Fun fact: IDK about like a backyard vegetable garden, but small family-sized farms are actually more productive per unit of land than big industrial agriculture.
The farming conglomerates like to enforce big farming operations because they make things easier for the managerial class, and let them be in charge of everything. But if your goal is just to produce food and have the farmers make a living, small farms are actually better even economically (and not just for like 10 other reasons).
Aragón conducted a study on farm productivity of more than 4,000 farming households in Uganda over a five-year period. The study considered farm productivity based on land, labour and tools as well as yields per unit area of cultivated land. His findings suggested that even though yields were higher for smaller farms, farm productivity was actually higher for larger farms. Similar research in Peru, Tanzania and Bangladesh supported these findings.
What explains these divergent findings? Answering this question is important given its consequential policy implications. If small farms are indeed more productive, then policies that encourage small landholdings (such as land redistribution) could increase aggregate productivity (see the discussion in Collier and Dercon, 2014).
We argue that these divergent results reflect the limitation of using yields as a measure of productivity. Our contribution is to show that, in many empirical applications, yields are not informative of the size-productivity relationship, and can lead to qualitatively different insights. Our findings cast doubts on the interpretation of the inverse yield-size relationship as evidence that small farms are more productive, and stress the need to revisit the existing empirical evidence.
Meaning the author is advocating for more scrutiny against the claim and against land redistribution as a policy stance with the intention of increasing productivity.
First, farmers have small scale operations (the average cultivated area is 2.3 hectares).
The definition of “small family farms” in this case is on average more than 5 acres, which would absolutely be under the umbrella of subsidized industrial agriculture in developed nations.
My god it’s like they’re deliberately trying to make their paper unintelligible to other humans. If I am reading this paper correctly, it is in line with other research on the topic, by indicating that smaller farms tend to have higher yields due to greater labor inputs. While I’m sure an economist would think this puts the issue to rest, being able to feed more people on a smaller land area might still be beneficial even if it requires more labor. Economists often assume that the economy represents the ideal allocation of resources, but I reject this assumption.
By the way, 5 acres is minuscule compared to conventional agriculture, at least in the US. So these aren’t backyard gardens but they are likely quite different from agribusiness as well.
If you think 5 acres on average isn’t subsidized or industrialized then I challenge you to try it out of your own pocket: fertilize with shovels, till with a hoe, water and pest control without anything but hand pumps or windmills, reap the harvest with a scythe.
We do all by hand on a 1/2 acre of mixed veg. We feed our family of five and sell our extras. All the work is done by two adults. 5 acres would be insane and we are hard workers. I can’t imagine that size without a tractor.
Wait, 5 acres wouldn’t be all vegetables! Fruit trees, grains, grassland all spread in time so you can work on them when your vegetables don’t need attention.
Two people. No mechanical equipment. Even with using animals in order to maintain all that space. Then add harvesting and threshing grains by hand along with those animals. Good luck. Our entire working space is an acre with fruit and nut trees and chickens for meat and eggs. The workload is immense and if our lifestyle was similar to most (day jobs) there is no earthly way we could manage what we have let alone 5 acres. We have been doing this for decades and have systems in place to help us as much as possible and it just would not be physically possible. Just garden prep for us alone takes months at a half acre and simple maintenance and picking is a daily chore all season long. We start planting in February and grow until Oct/Nov. We don’t vacation in those months at all and we have seasonal jobs so we can put as much time as possible into food. Oh and we don’t get paid to grow food because we consume the vast majority of it ourselves so we need those real jobs too. Where are you finding all the time and money?
I don’t know why you’re assuming small farms need to be worked with medieval technology—that’s not what I’m saying at all. What I am saying is that 5 acre farms are far smaller than typical for modern agribusiness, and the differences in management are enormous. And I’ve actually worked on a farm that was 8 acres and we did much (though not all) of the labor by hand.
The average US farm is just under 500 acres. It’s totally different to grow food on that scale.
Yeah, that's why I included "per unit of land." It is in practice a little more complex, and a lot of times the smaller farms are more labor-intensive.
My opinion is that modern farming is efficient enough that we can very obviously sustain the farmer, and sell the food at a reasonable price, and it all works -- the only reason this is even complicated at all and we have to talk about optimizing for labor (certainly in 1st-world farms) is that we're trying to support a bloodsucking managerial class that demands six-figure salaries for doing fuck-all, and subsistence wages for the farmers and less than that for farmworkers, and stockholder dividends, and people making fortunes from international trade; and if we just fixed all that bullshit then the issue would be land productivity and everything would be fine.
But yes, in terms of labor productivity it's a little more complex, and none of the above system I listed is likely to change anytime soon, so that's fair.
Also, you can’t just look at the amount of food produced, but the amount produced vs waste, storage and transportation costs. Most things in the garden can stay ripe on the plant for a while and can be picked as needed.
Anecdotally, we were supplying about 80% of our fruit and veg needs on our own garden plot on our standard city residential lot with a family of 7. And we were literally giving tomatoes, citrus and zucchini away as fast as we could.
It’s better to encourage native fauna by planting native flora than plant a vegetable garden that you give up on after 2 months and then gets overrun with foreign weeds.
I think the imperative phrase here is backyard garden. They aren’t referring to a 40 acre field of wheat and potatoes, they probably are thinking a 10’x10’ raised bed.
This is a totally specious argument. Everyone doesn’t have to make 100% of their own furniture any more than every one has to grow 100% of their food.
If I make two chairs it’s more efficient than 1 chair and I only need to spend maybe 70% more time than 1, not 100% I sell/barter one chair to my neighbor, who, because they have grown 6 tomato plants instead of 4 (at most 10% more of their labor), has excess tomatoes and gives me some in exchange.
I’m curious if you have numbers on that or you are just assuming low yields.
I happen to know exactly how much a tomato plant grows because over 20 years of commercial farming I kept records. It varies a lot by variety and season and even how we are responding to market needs but in general I tend to get about 800-1400 lbs per 200 ft row for indeterminate tomatoes over the season. A farmer I know at lower elevation gets a lot more but they have a longer season, better soil and, crucially, water a lot more than we do – my method cuts yield but increases quality. We use a 2 ft spacing for F1 varieties so that’s about 100 plants (more like 95, but whatevs) so let’s call it 8 pounds per plant = 48 lbs of tomatoes. Again, this is quite generalized and it’s often way more. I also happen to know that’s going to be on the very low end of home garden yields because people tell me this shit. Also, for cherry tomatoes you can get probably 60-70% more since they are very prolific.
They might just be in a better climate than you! I had far more delicious sun-ripened tomatoes over the summer than I could eat. More than six plants to be fair, but most self-seeded anyway.
i’ve been gardening for years. it’s a supplement. for like 1-2months i get nice produce that can feed a few people for a few weeks. but that’s it. i maybe produce 20lbs of produce in a year if i’m lucky. that’s over a dozen or two plants. i have a good sized garden of about 100 sq ft.
not to mention the weather any year could totally f you. one year we had three months of drought, so i got like 2lbs of tomatoes that year.
turns out i still buy like 95% of my produce from the grocery store… because it’s available year round and it’s hard to grow variety well unless you have multiple beds with differing soil and sun conditions.
most folks grow tomoatoes and cukes because they are easy and produce abundantly. but i am not going to live on tomatoes and cukes 365 days a year.
the space needed to grow squashes, berries, etc. is way way higher. you need a lot of land. and they are very low yield. a ten foot watermelon vine produces like maybe 1-2 melons per year and takes up 20 sq ft of garden space. a squash vine might produce 4-6 decent squash, etc. and a lot of veggies and plants are non complimentary, meaning they choke each other out if grown in proximity.
the only person i know who has a varied and big garden is an engineer who has spend five figures producing dozens of beds, water systems, and etc. and he still gets a shitty yield some years due to weather and he struggles constantly with rabbits, groundhogs stealing his crop. he has a whole trap and kill system for them even now. because the critters know he is the place to go for the tasty plants. most home gardening grow a few tomato plants and make some tomato sauce and throw a dinner party and that’s the extent of their home gardening.
it’s way more complex and difficult than some ‘hrr drr just bring back victory gardens’ nonsense. you’re average person isn’t going to be building a 1000sq ft veggie garden with fencing and dealing with all the part time job of labor and upkeep that it requires.
Is probably true. However, one should question their world view if they measure everything as a minimization problem with respect to cost efficience and yield.
I get what you mean. Our system produces a ridiculous amount of quantity, which should be great! But in the context of where it’s firmly placed within existing socioeconomics, stupid things happen like “destroying all the product to keep the value from crashing” and the “distribution problem” that feeding the poor isn’t profitable.
Maybe industrial agriculture wouldn’t be so terrible if food production for the human race didn’t operate on the same metrics as handbags or funkopops. =\
And for the inevitable “it’s too expensive” and related comments:
Find the markets where you are buying directly from the farmers, not aggregators/resellers.
Shop around and buy things that are less in demand. You can ask what’s not selling and try to negotiate a little and if you go right at the end, say 15-30 minutes before vendors have to pack up, you will find lots of bargains.
Build relationships with growers. You will get better deals and freebees.
It’s the same situation as when you grow a pear in Argentina, send it to Malaysia and back to usa.
Boats are simply too big
A local farmer doing restocking trips, buying and transporting, you on trips buying the stuff needed to make those sweet iron and vitamin deficient mini tomatoes, soil, fertilizer, etc, consume lots of energy. Which might seem like a little but multiply that effort by the proposed method of “everyone planting and harvesting their own shit” and you soon see that it was kinder to mother earth and the climate to just transport shit over a cargo ship burning 400 trucks worth of fuel in one trip and transporting the equivalent of 9000 trucks, than you doing the 400 trucks worth of fuel trips and transporting, well 400 trucks worth of goods
It’s basically about scale. Shipping container ships run at low speed and maximize fuel efficiency.
When you drive, most of the fuel is used propelling the car forward, backwards, upwards and downwards. You make up a small amount of the stuff moved. You also change speeds. You come to full stops, take turns, maybe even go the wrong way. All of that is “wasted” energy that goes to the polluting impact of your vitamin deficient mini tomatoes.
However, a ships engine mostly works way more in per portion to move product across the oceans. Importantly once it maps out it’s routes and hits speed, it doesn’t deviate. Once the ship is up to speed getting it to keep going forward isn’t very hard.
It’s almost (because of need if preexisting infrastructure) the same with rail. The ability to carry a ton of stuff and maintain the same course and speed saves so much fuel, lowering the carbon footprint of any transported goods to your place to something miniscule you could never actually achieve by your own machinations
That’s why they pollute more. That’s right your homegrown tomatoes are more polluting than those of a mega corporation
I ran commercially successful regenerative farms for many years. Here is the shocking truth Corporate Jesus ™ didn’t want you to know:
You aren’t “competing” on price or quantity. You are competing on quality. Quality in taste, quality in freshness which also means quality in nutrition^ and quality in sustainability.
So… it might cost you a bit more in money and/or time to grow food in your garden but you are getting so much more value out of it. That’s the yield and that’s the cost effectiveness.
That’s massively more efficient than subsidizing huge-scale industrial agriculture so that some giant corporation can yield higher profits. In fact, come to think of it, shouldn’t home gardens be subsidized?
^ E.g. 90% of vitamin C in spinach is lost after 72 hours from harvest
that’s why OP was suggesting we subsidize home (and I’d add allotment) gardens - give people money to plant food and flowers and they’ll be better of f both physically and mentally.
and who will till the soil, weed, fight pests, harvest, etc.
govt going to provide the physical labor and extra hours per week that is required too?
I mean I get it. I’m a rich white person with a lot of leisure time and I own property where I can have a garden… but turns out not everyone has this stuff. Half my younger friends have no time and no property on which to garden. And those folks are much better off that say, a single mom of two who rents and is struggling to provide her kids with food because she’s working 50 hours a week to pay rent. Should I just tell her to ‘make your own garden! that will totally feed your family of three…’ just put dozens of hours into your concrete driveway of plastic tubs that will provide you with a few weeks of vegetables, most of which will rot before you can use them… unless you want to devote more time and money into canning.
Gardening is great. But jerking myself off and generalizing and saying everyone else should be doing what i have the luxury to do… just makes me a smug self-righteous ass. People buy food from stores because it’s convenient and fast.
Involvement in food production to some degree is involvement in your own freedom and independence from capitalist hegemony. To me it’s the opposite of privilege. It’s not a luxury and it’s so so sad that people think of it in those terms.
Somehow along the way folks were instilled with the idea that growing their own food is hard, not efficient… even equated with being poor or some kind of peasant. And there’s a very good reason for this - big industrialized agriculture doesn’t work except at huge scales and it takes everyone buying cheetos and hot dogs for it to work. And somehow we got into this rut where you have to work 50 hours a week - paid a fraction of the real value of your labor - to afford the “value-added” food that is not nutritionally dense, tasty or grown sustainably.
The truth is that growing food is about as simple and basic as it gets IF you have the knowledge. It is even more viable if people work collectively to get some of those economies of scale.
So take 10 hours of that week and use it to produce valuable food for yourself and for your neighbors. 2-3 families working 10 hours a week each grows A LOT of food. You do not need a lot of land… indeed there is land out there available to be used for community gardens, for free.
Unlike a lot of folks, I’m not going to say this can’t work in every situation because I believe it can. Further, I believe it’s an existential necessity.
and who will till the soil, weed, fight pests, harvest, etc.
In the case of a home garden, the homeowners, just like it’s expected for a homeowner to care for all the other plants on their property.
In the case of an allotment/community garden, community members would provide the labor. That’s how they currently work.
I mean I get it. I’m a rich white person with a lot of leisure time and I own property where I can have a garden… but turns out not everyone has this stuff.
I’m confused what the problem is - just because you know some people that wouldn’t benefit from a home garden subsidy, doesn’t make it a bad idea, if it encourages more people to grow food at home. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution to be sure, but it is a solution that would work for some, with little to no downside that I can conceive of.
Also the whole “you need a lot of land if you want to garden” thing is kind of a myth. You can do a surprising amount in containers, with vertical systems, or even indoors with grow lights or hydroponics these days.
It’s largely a privilege for those who have both. not a solution for the economically depressed who have neither.
I’m pretty sure that’s what Corporate Jesus would want people to believe. And to be honest, sometimes labeling something as “privileged” is just another way of reinforcing that thinking. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Gardening does not require much time relative to the value of the output. Many new gardeners will say “oh but it’s so time consuming” because they are still learning and make lots of mistakes. If you have your systems up and running and your processes down, it’s a fraction of the actual value produced and is extremely efficient. Don’t get me started or I will go on about this in extreme nerdy detail from personal experience.
Collective action can massively increase both the availability of suitable land and the output relative to any one individual’s effort. An obvious example of this is community gardens such as the Gill Tract in Albany, CA. If Occupy the Farm had been better supported we the people could have had the whole thing, but there still is a large garden available for use by neighboring houses. And there are community gardens and vacant land waiting to be community gardens everywhere. It just takes folks to say they can do it to make it happen.
A key component in this is a general misunderstanding of the value of your labor. When you garden you retain 100% of the value of your labor and your time is worth much more. When you work for others and then have to pay for food at a significant markup, you are losing a very large proportion of that labor. This is one of the central lies of capitalism that forces you into wage slavery and promotes false narratives like “growing food is most efficient on a huge scale”. Efficient to whom? Not to you.
Edit: Another related example is the Berkeley Student Farm on the Oxford Tract and 6 other urban spaces. They are doing some amazing work and it’s worth a few moments to read about them: www.studentfarms.berkeley.edu
Please do! I am just starting with some gardening and haven’t much experience yet.
Uh oh.
Well I’ll just mention one thing… just. one. thing. Ok, no, let me do my top beginner mistakes, which seem to all be not understanding what plants need.
Over-watering. For example, tomatoes (and solanaceae in general) like periodic deep watering and shouldn’t be overly moist. I always starve them for water until they start to get a little crispy (literally they look like shit) and do my weekly-ish harvesting the day before watering.
Not hardening-off starts. Don’t plant those peppers in the ground without having them gradually outside over a few days, ending in being out overnight for a day or three.
Not understanding soil and air temperatures. It’s super helpful to know the daytime highs and nightime lows and ideally soil temps as well. Some plants just really won’t grow well when it’s too hot (lettuce) or too cold (tomatoes, cukes, etc)
Growing starts in your living room window because it “gets lots of sun”. If your plants are leggy and weak it’s because they get sun for part of the day and it shifts around too much.
Assuming you have to nuke every living thing anywhere near your veggies. 95% of all insects are beneficials and if you do not provide habitat for them and/or you use copious pesticides, you are killing more good things than bad. On my last farm we used no pesticides, organic-approved or otherwise. This works if you have pathways of (ideally natives) for beneficials to thrive in. The classic example is flea beetles - they thrive in barren hot soil while the beneficials that would eat them avoid that. So plant your arugula near some grasses (like right up against it) and you will not likely have a flea beetle problem.
Last year I bought a packet of sugar pumpkin seeds just because I thought the flowers looked nice the previous time I’d tried (and failed) to grow pumpkins. Got plenty of pumpkins out of it, saved some of the seeds, and started buying butternut squash when the pumpkins ran out. Saved the seeds from those, too, and now I’ve got seedlings of both popping up. I’m gonna have so much pie!
Home gardening is an important element of individual food security. It’s not meant to replace industrial agriculture which maintains food security for the nation as a whole
Home gardening is an important element of individual food security.
And food independence
It’s not meant to replace industrial agriculture which maintains food security for the nation as a whole
Hard disagree. Industrial agriculture maintains profits for a few corporations. That large-scale agriculture is productive, necessary, efficient or any of that is a myth. It’s massively inefficient when viewed from the perspective of value - especially nutritional value- to the consumer.
I don’t have any love lost for mega corporate farms and agree that we need more family and cooperative owned farms that would be more concerned with sustainability and environmental impact.
It depends on what and how much you grow in your garden. Growing up and even when our kids were young and at home, we grew a large garden to save money. Growing things that store well, like potatoes, squash, carrots, turnips, rutabagas, and other root crops will save you money because they require no very little to no extra processing to store.
Tomatoes, while VERY tasty straight off the vine, often get highly processed into sauces and jarred to preserve. That is time consuming and expensive. But, if you have enough freezer space, you can freeze tomatoes and peppers very easily. But you need enough freezer space for them. Growing string beans are also fairly efficient crops that require little processing to freeze. But, there is still some extra work to be done with them. Sweet Corn take a lot of room to grow enough to make it worth your while preserve.
But best of all is to garden because you want to and you enjoy it. I no longer grow a large garden - me and Grandma don’t need much anymore, but I still grow tomatoes and peppers, turnips, green onions, and amaranth. Amaranth is often used as a background plant in flower gardens, but the whole plant is edible. From the roots to leaves to the seeds. It has a wonderful nutty flavor and is stupidly easy to grow.
I don’t understand why anyone would argue against a garden. Should my yard just be grass? Why shouldn’t I plant something I can eat in it? It doesn’t matter if it’s less efficient than industrial farming, it’s basically unused land to start with.
That’s because nobody is arguing that. The argument is against people saying that industrial farming is evil and should be stopped, which is a bit of a past time hobby around here.
it’s no different than the yahoos who they they would run the govt better. then they try and give up because it’s ‘too hard’. this is basically the same as soveign citizen BS, but with vegetables instead of guns.
but we can’t let a complex reality get in the way of our well-intention delusions of smugness. because apparently if every citizen isn’t providing themselve wiht their own fruits and vegetables… it’s their complicity with corporations… or something.
Monoculture is terrible for the ecosystem. Fertilizer runoff causes algal blooms and dead zones in the ocean. Multinational agricultural conglomerates force developing world farmers to purchase their GMO seeds sue them for copyright infingement if they try to use their seed stock in the next season. Rainforests are being burned down to make room for pastures of methane emitting cattle and monocultured palm oil plantations. The Haber-Bosch process is responsible for 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Should I go on? At what point am I supposed to like this?
Fix the system, make a new system, buy discerningly. Have a garden if you can and advocate for more of them if you want. Fight against monoculture, irresponsible fertilizer and pesticide use, copyright abuse, and more. None of that is an irreplacable part of growing food at a large and efficient scale.
By the way, I’m curious about the Haber-Bosch figure. Isn’t that the process that allows us to easily make fertilizer, and greatly increase productivity? It seems like that 5% is doing much more heavy lifting than, for example, the ~20% from cow burps.
Right, those are all irreplacable parts of global capitalism and its ruling oligarchy.
Haber Bosch is basically just squeezing nitrogen and oxygen together with a catalyst to make ammonia. To generate high pressures you need energy which you get by burning hydrocarbons. Legumes and bacteria can also do this, which is why crop rotation and letting fields lie fallow has been done for centuries. But you can’t let your field lie fallow if you have to compete with other firms who are burning coal to make fertilizer…
Because a terrifyingly large percentage of soil is very polluted, and really isn’t suitable for growing food. If you eat a lot of homegrown food, getting the soil tested for (at least) heavy metals is probably a good idea, especially if you have little kids or pregnant people.
I smoke a lot of weed. Always have. Last year I grew 4 plants in my backyard garden and this year I’ve saved thousands of dollars on weed. It’s not as strong as store stuff but you get used to to it quickly and there’s less paranoia with homegrown I find. I’m always gonna grow my own weed from now on. Only reason I didn’t before was that it was illegal. This year I germinated 3 seeds but only one took so I’ll have one super tall pot plant in my backyard haha.
The only thing I grew at home (in a pot, because dogs) was chili, because it’s more scarce in stores than stuff like onions. Some do fear that the store ones are all “GMO” secretly, or even manufactured from some petroleum products, like my stepmother, who once learned that things like milk powder, egg powder, and meat powder exists, but she thought they all weren’t made of the real things, because she couldn’t believe the Earth could feed this many people, and the rich hoard all the good stuff for themselves.
The thing about it is that I’m keeping the benefit of the cost effectiveness myself instead of some farmers and taking heads elsewhere. It’s more efficient per dollar for ME.
May I ask a favor? Make a distinction between small-scale direct-to-consumer farmers (ie the kind that sell at farmer’s markets) and large-scale commodity farmers and the huge agricorps that own them.
Why would I make that distinction when the point of it is that I’m saving money for myself with my own efforts? It’s specifically to exclude external economics.
Because (a) you say it in a way that comes across as derogatory. Unless you grow 100% of your food you need a farmer in there somewhere to live; (b) because the closer you get to the farmer (ie buy from small-scale farms) the more value you retain.
I’m saving money for myself with my own efforts? It’s specifically to exclude external economics.
and here:
The thing about it is that I’m keeping the benefit of the cost effectiveness myself
By using your own efforts you retain more of the value for yourself. When you work for others you get paid only a fraction of the value you produce. Ie, your time is more valuable than you are getting paid for.
You think I can just go to my workplace and sit on the clock whenever I want? No. There are hours when I cannot be at work. Those hours are not equivalent to work hours.
Also, WTF are you smoking? These arguments are nothing alike.
Your time is not free. In fact it’s incredibly valuable. So why are you giving it away to corporations for pennies on the dollar? You could be getting 100% of the value of your time when you garden.
Add comment