Big Farms Are About to Get Bigger | Hacker News Reader

Big Farms Are About to Get Bigger

american.com

22 pointsdigisth33 comments

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I spent twenty years in the fertilizer business and worked with farmers big and small every day.

Here's the facts:

1. Farming is a low margin business

2. The only way to succeed is to be a great manager at large scale

3. Most of the technology is used to allow farmers to successfully manage larger and larger farms

4. Most of these with a few exceptions truly are family farms or if they were in town what we would view as small business.

5. The biggest challenge for the farmer in software isn't collecting the data but receiving actionable information from it.

Seems some small farmers disagree with your "facts" 1&2:

Joel Salatin of polyface farms makes more than his neighbors (particularly on a per acre basis) by throwing away "big agribusiness" truisms like single purpose machinery, monocultures, and chemical stimulants for the land. He uses symbiosis instead, creates a premium product that his customers are willing to pay a premium for, all without subsidization (iirc).

There is a small market for specialization; my parents did it well. But the bulk of food comes from the farm rmason is talking about, the massive amounts of grain, vegetables, and meat that feeds America. The plural of anecdote isn't data.

Also, dont believe that just because lots of people are fed by the kind of farming that rmason talks about that the "older" ways are no viable. Supposedly the old ways were far more resource efficient in every variable except human time.

The plural of snark isn't intelligence, either.

If your parent's post ruffled your snark-feathers, your sensibilities may be... overly sensitive.

You can not feed a nation on "a premium product" that you have to "pay a premium for"

Which is not to say I have any strong investment in the belief that current large scale farming is optimal however I'm poor but inconveniently need food from time to time, so unfortunately I've gotta throw my weight in with the "what ever gets me rock bottom grains and legumes" camp.

We are already paying a premium for subsidized food. From what I understand Big agri is very subsidized and smaller producers are not. That means a portion of the price premium (the spread) is not a real production cost, but just a lack of subsidies that competitors receive.

If BigAgriBusinesA receives more $ (on a per unit produced basis) than SmallAgriBusinessB , then there is a price spread that is not due to efficiency, but due to meddling by the gov't in the market.

Also, if premium food does in fact lead to premium health, then one might argue its cheaper to eat premium food than the total bill of cheaper food + additional health costs. This may not work for organic kale vs reg kale, but just might for potato chips vs reg kale.

"You can not feed a nation on "a premium product" that you have to "pay a premium for""

Yes you can. You just need fewer people to feed.

Well that's easy then. What says we have to feed everyone?

Monsanto is working on that with their GM program.

https://www.google.com/search?q=monsanto+sterilization

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/1995/2249_kissinger_food.ht...

You are making an emotional and anti-science argument. Even having to quote from a Lyndon LaRouche website.

Here's a few articles that counter your argument:

http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/bad-s...

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

People have done seed breeding since the days of Mendel. The only difference today is that we have better tools.

I know. We have excellent tools. And Monsanto is using them to create corn that sterilizes humans.

It's not emotional or anti-science. It's just the cold hard truth.

https://www.google.com/search?q=monsanto+corn+sterilizes+peo...

It is patently impossible to discuss social engineering or the automation of a society, i.e., the engineering of social automation systems (silent weapons) on a national or worldwide scale without implying extensive objectives of social control and destruction of human life, i.e., slavery and genocide.

The solution of today's problems requires an approach which is ruthlessly candid, with no agonizing over religious, moral or cultural values.

Not to nitpick but artificial selection in plants started a lot earlier than Mendel[1]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture#Developm...

You have no idea how comforting it is to see a Google search link that doesn't have a bunch bullshit parameters at the end of it.

A typical dryland farmer can produce a bushel of wheat (60 pounds) for less than $3/bushel, assuming typical weather. That's all that 99% of consumers care about. Everything else is niche.

Universities are working hard to bring these techniques to the mass-market farmers. GPS-enabled equipment has already let farmers massively reduce the amount of herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers they use. Machine vision technology shows great promise in bringing the rest.

By my math, that comes out to a nickle a pound. Great that we can be that efficient, but it seems to me there should be a fair number of people who are rich enough and picky enough that they would be willing to pay a little extra for a premium product.

Of course there are. It's called "Whole Foods Market".

The sad humor is the real profit is to be had when you can sell people nickle-a-pound wheat, and make them think it's premium product.

Consumers in the first world wouldn't care if they're paying 5 cents or 6 cents for a pound of wheat. But consumers don't buy wheat. They buy sandwhiches from companies who buy bread who buy from companies that make flour from wheat they buy from grain companies who buy wheat from flours. All those companies in the chain care greatly about the cost of product they buy.

His yields are also almost certainly less than his neighbors, as well. I love what Salatin is doing, but there are tradeoffs, one being that it probably doesn't scale that well.

There's a premium market for almost anything, and it almost always is an exception to whatever runs the non-premium side of the market. TBH I don't think this has any effect on what the root comment said.

6. Knowing how to farm the federal government is just as important as knowing how to farm the ground. Perhaps more.

The census publishes statistics that back this up:

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/agriculture/farm...

Most corporate farms are owned by families and a bunch of the remaining corporate farms are held by a small number of people (less than 10), which isn't the colloquial idea of a big business.

I get the feeling that people have repeated the phrase "corporate farm" so often and don't really get what that stats you pointed out mean. It has the word "corporate" so it is bad, but you would have to be stupid beyond belief not to incorporate a modern farm even if it is a hobby farm. You sell something, you incorporate.

Not only that, but you potentially incorporate individual fields as their own legal entity. Maybe there is a lawyer or accountant here who can speak to the advantages, but I know from brief conversations with my accountant (who works with a lot of wheat famers) that most set up each thing as a separate entity under one or more holding companies, and each holding company is potentially in the name of the kids or grandkids even if still controlled by mom and dad or the grandparents.

I was told the inheritance tax (aka death tax) was a major driver of a lot of accounting in farm country. Also, widows tend to rent out the land and it makes accounting for the profits a bit easier.

I believe the inheritance tax is just a bad deal for a lot of people and only makes accountants and lawyers rich.

This seems consistent with my experience working with Iowa farmers from 1997-2001. We were seeing consolidation of family farms into even larger family farms at that time. Many small producers were forced out of business due to low commodity prices at the time. And the bulk of the landowners were cash renting their land to the producers. So, a "family farm operation" likely included land that they rented but didn't actually own. You would be shocked to learn of the amount of millionaire landowners in Iowa who live on small, humble acreages and simply rent their land to farmers.

There was a large contingent of "hobby farmers" who owned land through their family, but it was a "side project" for them. They often had jobs with the USDA, etc or other sources of income. Equipment was insanely expensive and capital intensive.

I'm not in the ag industry now, but computer technology in '97-'01 was like a magic elixir to farmers. Very little software existed to help them turn data into actionable information. I'm sure today it's very different.

Edit: I'll add that the "state-of-the art" at that time was to use military-grade GPS receivers (which we got as a part of USDA) to track soil samples and create GIS heat maps and basic fertility plans. There were no on-board computer systems. :)

So true. Everybody moans about the rise of the big corporate farms, but in many ways those farms are smaller than the 7-11 on the corner. Sure, they may be incorporated for tax purposes, but they rarely have more than one or two employees with the majority of the work being done by the owners' family. The land and equipment are worth millions, but that's not accumulated by a corporation selling shares but through the heavy use of mortgages by a family over many generations.

"Farming is a low margin business"

You can do quite well if you manage moisture effectively. Those dryers are not cheap.

"What we have gained in efficiency and by avoiding the overuse of scarce and potentially environmentally damaging inputs, we may be losing in the connections of the farm family to the ancestral place."

What a stupid quote. If it's a tradeoff, call it a tradeoff--you are not losing environmental savings by losing the "connection of the farm family to the ancestral place", you are trading something sentimental for direct benefits to the environment and cheaper food.

My main quibble with this article is that a lot of the "revolutionary data" is already known and used. Farmers know the yield others are getting. Elevators are reporting what they are taking in to big companies doing investing. Satellite pictures and some aircraft pictures are already used.

The image of the farmer as a simple, non-tech person is pretty pathetic. The current generation of farmers are pretty sophisticated. You cannot make it this far without being that. The amount of data a farmer wants is pretty impressive.

The JD thing in the article is the newest and I'm not sure its going to be a ongoing proposition if the farmers don't benefit financially from their data. A lot of farmers run their combines all harvest by starting them in the south and working their way north as the harvest progresses. You have to pay for a vehicle that makes most high-end sports cars look cheap. They also aren't the cheapest thing to maintain. That harvest run of data is know to the farmer and would be worth some cash.

The image of the farmer as a simple, non-tech person is pretty pathetic. The current generation of farmers are pretty sophisticated.

Many members of the current generation of farmers even have college degrees just as serious & relevant to their field as any other science.

It's amazing the insight that is uncovered about a farming operation's efficiency and potential lost revenues when one takes the time to gather all the information in a useful way.

We believe so much in the benefits of using technology to better manage a farm can have on the bottom line that we give Farm At Hand away for FREE.

www.farmathand.com

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