied to have special conditions put in place for their industry: since 2007, they can 'temporarily import' hundreds of foreign labourers from the islands of Tonga and similar - a special workforce of large muscled young men for whom any NZ wage is a fortune back home, and to whom the powerful orchardists and their cronies are like little gods.
The natural local market forces that-would-be are being manipulated for commercial purposes, with significant and complex environmental, economic, and cultural side effects.
Whose fault is it? What should we do instead?
In the same way that only a minority of people have an aptitude for work consisting of an 8-hour hard-focused (e.g.) mathematical workout every day.
The difference is that the former tends to come with a sub-cultural attitude of "people who can't/won't are Lazy", which is unfortunate and misguided, in the very same manner that a "people who can't/won't do maths all day are Stupid" view would be.
I suppose my point could be construed as highlighting the significant factors of power and inertia in regulatory systems, as pertaining to environmental and economic setups.
Regarding your point about Voting Out - it assumes that the major political parties differ in their stance on this one matter. If both/all are subject to the same lobbying, then whichever is elected will see the status quo remain.
Win for whom?
I'm a developer from not an affluent country, working remotely for an american company (although for an american level of pay, my employer is quite awesome). So it's definetly a win for me.
This is the problem to solve, and something I believe is becoming solved gradually even if very slowly; developing nations have been developing. But if we manage to eradicate this idea of "high wage countries", or at least reduce it so that the imbalance is not order(s) of magnitude, then that will alleviate many of the negative side-effects of globalization.
Assuming you aren't aiming to reduce standard of living in rich countries.
We see this all over the place. Many manufacturing jobs moved from China to cheaper places where people are more needy because so many Chinese were lifted out of poverty.
The best way out of poverty is allowing globalization to continue doing this and have policies that focus on creating abundance rather than seeing the economy as a zero-sum game.
At some point automation will hit a point where we must have something like UBI, but it seems like we aren't there yet.
In Europe since the 80s , forest coverage has grown by something like 30%, acid rain is pretty much gone, protected areas have doubled, most big rivers are safe to swim and co2 output is going down.
I think it would be great if every country had the ressources to accomplish similar things instead of deforesting because they’re poor.
In such a system, high levels of inequality is the natural state.
Developing countries also seem to be catching up. The gap between southeast Asian states that used to be tragically poor a few decades ago to western countries is clearly closing.
We've accepted for far too long the lie that low inflation (i.e. theft at a slow enough rate that working people hopefully won't notice) is necessary for economic growth. That's not true, but it introduces all sorts of systemic injustice into our economic systems.
There are farms there with 1,000+ year traceable, verifiable histories.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcarr%C3%A0s_(film)
This is a very small farm even for family farm-sizes. Article does not mention if it was once larger, but I have a suspicion that it was.
> “Today, the cost of producing anything is way out of line,” Paul tells Harasimowicz. “A dollar gets spent almost before you earn it because of the cost of pesticides, diesel fuel, labor, insurance—everything has gone up. You can only get so much for a tomato.”
At 17 acres, the farm would not be able to take advantage of economies of scale the way a one man show of, say, 530 acres would. My friend, a farmer that left his family farm (of about 5000 acres now) after decades to become an accountant (due to the toxic behavior of the uneducated and entitled next generation, Millennials fwiw, not insolvency) was just talking to me about smaller 1000 acre farms around his family's farm that "were basically one-man shows," that they would hire seasonal help only during harvest, and the reason they were not wealthy (they're not unsuccessful though) had nothing to do with farming, per se, instead poor crop choices and bad timing in planting.
Farming is extremely lucrative, but there are far easier ways to make money. And if his nephew ever does get control of the farm, it will not last, because he is an uneducated moron that is mentally ill and abusive. That he is a Millennial is incidental. He's young, but also identifiably a narcissist, and I should have just said that and left what generation American he was out of it. I believe the children are our future. Millennials, as sensitive as they can be at times (if hn comments are any indicator), and maybe it is just that they get too much unjustified criticism, are going to save the world, I have no doubt about that. And I am and should be grateful to them.
They are sensitive. Thankfully, not as sensitive as the generations that would riot if the wrong kind of person drank from their water fountain.
I dont know the margins in US, but in italy, considering all capital costs, margins for cereals farms average 2% before tax (inheriting lands makes numbers look bigger but one has to factor land costs).
Industrial farming depends on oil as a chemical input, because the soil has been sterilized and turned into dirt in most places by ammonia based fertilizers. The process of tilling the land resulted in most of the remaining dirt being eroded over the past century.
We're going to run out of oil. I know that's a minority opinion here, but the facts will bear it out over time. Without that oil to turn into fertilizer, the only other chance is to have ruminants actively managed on a regenerative farm growing both meat and produce. Doing so would build soil, capturing and fixing large amounts of carbon in the process, improving drought resistance (through improved ability to hold water without runoff, and reduced ground temperature and evaporation due to cover crops).
What a piece of nonsense bullshit.
1. Ammonia can be produced without any oil. Natural gas (not oil per se) is simply used as an easy way to produce hydrogen and the heat energy needed.
2. Nitrogen fertilizers do not "sterilize" the soil. Not even close to it. They in fact can cause bacterial overgrowth, as nitrogen is often the limiting nutrient for anything. Soil with fertilizer is extremely fertile for both agricultural plants and for microbial life.
3. Nitrogen fertilizers are _essential_ to survival. Without them, quite literally billions will starve.
4. "Soil depletion" is typically caused by the lack of micronutrients such as potassium, and can be managed by (you guessed it!) adding fertilizers. Some other causes such as salt accumulation due to irrigation are more complicated.
> Without that oil to turn into fertilizer, the only other chance is to have ruminants actively managed on a regenerative farm growing both meat and produce.
Sigh. People should REALLY learn how the nitrogen cycle works.
Look, the hard truth is, nitrogen is the limiting nutrient. A square kilometer of plants can fix only so much of it on its own via symbiotic bacteria (and maaaaybe archaea), fungi can NOT fix nitrogen on their own.
You can optimize, curate, cultivate, paint yourself in dog shit and chant at the full moon however long you want, but there's a hard practical limit on that amount. And that's it.
Animals can concentrate nitrogen into manure, but they don't produce more of it.
That's why fertilizers are absolutely essential, as long as the Earth's population is above ~2B.
Sounds like the cost is in the ballpark already:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/01/19/pulling-fertilizer-ou...
Hard to tell if this startup is really something because all you can find is articles built from press releases.
The part about transportation is mostly moot, in the Midwest the fertilizer plants are local, there was one like twenty miles away from the farm i grew up on.
Decoupling from the energy markets would be nice, but it’s doubtful anybody really wants to become a pricecutting commodity here. Farm inputs have the tendency to be as expensive as farmers can afford.
Until this thing is operating profitably at scale it is unproven
Methane is used as a source of hydrogen to fix atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, but it's entirely possible but slightly more expensive to use hydrogen from splitting water. When natural gas prices go up, it'll be cheaper to use electrolysis on water so that's what will be used, no starvation involved.
You don't know what you're talking about.
The generational BS about not being able to do agriculture any more in n decades doesn't have any merit, it's just a bubble of doomers who have no idea what they're talking about convince each other that the world is going to end.
And, in particular, this statement is figurative and literal bullshit:
> Without that oil to turn into fertilizer, the only other chance is to have ruminants actively managed on a regenerative farm growing both meat and produce.
If you took away the methane, you could heat the reactor electrically and produce hydrogen from water. It would be more expensive and use more energy, but it would work. Although potassium is a nonrenewable resource it is not likely to run out any time soon.
The limiting element is phosphorus. It cannot be substituted for and phosphate ores will not last forever. Eventually, it will have to be extracted from very low grade rocks at a concentration just above 0.1%. This probably sets a lower limit on how much rock global civilization will have to process each year. Phosphorus recycling will likely become more profitable.
False dilema.
There are probably more options, but one that immediately comes to mind is that we could synthesize petroleum from the atmosphere.
It'd probably be the only sensible way to do long-range air travel in your scenario anyhow.
That's a massive, massive exaggeration.
Why is this funny? Because small businesses and family farms are inherently more socialist than capitalist. Why? Because it is closer to owning the means of production and capturing the excess value of labor by those who are, well, laboring. These are socialist principles.
Many (including in these comments) will repeat the propaganda that small farms (or businesses) can't survive. Yet farmer's markets, which many people like, can offer better prices and products than those that come out of agribusiness and go through distribution chains to end up on supermarket shelves. Again, the value has simply shifted to many layers of capital owners instead of the farmers.
This is a myth because it's been artificially created. Agribusiness is predatory in nature. Things like seeds are now a subscriptio model. Modern farm equipment often can't be repaired. It requires another predatory subscription. Yet, those large agricultural conglomerates also operate their own farms and don't have to pay those predatory prices.
I would call this distributed capitalism. The farm owners can still run the farm however they like, keep the entire profit of the farm, invest in capital machinery over a long term that they have exclusive ownership of, etc. The outcome is indeed closer to socialism in that it's likely the owners will also be workers, and profits are spread around throughout society. I'd say the key difference is that distributed capital divides power bottom-up, whereas socialism is more of a reaction to the lack of it or the failings of it.
What we're suffering today is centralized capitalism, where that ownership has been concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. I look at the federal government giving many trillions of dollars to centralized Wall Street in the form of low interest loans over the past few decades, and can't help but think that is a significant cause of the centralization - especially in light of the waste that centralized management seems to create (otherwise you'd expect larger business structures to be outcompeted in many areas). These subsidies are also the cause of beancounter-centric monocultures, because in order to direct those loans (leverage) into specific concrete endeavors the financial outcome must be made extremely predictable.
Feudalism as an economic system captured the surplus value of labor right up to the monarch. This was done through a number of layers, what you'd call vassal lords. In some places these structures exist today (eg the various duchies in the UK that still derive an income from their holdings to whatever royal or aristocrat is appointed to benefit from them). One might be tempted to call this distributed feudalism because of the existence of intermediate lords but it's one of those distinctions without a difference. The monarch will ultimately seek to extract as much value from his or her vassal lords as is possible. At times this was an explicit goal (eg Louis XIV keeping the nobility poor through Versailles).
"Distributed capitalism" is likewise a distinction without a difference. You can have smaller farms. These will be gobbled up Cargill or whoever, often coercively through predatory pricing of key products. The forces at work always seek to capture that surplus value of labor into a smaller and smaller group at the top.
You see the effects of this everywhere: massive consolidation in every sector. All of the food in the US is produced by like 6 conglomerates.
You completely ignored the last bit of my comment where I pointed out a likely cause of much of the consolidation, that isn't just "capitalism". A privileged class of people getting a cheat code of easy money to buy up ever more of the productive economy is not what I'd call a level playing field.
I see many dynamics that should discourage concentrations of wealth, like the utility value of money goes down as you have more (rich people overpay for stuff), and centralization often creates extra waste to help uniformity. I'm not going to assert that the overall dynamic is definitely this way (and then just-world-fallacy the way things currently are), rather I'm just pointing out that distributed capitalism is most certainly not the experiment we're running.
And to head off the common retort that these subsidies are inevitable as capital captures the government - if this is true then there's really no point in analyzing any -isms as it means we'll always be stuck in this type of "capitalism".
But why is it funny? You're not wrong that family farms are socialist in nature. Farmers have traditionally, at least here in Canada, even been socialist in political view. Our socialized healthcare system, for example, was a product of the work of farmers. The NDP, our closest answer to a socialist party, was born out of the older United Farmers party.
Bemoaning the death of that socialist legacy is like bemoaning the disposal of an Apple II, Commodore 64, or whatever legacy computer system is to your fancy. Being sad to see that history go isn't at odds with extolling the virtues of our modern technology, nor is it unusual to have a place in one's heart for the past while also embracing the present.
What seems far more socialist is the crony capitalism of large agro-business that prices small, family-owned capitalist farmers out of the market by taking taxpayer-funded federal subsidies and using them to capture regulators and buy out their competition.