When Land Is History
pjmedia.com
pjmedia.com
I think we all have a selfish tendency to think of land and property as being at its best when we knew it most intimately. But the land was there long before us and will be there long after.
My grandpa farmed with a Jeep that had a PTO and a team of mules into the 60's.
I don't really know much about the farm on that end before that though. I should do some asking around.
...presumably run by people with agribusiness BAs.
This is a silly meme. If you look at government data on college degrees (which only goes up to 2004 as far as I can tell), humanities aren't over-represented at all, but account for between 8 and 12 percent of Bachelor degrees awarded[1]. That's History, English, Philosophy, etc. combined[2].
It would be more accurate to say that more people in business should focus on agribusiness instead of finance, or that social science majors should switch to agribusiness[2].
And the percentage of humanity degrees awarded is lower than it was forty years ago, and has been trending down for most of that forty years[3].
Finally, it's rather odd that the author would write that, considering he has both an undergraduate degree and graduate degree in the classics, of all things[4].
[1] http://archive102009.humanitiesindicators.org/content/hrcoIm...
[2] http://archive102009.humanitiesindicators.org/content/hrcoIm...
[3] http://archive102009.humanitiesindicators.org/content/hrcoIm...
His point is that inside of his family there were too many liberal arts degrees and not enough agribusiness folks. The reality is that if you want to grow organic, all natural, heirloom plants on that type of land good luck! That's the type of production liberal arts degree majors tend to favor.
A person with an agribusiness background would come in and say, "Throw up the irrigators, spray the fertilizer, and lets try to get some organic matter into the soil".
All he is saying is that his family didn't have the right people in the right places to make the right decisions at the time.
You could be right about the heirlooms.
A person who wants to own a farm but not be a professional farmer should probably lease the farm to a professional farmer (which is fairly common); what I'd personally like to do is own a timber estate, since that really is mostly passive for 30-50 years.
They already have levelers[1] available which get us most of the way there. Again, no good black dirt, it's not worth farming (at scale anyway). A combine or chopper can easily push you over a quarter million dollars, so the guy running the thing for a couple of tens of dollars an hour for a few months a year isn't that much of a cost compared to your input costs, etc.
Variability in land form doesn't contribute to risk mitigation much if at all unless you're talking about large geographic distances, which of course it's the fact that diseases and weather systems don't travel far and fast enough not that the land form is different.
More specifically, GMO provide the best opportunity to address disease and weather issues. That said, maybe that isn't what we should be optimizing for.
[1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uaYbXtPs_o&feature=relat...
Automation doesn't address the sorts of problems that "not flatness" causes.
Consider irrigation vs pruning, weeding, or harvesting.
Heck, even "hand watering" (which doesn't make much sense)isn't made appreciably harder by reasonable "not flatness".
> variability in land form could be an excellent risk mitigation strategy against disease and harsh weather conditions or variability in fertilizer prices and so on.
What have you grown?
When it comes to pruning, weeding and harvesting, a sufficiently smart autonomous robot could do those just as well without everything perfectly flat and in evenly spaced rows. However, it is currently much easier and cheaper to do a "stupid" machine that works only in the controlled environment.