Why small farms can not feed the world anymore...

There is no comparison between the meat we grow on our farm and the CAFO carcasses found at the store. I can't eat factory produced meat and maintain a clear conscience.

As far as time and $$$ go, my time is better spent gardening and tending stock than being online or fiddling around somewhere else.

__________________
Je ne suis pas Alice

http://homesteadingfamilies.proboards.com/

Not everyone can afford to be snobbish about the food they eat.
Not everyone wants to raise a stinky old pig or dig around in the dirt.
People move off the farm because they want something besides 24/7 drudgery.
It has been that way since forever.
The kids want out, dad gets old and sells out to the housing developer or the big time operator the next county over.
Or dad works himself to death and the kids sell it.
Yes there are some folks who want to do it but there are more folks that do not.
That is why there are cities.
Leave those folks where they are and don't worry about what they are doing.
If you like growing your own then have at it.

__________________
Deja Moo; The feeling I've heard this bull before.

I must ask just where the apartment dweller or condo owner in NYC is going to raise his pig? And where is the food that said pig will be getting the scraps from going to be grown?

__________________
Remember, when seconds count. . .
the police are just MINUTES away!

Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. . .Davy Crockett

Think, Man. 10% of the US population is all I'm saying. I'll bet if you look hard you can find that a whole bunch of people don't live in NYC. 20% of the US lives rural. Most of the 80% that is urban / suburban is suburban, but I can't find a good number right now. A minority of those suburban folks live in 1 - 5 acre lots and larger, easily able to set aside a small space for pigs, a cow or two, or whatever.

Again, I'm not saying we have the attitude to make this happen, just that it CAN happen if we ever decide there is reason enough to make it happen. I posted the math only to show that the dire warnings that the growing population is going to starve, that we need CAFOs, and that the world can't eat like the US is a bunch of blather.

Agreed, the small guys CAN do it, if they want to. But the will and desire has to be there. I just wish i owned more land. My couple of acres are close to getting maxed out. My cousin told me once that i out produce him 50 fold, and he owns 160 acres. Granted, he COULD produce more, but there again, no desire.

Prime example of how people could do more, if they wanted to.

Few years ago, I bought a house in a subdivision just outside of a small city. Every yard in neighborhood was half acre. When I started talking about putting in a garden, neighbors started talking about their gardens....biggest was about 8 by 12 foot.
I put in a 36 by 85 foot garden. I also raised 9 rabbits, a dozen layin hens, and that summer also raised 65 or 70 cornish cross chickens.
Granted, I couldn't even produce a third of my families food from that set up, but imagine the outcome if everyone in that neighborhood had the same desire. 10 houses each with half acre "lawns", combined, we could have come close to feeding our neighborhood at least 50% of our food consumption. Now, what if two neighbors each raised 2 or 3 pigs, two neighbors each raised a cow. 5 neighbors each raised 1/4 acre gardens, 1 neighbor raised broiler chickens and turkeys, and final neighbor raised 4 dozen laying hens and a couple dozen rabbits.
Each person could also plant one or two fruit trees maybe a blueberry bush or two, and some strawberries, all in their front yards, they could be used as nice landscaping.

Between the 10 households, all sharing and battering with each other could really take care of the biggest part of the food needs, and literally, off 5 acres.

So don't raise stinky pigs in confinement. Put them out on pasture. No stink. Virtually free animal feed from the pasture lands. Saves a bundle on feed (30% of the cost of raising an animal to market). Makes for better quality meat. Doesn't stink. A lot more fun. (I have 400 pigs on pasture and about 300 to 500 chickens at any time plus other animals so I am familiar with how to not have stinky chickens and not have stinky pigs.) It's all about choices you make.

So they move to the city where they have drudgery in the factory or cubicle and die younger. The drudgery factor doesn't originate with the farm but with the people who make their lives into drudgery. It's a choice. Choose what you want to be like. That is how you will be on the farm, in the city, where ever you are.

Agreed. I wouldn't want them to empty. It's a good place to store those people.

__________________
SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

A lot depends upon what a person wants to eat.

Feeding a lot of animals, even small ones, can get to be pretty extensive if you have to grow and process all of what they eat.

A person can grow a lot of food on a pretty small plot of ground but it may not be what a some would want to eat. (Some people have meat as their main diet with the occasional veggie on the side. Not being critical, just observing.) Those eating a mostly plant based diet can grow what they need more directly. Potatoes (white and sweet), beans of numerous kinds, and brassicas can produce an amazing amount of calories. Squash, tomatoes and cukes are often very prolific. And there are other things. Some might depend on whether a person is more northern or southern, eastern or western.

A sort of middle ground might be depending upon hunting and/or fishing for meat rather than trying to grow it. That, too, would have some pretty heavy influence by where a person is located.

I agree, that it depends very much on locality. I grew up in a country, where the rural population density is on par with that of Alaska's, so you can imagine that most of my family depended a great deal on my grandpa's hunting and fishing for food when I was growing up. My grandma and mom taught me to forage, and my grandpa taught me how to set nets, fish traps, and how to gut and fillet a fish before I was in elementary school.

My grandparents weren't entirely self-sufficient, but as they never really turned off the rural subsistence spirit they grew up with in WWII Finland, so when I was a kid, and they were still relatively young and fit, they grew practically all of the extended family's (that extended family is roughly 9-12 people at any time) cucumbers (my grandpa pickled them in giant vats, and we always ate them all before cukes came back up in summer), squash, potatoes, onions, jams, juices (and much of the wine, beer, and liquor, but shhh... my grandpa wasn't supposed to have that still), frozen meat, fish and berries, and lots of odds and ends straight for the table during summer season, as well as caught all of our sweet water fish, and probably half of all the meat we ate.

They did this without owning land. What they had, was an allotment as part of the lease on their cabin, a fishing license, and a hunting license, and the Finnish laws allowing public access to the forests, which comes with a certain extent of foraging rights. My grandpa had access to maybe 1/3-1/2 an acre of field (half a hectare), that he cultivated "traditionally", meaning I have a lot of routine in weeding and watering his veggie patch during dry summers, and although I hated it as a kid, find the exact same activity to be therapeutic these days, although I'm utilizing my knowledge of sustainable agricultural practices to reduce the labor input in the long run.

Edit: It should be mentioned, that Finnish winters are long, dark, and cold, with a growing season that can be as short as 4-5 months in part of the country, so my grandparents' food growing accomplishment suggests, that with the right kind of crops, even colder climate dwellers are able to provide, or at least supplement their food supply. But Finns have an inherent sense of self-sufficiency that Americans have lost, so what most Finns, even in cities, still grow up thinking of sort of normal, is a little strange for the mainstream suburban or urban American.

Not wanting to hijack the thread, necessarily, but it does seem to be relevant.

Tell me more about how this can be done so that it's a good deal for both a leasee and lessor that transforms into a buyer and seller.

Right now, I am doing my little bit of farming on my parents' land, land which I do not expect to inherit nor do I want to considering it's location. So where I am, I do not consider to be a good long term solution to acquiring a homestead.

I often find that my savings does not equate to the prices being asked for properties that are of interest.

I'm not crazy about borrowing money by conventional means.

And so your post really intrigues me.

I've been reluctant to rent a property because of wanting to develop the soil fertility over a period of years that goes beyond what I might want to do on somebody else's land. I also would like to develop an orchard, and that is not the type of project I'd like to invest heavily in on land I do not own.

Would a middle ground be something like a lease with option to buy? perhaps with terms that look good to both parties? Or are there some other ways to make something happen that a person can, if they're persistent, hard working, smart and resourceful, work themselves into a homestead?

I'd like to hear more about these ideas as it may be just the type of situation that could take us from being nomads to homesteaders on our own place.

Thanks very much for the input!!

I have friends who have done something similar. They run a small CSA/market garden operation in eastern WI. They grew up in the cities, (no farming background) but interned on a larger CSA for their honeymoon. They rented a house from a small dairy operation and rent three acres of pasture as well. They'll grow produce on the three acres on one side of the house for a couple years, then that gets planted back to grass and their garden moves to another side of the house. So they can keep ahead of the diseases to some degree. They raise a couple hogs in a "hog tractor" that gets pulled across harvested veggie rows.
They live on very little income, but of course they have all the produce and pork that they can eat.
The straight CSA wasn't paying its way, so they do more direct marketing to restaurants in the surrounding towns. Through a lot of hard work and persistence they have a good reputation among the area chefs who are happy to be able to use local produce in their menus.

It's not easy for them, and I wouldn't be willing to live that lifestyle myself, but those kinds of things can be done if it's really want you want. You need to find a market that you can fill, and then make it happen.

Meat is the easiest, most reliable thing to grow.

Vegetables, fruits, grains and nuts all have good seasons and bad depending on the weather. The weather is not consistent year to year - it never has been, nothing new with that. Livestock can eat pasture and a variety of other things. We 400 pigs and over 300 chickens on pasture with no commercial feed. That makes up the vast majority of their diet. As available we supplement with whey, spent barley from a local brew pub, etc. Those things are bonus feed and we've raised the animals completely without any supplements some years. Pasture is always available and cheap. Do managed rotational grazing and the pasture just gets better and better every cycle.

Meat is the most reliable, easiest, cheapest food I can raise. I can put almost anything in one end of an animals and get meat (and eggs and milk) out of those animals. What is not digestible by humans can be eaten by animals and turned into high quality protein, lipids, minerals and vitamins we love to eat.

Perhaps most importantly, meat is nutrient dense. You'll die trying to live on lettuce and face severe malnutrition on just potatoes. You can thrive on just meat. Not that I would want to only eat meat - I also like other things - I'm an omnivore. But meat, eggs, milk - animal products - offer rich nutrition. (Did you know that pigs produce their own Vitamin C and it is in the meat? Most animals do. Humans lost this ability probably because they ate so much fruit at one state of evolution.)

Plants on the other hand are not a complete diet in our northern climate. You can't grow a plant based diet in our climate sustainably without supplements or long distance shipping. Veganism is a fad and not sustainable.

I'm also a very good gardener. But meat is easier and cheaper to produce - do it on pasture - the land provides the food if you do good managed rotational grazing. It is easy to learn and simple to implement. This works even in our extreme northern central Vermont mountain climate (Zone 3 on a good year).

We're omnivores so we get to take advantage of a wide range of dietary items.

I just want to dispel this myth that meat is somehow hard or expensive to raise. It's not.

__________________
SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

Walter makes a very good point.

I'm a fairly decent gardener, but wow! I am REALLY good at growing meat. It's not hard at all (except when it comes time to harvest). Pretty straightforward, actually. And when it comes to more complete foods, you'll do well on meat. Its availability is certainly more consistent, as Walter said.

__________________
Je ne suis pas Alice

http://homesteadingfamilies.proboards.com/

Pretty much, yes.

My hobby farm keeps me busy and happy. I spend less on consumer goods (I have little time and energy for shopping) and the food that I raise reduces the grocery bills.

So, that is both less money spent in town and less money spent at the grocery store. I probably earn less than minimum wage when I raise my food but then I also spend less on consumer goods as my desire to go shopping is nil.

I think this thread would be more accurately titled "Why we do not" not "Why we can not". Theoretically it is possible, just hard to implement today and put into practice.
Similar to my next example:
Theoretically, we could send everyone to the moon. I mean we have sent people there in the past, so theoretically it is possible!! But in reality it would be very difficult to implement a plan to send everyone to the moon! Of course then we get back to the other argument that has been brought up in this thread, that not everyone wants to go to the moon?? Would be very difficult to load those folks on the spaceship, I would be one of them!!.

Aye, that's one of the things I don't like about going in town. I always end up spending money. It's cheaper to stay here on the mountain.

__________________
SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

Highlands and Pony,

No offense intended. Sounds like you have the meat growing down pat. And that's great. I have seen some posts on other threads (I recall $15 chickens) where others had difficulty making the finances of growing meat work.

To be fair, I should probably mention that some can't grow fruits or veggies profitably either.

This region has had a depressed economy for many decades. The recent housing bubble/bust largely skipped this state. The primary industry is tourism which is seasonal. 92% of the land mass is forest, but the timber industry just can not seem to get things together. Lumber is brought in from Canada.

Young adults mostly leave for jobs elsewhere. Retirees migrate here for the low cost-of-living and rural peace / beauty.

In my town, maybe around 1/3 of the parcels have residents living here. The rest are all owned by people who do not live here. We have seasonal tourists that come here to camp. There are many abandoned farm houses where an old couple died, and they are now owned by the children who live out-of-state, thinking that maybe someday they will return to their home town. Taxes are very low so owning 100 acres here is not a big burden on anyone who has a job.

If I need to run an errand and drive through 6 or 8 towns to get somewhere, it would be easy to count 50 abandoned farmhouses.

There are a lot of properties here that are not being used by anyone.

On the other hand, there is a culture here, that everyone owns a 'camp'. A place in the boonies, to go to for long weekends. I am not from here, so this culture is not native to me. Where my Dw works everyone there owns a home or rents, but they all own a camp somewhere. All of them.

With so many properties that are not being used, it is not impossible to work out a deal with someone, to use their land for a 5 acre garden.

I know two girls who made a deal, they trade-off babysitting a couple's children, in exchange for the right to use some land for a 4 or 5 acre garden. Those girls [20-somethings] support themselves from the sell of their garden produce.



I started shopping for land here after I retired. I found two parcels of forest adjacent to one another. One with 1/4 mile of river frontage for $900/acre, and one without river access for $350/acre. Taxes on both are $1.05/acre.

I bought this parcel with a check, no mortgage. The lawyer's fee for title search/insurance, writing a new deed and recording it was $200 flat fee.

Then I built our house. I hired a guy to install a power pole, another guy to drill the well, another guy did the foundation, and last a guy with a crane helped me for 3 hours when I was standing up the main girders. Other wise I built this house myself. In less than a year, we moved into it.

I had never built a house before, I made a few mistakes, but it was fun.

Now I sell produce in a Farmer's Market.

__________________
http://www.mofga.org/

http://www.mofga.org/Programs/FarmAp...2/Default.aspx

I fenced off 5 acres of forest for our pigs to free range in.

I planted 50 fruit / nut trees, so now I must wait for them to mature.

I have about 10 acres that produces fiddleheads. about 100 big mature maples that can be tapped. Beaver, deer, turkey are all in abundance here. A bear is taken from our adjoining property, every year. Some years a moose.

We forage mushrooms, ginseng, etc.

Our gardening efforts expand every year. I sell in a Farmer's Market, where I see a lot of other vendors who are doing the same thing I am doing. [different styles of course] Some are young folks starting out, some are older folks with a pension. New farms start up every year.



Most of the nation has been in a long trend of less farms every year. Maine shows more farms every year. I have no idea if this trend is happening anywhere else.

As for small farms feeding the world; traditionally around 40% of the population farmed. In the modern era only around 1% works in Ag [including grocery store personnel].

The only way for 1% to feed 99%, requires the modern style of Ag that is dependent on petroleum and synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides.

I do believe that small farms could feed the world again, but only if 40% of the population went back to doing it.



Do I care? Not really. I can feed me and my family.

My pension is around the same as Minimum-Wage. A new 2400 sq ft house on 150 acres of land with lots of water, and less than half of one month's pension check pays the annual taxes.

A person could easily flip burgers and afford it here.

__________________
http://www.mofga.org/

http://www.mofga.org/Programs/FarmAp...2/Default.aspx

If not for the myriad of head spinning regulations and the handouts given to my competition in big Ag, I could easily feed several dozen people year round on my small farm. But the system is so manipulated by powerful interests with the winners and losers picked by government, that it makes it all but impossible for me to compete on a level playing field. So "can small farms feed the world?" Absolutely. The real question is "will they ever be allowed to feed the world without a bought off government holding them down and boosting larger agricultural interests up?". I don't know, but my guess is that eventually, yes.

I challenge any of you to take a trip to Italy and see how small farms feed an entire country. Everything there is local. When you step out of the city limits you step into farm country, there is very little in between. Almost no such a thing as 'suburb', they have put there useful land to use. In the early mornings the farms all around the cities bring their goods to market, into the restaurants, the stores, and the city squares where hundreds of Italians clamor to get the freshest goods for their families.