Really Interesting Reality Check About Farming For All Us City- And Suburbs-Slickers
This is Dr. Sarah Taber, a scientist and manufacturing and agriculture growth strategist. The whole thread is here -- and is worth reading:
via @Overlawyered
Really Interesting Reality Check About Farming For All Us City- And Suburbs-Slickers
This is Dr. Sarah Taber, a scientist and manufacturing and agriculture growth strategist. The whole thread is here -- and is worth reading:
via @Overlawyered
One orbit or one lifetime.
Crid at September 6, 2018 2:26 AM
Sorry, wrong thread.
Also, Taber's feed (per this blog post) is a good read.
Crid at September 6, 2018 2:38 AM
Pretty accurate.
Ben at September 6, 2018 6:34 AM
My sister has a "small family farm." It's a hobby. Both she and her husband work because they could never make a living at farming.
Conan the Grammarian at September 6, 2018 7:13 AM
For those who don't twit:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1026198501129179137.html
Unroller at September 6, 2018 7:13 AM
Having small family farms are a choice countries make. Here in rural switzerland we have small family farms everywhere. It is what people value here, so we have it. We are currently voting on food sustainability and security issues with twp questions about food on the ballot this round.
Nicolek at September 6, 2018 7:52 AM
My friend has a family farm in Illinois. He inherited the land. He farms 1000 acres, has 200 cows, grows corn and soybeans. I would say 1000 acres is a minimum to be viable. He has probably half a million in equipment.
In many places if you have a horse or cow, you are a farm and get taxed at a lower rate, so people who want to live in the country get a horse and call themselves a "farm" for that break. If the horse knew how much benefit it is providing it would ask for a raise.
cc at September 6, 2018 9:01 AM
Sorry but this just isn't true. And why is she so angry??
Take a look at the USDA stats on farm ownership, production etc..
Something like 97% of US farms are family owned with over %80 of productive farm land owned by families.
Now most of that 80% is made up of very large land holdings. But there are also thousands of small farms - the average acreage for US farms is only a bit over 200 acres.
So WTF is Dr. Sarah talking about? Is she misinformed, or working from some very specific and limited definition of 'family farm'?
WTF at September 6, 2018 10:07 AM
"And why is she so angry??"
Maybe because she doesn't have as much prestige as she thinks she deserves?
dee nile at September 6, 2018 10:15 AM
@WTF: If you had followed the link, she points out that many of the large food producing companies ARE family-owned:
"Documentary-style "corporate farms" that have to Answer To Big City Investors are actually pretty rare.
Cargill: family owned.
Tyson & Purdue: family owned.
Blue Diamond, Land O'Lakes, Ocean Spray: farmer co-ops.
Smithfield Pork: bought by Chinese in 2013, *v recent event.*
It was right there, you just chose not to read it. "Unroller" linked to the thread, too.
ahw at September 6, 2018 11:56 AM
@WTF: If you had followed the link, she points out that many of the large food producing companies ARE family-owned:
"Documentary-style "corporate farms" that have to Answer To Big City Investors are actually pretty rare.
Cargill: family owned.
Tyson & Purdue: family owned.
Blue Diamond, Land O'Lakes, Ocean Spray: farmer co-ops.
Smithfield Pork: bought by Chinese in 2013, *v recent event.*
It was right there, you just chose not to read it. "Unroller" linked to the thread, too.
ahw at September 6, 2018 11:57 AM
AHW there is a big difference between a farm and a processor.
It seems like she's striking out at environmentalists and lefty activists who like to claim that agriculture has been taken over by large corporations. To do that, she's pointing out that their promotion of small scale agriculture is unrealistic and impractical.
But she went too far when she claimed that there is 'no such thing' as small family farming any longer - as I pointed out, that is simply not the case.
WTF at September 6, 2018 1:16 PM
She's talking about the food supply and food production, not nomenclature. The operative word here is "small."
How much do those small family farms actually contribute to the food supply?
"In 2015, 90 percent of U.S. farms were small family operations with under $350,000 in annual gross cash farm income (GCFI)—a measure of revenue that includes sales of crops and livestock, Government payments, and other farm-related income. These small farms, however, only accounted for 24 percent of the value of production. By comparison, large-scale family farms with at least $1 million in GCFI made up only 2.9 percent of U.S. farms but contributed 42 percent of total production. Nonfamily farms accounted for only 11 percent of agricultural production."
Conan the Grammarian at September 6, 2018 2:54 PM
Conan: The operative word here is "small."
OK and the operative phrase is "no such thing", which she uses to assert that small farms do not exist as a contributor to agricultural output.
That's plainly not the case - your own cite shows small farms contribute 24% of output by value.
If she didn't actually mean 'small farms' she should have used more precise language.
WTF at September 6, 2018 4:30 PM
We moved out to some land to live closer to our resources. Dyer Dairy for milk, Brazos valley cheese, Ise Acre Farms for greens, eggs from our own freeranging hens, beef from our neighbor rancher, pork from just down the road.....yeah, we still hit up the grocery store for snacks and some produce, I'm not fanatical, but I like the kids helping procure our food from the source. All 4 of my kids love sunflower microgreens-thank you farmers market samples for that discovery!
Momof4 at September 6, 2018 4:49 PM
Yes and no. Yes most city people have odd ideas of farms either one extreme; "large faceless company abusing nature and animals" or the other, "small one family farm say 40 acres". That get thrown about especially around political talk of US life and farm subsidies. And No, The reality is there is a mix of things. Farms do tend to be larger than urbanites think, just for economy of scale to make them work as more than a supplement or hobby. Just ask an urban person how big an acre is.
Joe J at September 6, 2018 4:59 PM
That's plainly not the case - your own cite shows small farms contribute 24% of output by value.
Use the whole quote - 90% of small farms contribute 24%
24/90=0.26
Each of those farms contributes one quarter of 1% to the total gross food supply, given how much is pitched at each step I wonder what that figure is for the consumption net food supply
lujlp at September 7, 2018 3:12 AM
Conan, thanks for the numbers. Do you have any idea why they add up to only 77%? Could 23% be coming from non-commercial family gardens?
"In 2015, 90 percent of U.S. farms were small family operations with under $350,000 in annual gross cash farm income (GCFI)—a measure of revenue that includes sales of crops and livestock, Government payments, and other farm-related income. These small farms, however, only accounted for 24 percent of the value of production. By comparison, large-scale family farms with at least $1 million in GCFI made up only 2.9 percent of U.S. farms but contributed 42 percent of total production. Nonfamily farms accounted for only 11 percent of agricultural production."
There are very few businesses with gross receipts of under $350,000 that clear enough profit for a family to live on, and in my experience that would be even more unlikely with a farm. Nearly all of these small farmers have a regular job and are farming on the side, and/or they are drawing welfare. (I work with two engineers with a farm on the side, and know several welfare families with livestock or crops.) So if by "small family farm" Taber meant "small family-owned farm that supports the family without outside income", these hardly exist - and in my experience growing up on a 110 acre farm, they haven't existed in significant numbers since the 1960's. However, the people farming on the side do produce a quarter of our agricultural production. (Note that this is not equal to our food; we import some, and export a lot.)
As for the bigger family-owned farms, some are big enough to run like corporations, with salaried farm managers. E.g., much of the farm land near us was owned by a developer, who acquired land where he expected the town to grow and had it farmed while he waited - sometimes decades. That would be classified as "family owned", but it certainly wasn't family run. It would be in the 2.9% of farms that produce 42% of the total.
In between, there was the dairy farm family with about a square mile of land under cultivation, besides the feed they bought; I think that adjusting for inflation would put it in the million-dollars of gross range today. They drew a decent income from the farm, but in fact it was on the average running at a profit, but not much, and they were living partly on borrowed money. Every year the USDA raised the loan limit, and they borrowed more. If the government ever stopped raising that limit, they'd be broke.
markm at September 7, 2018 8:53 AM
Conan the Grammarian at September 7, 2018 2:43 PM
Suppose the average Twitter and/or Facebooker knew as little about this subject.
Then, suppose they knew as little about any other subject.
That's likely.
The stage is set now for a great many American and world policymakers to simply not care about social media addicts; after all, those people are busy on social media, not working hard.
Aspects of all sorts of work are alien to the holder of the bedazzled smartphone, every bit as much as they were in the past, for people seek comfort, and comfort is not often found in learning.
Radwaste at September 8, 2018 6:07 AM
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