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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

How much of this is because of hobby farming and kids inheriting the family farm?

Going back a couple hundred years, ~80% of the population was a "farmer". But by any standard, they had "multiple jobs".

I.E., they were doing a lot more than just growing food to sell.

You probably had a sweet spot somewhere between the 20s and 60s where you didn't yet have mega farms, but also <20% of the population was a "farmer" - so you could actually make a living off that.

Now, most of those farms have been sold off to mega farms or handed off to kids that don't really want to be a "farmer".

With the mega farms came efficiency, and if you're trying to be an inefficient small farmer, you're going to have a bad time competing. Hence, the need for a second job.

Anyone under 30 trying to compete with a mega farm is like some solo developer trying to build the next Google.

It's never going to happen.

Either you're doing it as a "hobby", or you REALLY want to farm.

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"Now, most of those farms have been sold off to mega farms or handed off to kids that don't really want to be a "farmer"."

It's common practice that the person doing the farming may not be the land owner. Field leases are extremely common. So they can inherit the land and just lease the fields until they decide to sell to a residential developer for big money as the urban sprawl encroaches.

The vast majority of farms are not in danger of urban sprawl. Farms near cities are but there is a lot of land not close.

The easy test is ask someone who has known an area for 50 years how many new houses have gone up. You might be surprised. Even in depressed areas with some reduction in population, such as some areas of Appalachia, there are many new houses in rural areas.

"there are more houses in my area, therefore there are more houses everywhere" is illogical. i wish it were true in the seattle area. also, there will always be more houses today than 50 years ago in a society with an above zero birth rate.

"there are more houses in my area, therefore there are more houses everywhere"

Nice strawman, I never said that.

I'm talking about localized population trends, such as in parts of Appalachia. I've seen it even in my own lifetime with houses replacing what used to be fields.

The Seattle area is not rural, so I would not expect you to notice farmland converting into developments.

Most, even

My parents farmed their whole life and had part time town jobs primarily for health insurance.

>With the mega farms came efficiency, and if you're trying to be an inefficient small farmer, you're going to have a bad time competing.

Essentially over time you had to work more land or raise more livestock in exchange for a steady quality of life.

The cost of food people ate did not at all scale down with the profit the folks working the land. The cost of inputs went up, yields went up, prices went down, and entities higher up in the supply chain took an ever increasingly large amount of the pie.

At the same time farmland became an attractive investment vehicle to store value so prices shot up so that it will take 30-40 years to pay for the land you bought by working it, before considering interest. (which is much much worse than many other investments)

You don't want this because smaller farmers can pay more attention to their products and create food with higher quality and more variety than corporate farming with industrial methods.

As for my going back to the farm eventually, honestly just the concept of making my career producing the inputs for ethanol, feed for confinement animals, and industrial food products (soybean oil, corn syrup, etc.) doesn't seem to be of particularly high value.

Do the rates for leasing farmland go up with farmland prices?

Yes.

I disagree with this post not because it is completely wrong but because of its dismissive tone. Many important aspects are not mentioned or detailed. Dependencies of subsidies from gov, price pressure from large supermarket chains, large farms are corporates VS small family farms, responsibility regarding soil conservation, Methan emissions, dependencies or lock in from Monsanto and similar grain and fertilizer suppliers, inability to repair modern tractors due to DRM and so on.

Media likes to lump together "farmers" and large ag companies. They are no where near the same.

I think that you are comparing un-comparable. No, farmers back then, regardless of what unclear period you talk about, did not had two jobs. They had one job.

Also, I suspect you don't have actual concrete place and time in mind. How farming and economy worked varied widely between times and places, you cant just cherry pick small anecdotes from span over 500 years and two continents and create comfortable picture.

A lot of time businesses that farmers could do as side gigs become the primary gig over the generations but the farm just has to stay there and keep doing farming things so you don't get screwed by the municipality or state on zoning or facility related compliance BS.

Or you get to keep your agricultural property tax breaks.

Um . . . no.

Citations needed about any historical claims.

Also, show me yours about serious farms vs hobby farms and I'll show you mine about century farms...

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