She is an ag scientist and and damned good one to by all accounts, co owner of a regional ag consulting group.
For that matter the chap down on the corner is in the grain seed ANOVA business, he has thousands of test plots all over the wheat belt region.
What's always happened here is that everybody multi skills - not everbody is an ag scientist, but everybody knows someone who is - ditto diesal mechanics, well borers, drone operators, tractor hackers, silo builders, etc.
As someone who lives in a rural/agricultural area, yes.
It turns out that by building networks of producers who share their experiments as they try to find best practices for their specific place, time, and crops for regenrative ag actually helps them improve it for their context and make a little money.
The problem with ag scientists is that they stay in universities, grow a few test crops in their own fields, then try to replicate that at scale a hundred miles away. Then they throw their hands up when the producers tell them they're full of it.
On the other hand when you build real social networks of producers they can find more common ground and share stories about practices that work.
It helps too because it's actually _their_ next door neighbors who don't use sustainable or regenerative practices who are coming over and telling them they're doing it wrong. IOW the isolation that comes with the decentralized ag that you're talking about is also a social isolation that makes it really hard to even experiment.
Educating small farmers is a big task but it's at least actionable--I have no idea how you could go about making corporations care less about profit than they do about sustainability.
The problem of industrial farming is the education bottleneck, though. There is good reason why virtually all farms in America have remained family farms. What growth in farm sizes we've seen has been mostly on the back of machinery and other technical innovation allowing families to do more work, and not so much farms being able to hire more and more labourers. The latter has not happened in any significant way because educating farmhands about agriculture is a monumental task. And if you manage to pull it off, there is a very good chance that they will soon want to become the farmer running their own family farm!
This is the wrong metric; we don't care about the number of farms, we care about the amount of agricultural productivity. Large scale family farms and industrial farms account for more than half of all agricultural output in the US (USDA (2021) America’s Diverse Family Farms).
> What growth in farm sizes we've seen has been mostly on the back of machinery and other technical innovation allowing families to do more work, and not so much farms being able to hire more and more labourers.
I agree--in fact, larger machines and more automation allows large operations to reduce labor costs in ways that smaller family farms can't compete with, which is helping to squeeze out small family farms.
> The latter has not happened in any significant way because educating farmhands about agriculture is a monumental task.
No, it's because farmhands don't have access to capital to buy land and equipment. Farmhands understand agriculture, moreover, even if you can buy a small farm you'll be working 80 hour weeks to break even--you have to have a large operation in order to keep your head above water (the only really viable small operations are selling prestige 'organic / locally grown / free range' foods to yuppies and even then I'd bet many of those farmers feel pretty strapped). Anyway the farmhands aren't the ones calling the shots on how the land is managed, they're shoveling shit and driving the tractor where and how they're told.
It's not intended to be a metric, just a matter of fact. Industrial agriculture has never really taken off in any meaningful way because it is too hard to educate workers about agriculture.
Anyone who already has that education does so most likely because they have been involved in a family farm, and thus are likely to be still involved in that family farm. Very few people leave the family farm to work for an industrial operation.
It is true that some family farms have been able to leverage technology to grow quite large and supply a significant portion of all the food produced, but they are still family farms. A family farm isn't determined by its scale.
> No, it's because farmhands don't have access to capital to buy land and equipment.
In my first couple of years of farming, I rented or hired out everything I needed. It is false to claim that you need to own capital to farm. In the long term I would agree it is prudent to start investing in those things, hopefully from the proceeds of your earlier years farming, but you most definitely don't have to begin farming as a BTO. You can get started with a surprisingly small investment.
What would have absolutely destroyed my farm business would have been not having some farmers readily available to share their experience with me and to help guide my operation. I agree that most people don't have access to that. For that reason, most people will never realistically be able to start farming, even with all the money in the world. I mean, of course anyone can live up to the "How do you make a million dollars farming? Start with two million." trope, but I wouldn't call that realistically starting farming.
> Anyway the farmhands aren't the ones calling the shots on how the land is managed
Absolutely. They are going to be the actual steward of the land, though. An industrial farmer isn't going to be the one doing the work.
When was the last time you saw a worker listen to shots called? I've worked in a lot of industries in my life and I've never seen workers listen to the shots called. They do whatever the want. They don't care if they destroy your equipment or land. What's it to them? They'll just go get a different job if you don't like what they decided to do.
Thanks to advancements in automation, more and more work can be given to computers who will listen to the farmer, leaving the worker to just sit there and make a phone call to an expert if the computer fails. This is making the industrial farm idea more realistic, but we've only covered a very narrow swath of farming activities with such automation to this point.
I think a lot more is wasted by the millions of smallholder turfgrass farmers in the suburbs than major food producers.
But much, much harder to teach their workers who actually steward the land on large farms. Farmers have some incentive to listen, but farmhands couldn't care less. They are just there to collect a paycheque. The long-term viability of the operation means nothing to them – they can always get a job somewhere else. The more decentralized farming, the more farmers, and thus more people who have reason to care and fewer people who have no reason to care.
I expect the people intending to produce good, healthy, and natural food to be more able to do so than those who follow FDA standards with the sole intention of making money.