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

We lived in Napoli for 3 years, it certainly was different.

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I've also found growing meat (small scale- cattle, chickens and other poultry, rabbits, sheep, etc) quite expensive due to multiple reasons incl fencing but even more so feed purchased. I suppose if you have the $ for haying equipment that would help. But small scale it's not often economically viable.
At least around here, concentrate feed pricing means you could break even, small scale that is. So long you don't pay yourself. Forget including land price, taxes, fences etc. Pasturing helps but at least here winter is more than 1/3 of the year. Nothing eats snow.

I have a comment on the points about it being possible to raise considerable meat on a smallish farm with enterprising usage of local byproducts like spent rye and whey. That'll work as long as the production isn't meant to "feed the world." I'd think the likely effect of a few other folks with local ag production learning about those techniques would be a bidding war for protein and/or nitrogen (and other nutrient) formerly-waste sources. Think about what's happened with waste cooking oil as the bio-diesel concept was popularized.... historically, restaurants and hamburger joints had been paying for waste disposal of oils, at least in some areas, then drivers with diesel vehicles (or other diesel applications) started dropping by local eateries and asking if they could just have the oils which the owners were generally delighted to donate. However, the actual practical value of the gunk became known and larger operators contracted to *pay* the restaurants for used oil with special larger storage tanks often placed by their back doors, then thieves started breaking into the tanks and making off with the stuff. Most of the earliest biodiesel folks likely got left with no economical source for the unfiltered oil, other than occasionally and in small quantities.

Here we have the truth of the matter. It might not take 40%, but it would take at least 20%, depending on your definition of small farms.

And I don't see 20% of the population interested in being small farmers. Just not going to happen without a reset of our societies mindset.

Can that happen? Yes, it can. It won't be pretty.

I guess mostly what I got out of his post was that growing meat is much easier than growing veggies and such. I would have to whole heartedly agree. I have three freezers brimming with meat and sadly very little veggies(I am trying really hard though).
We don't have a tractor and get the bigs round bales. We just have to be creative on how to get them off the trailer and how we feed it out to the critters. Just have to be creative.

Tractor's an interesting point. I never wanted a tractor and didn't have one for the longest time. We finally got one because we need to put in a new water line. We went without running water for a year and saved up enough for the down payment. The tractor almost paid for itself on that job because to have that hired out would have cost nearly as much as the total cost of the tractor. Better yet we got 0% financing from John Deere as well as negotiating a big discount.

Since then the tractor has paid for itself every single year over and over - it saves us that much on things and it has allowed us to do things that we couldn't have done. One example is we now buy big round bales which are far cheaper and better quality than the small square bales we used to buy. On top of the cost savings it saves us time. The tractor has also let us get whey to feed our pigs. Without the tractor we simply could not get the whey as we need to keep up a road for the milk truck and be ready to receive on a moments notice. We get deep snow. Before the tractor we didn't bother to plow. That alone pays for the tractor every year.

Tools are valuable investments. I'm not talking toys, real tools that save you money and make you money. I can live without it but having it lets me do so much more.

If I had it to do over again I would have gotten a tractor 15 years earlier.

-Walter

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

Land prices and taxes are very nebulous things to try and include in your costs of farm production. Simply because you will have those costs whether you choose to farm or not. Quite often a house in the suburbs or city will cost as much or more than 15 acres with a country cottage in a rural area.

You will pay land taxes no matter where you live ( unless you're in prison or a homeless shelter ). Even renters pay for their landlords property tax and cost. Taxes on a small rural farm are often much lower than taxes on suburban homes. So when calculating the costs you have to be able to compare it to some other alternative. In other words, if I farm my costs are x, if I do not farm my costs are y. If the costs of x and y are the same, then you cannot consider any cost to be a particular cost to x.

If you farm you pay for property and land taxes, if you do not farm you pay for property and land taxes....therefore property and land taxes are not a cost of farming. If you farm you will need food and water, if you do not farm you will still need food and water...therefore food and water are not a particular cost of farming.

We have 1 acre, off grid and a 4 acre parcel, divided off when we sold the farm, kept as an away place. It grows wild rice and fish in the pond and fruit from trees, canes and bushes. We don't mow, we make hay. Our off grid 1 acre grows the pasture and some hay for the animals and food for us. All animals are small and eat only oats, and our hay, that I barter for, in exchange for a little labor. Each enterprise helps support another. Manure grows our food, by products are fed. Chickens, rabbits, goats and pigeons. I do hunt some, turkey, deer, elk and squirrel. I fish a lot, both our pond and rivers. We do buy 25-50lbs of tuna a year, right off the boat at the dock. Very little fossil fuel use, cheap well maintained tools and manual labor. Water and power from our spring and the sun. Wood for heat and cooking. We do this so we can stay home, if we drive, it is to our other properties for leisure. We need very little in town....James

If people would/could grow their own, first and then enough for 2 other families, small farms could feed everyone but there are not enough people that want to do it, labor instead of chemicals. It would be better for the world, BUT, people are not willing to live the "GOOD" life. AND not many places that can grow what we can here. They want it all, the aggravation, stress and money, keeping up with the Jones's without the manual work. Better....NOT....James

And some of us moved to area where the taxes are fairly low anyway.

I pay $1.05 per acre for taxes on my land. It is not a big expense.

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I keep reading people explaining how people don't want to raise food. That is not the title of this thread. The title says small farms "can not" feed the world.

It was said that those in high rises can not grow food. My daughter in an apartment grows some food on a balcony. But if such people wanted to grow food, planner could have left some land around the apartments for a community garden.

Again, the thread is about "can not". We waste time, fuel, money, food scraps, fertilizer, our urine, etc, all of which could be applied to producing food if we wanted to or if we had to.

We could have planned cities to allow space around homes for growing food. Not an issue of "can not".

I recall that Salt Lake City was originally planned for food production. Until people decided they did not want to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Lake_City

I purposefully bought land 25 years ago where it was cheaper, the taxes are lower, it has the resources I need for farming and it is located close enough to my markets. I made a very purposeful choice. To do this I drew circles around my points of importance and then looked for land without zoning and with other favorable attributes in the overlapping areas.

The cost of the land, the taxes, licensing fees and such are all part of my costs of production for farming. They're in my overhead categories - keep them low to succeed.

Make conscious rational choices to last you a lifetime.

But you can choose to live in a ritzy area where you pay high land taxes or you can choose to live in a poorer area where the land taxes are low. It's a choice. Once you're there, be sure to go to town meeting and vote.

If I farm, which I do, I use a lot more land. If I didn't farm then just a couple of acres would be enough for me to have a home, cut some firewood and raise a few animals and gardens. The way the taxes work here is that there is a "homestead" portion of two acres around the house which is taxed at a higher rate. Then there is the rest of our land which is taxed at a lower rate. I wouldn't need 1,000 acres to live on, although I like it. But to do sustainable forestry, maple sugaring, livestock, etc I do need significant amounts of land beyond what I would need to live on. That land beyond the homestead is all part of the farming overhead - both it's purchase and the maintenance which includes the real estate taxes.

If you want to get into farming, look very carefully at the expected long term growth of the area you'll be buying in. Look at the taxes. Look at the rights. Farming is a long term thing. You need to make gradual improvements so you don't want to be moving around to a new place losing all your soil building and other infrastructure. Thus keeping an eye on your annual overhead which includes land taxes is important when planning.

Back to the original topic: Small farms can feed the world. The only question is, how many farmers does it take and at what level does the world want to eat. People are living like kings compared with the past. They're wasting a lot of resources. That is probably not sustainable. They don't have to be that way. It's a choice. Choices have consequences.

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

Some people do, most don't. Why waste the effort if they don't, won't, can't. I am all for the government getting out of it but it will not work as most people think today. The world will starve. Many think that is all right, they will figure it out. Look at how many here, with good intentions can't live, or want to live, scratching for a living. Highlands is an example of a small farmer that makes it work. Many people think it is ideal, how many can/could make it work, enough to feed a community, let alone the world....James

James, you have the right point. Absolutely it is hard for small farms to make it. And as mentioned many times, more could do it, but the desire is lacking.

Another important factor is, what constitutes a small farm? I only very recently started referring to my place as a farm, and still usually don't. Many others do and have called my place a farm. My stigma mainly lies in that I only have a couple of acres, but am completely surrounded by farms that range from a couple hundred acres to a few thousand.

I guess if a small farm is a a few dozen acres, my place would be a micro mini farm.

The USDA claims that if you sell a minimum of $1,000.00 worth of farm goods
produced from your property annually then you would be considered a small farm .

I think that if people were forced to do it a lot more would find they were capable of raising food, feeding themselves, feeding their families, raising extra for trade. If the world economy collapses, which it will do sometime in the next thousand years, then most people will adapt. Note that "most" is >50% so while I see that optimistically some might think 49% is pessimistic... :}

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A thousand years from now, if everything goes as it has in the last 100, no one will be able to grow anything on their own. You will take a pill 3 times a day, don't like that....there will be a pill for that too....James

The 1,000 years was to cover my ass that we will definitely be seeing a collapse and not make certain people think I'm dooms-saying. Not like that. Civilizations historically go through cycles. We can expect this to continue.

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