This ELMs scheme is SO POOR… where are the options for regenerative grazing, for long recovery periods, for trampling carbon, for hyper diverse permanent pasture, for agro-ecological transition, and for actually earning the real cost of public benefits? https://t.co/G0rawZT5xA
— James Rebanks (@herdyshepherd1) January 31, 2023
Jane Smiley is an award-winning novelist; her book "A Thousand Acres" is King Lear updated to 1980's Iowa. Here she reviews "Bet the Farm", describing a couple's return to an Iowa farm owned by her father-in-law. It came out last year. Smiley's review annoys me, but I did put a hold on it with the Fairfax library.
I wonder if there any good books by someone who's been farming their entire life, doing it full time without a sideline providing cash income?
I learned this term, "cherry shaking", along with "pitters" in a news article today. Michigan sour cherry growers are running into problems. Their sour cherries are ripening unusually closerly together, meaning they need to be harvested by shaking the tree, and then processed by the pitters, but there's not enough slack in the pitting capacity to handle the surge.
Here's a long discussion of why Haiti and the Dominican Republic have diverged so drastically, GDP per capita is 5 times greater in the DR, although they share the same island.
Several topics are discussed, but he leads off with the small farm/large farm contrast. There are several reasons Haiti now has small farms, compared to other Caribbean/Spanish American countries. The revolution, the prohibition on foreigners owning land, etc.
One thing struck me--in the context of the US, we've lost millions of small farms over the years not only because of the economic advantages of consolidation, which is the usual explanation, but because of the opportunities in the cities for better jobs in industry, commerce and finance. The "Great Migration" of African Americans from the rural South to jobs in cities all over the country is the prime example, but the reality is that there was a bigger migration of whites from Southern farms and of whites from farms in the rest of the country.
Modern Farmer has an upbeat review of an early farmland preservation initiative on Long Island, dating to 1974. Farmers sell off the development rights to their land, getting lower assessment and lower taxes.
It sounds good, but I wonder about the economics. There's reference to a 23 acre farm. It may have been growing potatoes in the 1970's; Long Island's glacial soil was great for potatoes. But with changing farming economics and inflation, I'm guessing today's farmer needs to switch to vegetables and specialty crops to make things work. Perhaps tomorrow the land will grow greenhouse or vertical farming. How long can the deal last?
Saw a tweet complaining about the 230-odd pages of material the Red Tractor inspector wanted. Did a search and found it's a UK scheme, as they'd say:
We are a not-for-profit company that is the UK’s biggest farm and food assurance scheme. We develop standards based on science, evidence, best practice and legislation that cover animal welfare, food safety, traceability and environmental protection. Around 50,000 British farmers are accredited to Red Tractor standards, which form the basis of buying and sourcing specifications for major supermarkets, household brands and restaurant chains, ultimately making life simpler for everyone,
50K is about half the active farmers in the UK, but I'm not sure of the definition. It doesn't mention organic products.
I find this:
"Results are weighted to represent the full population of farm businesses that have at least 25 thousand Euros of standard output as recorded in the annual June Survey of Agriculture and Horticulture. In 2019, this accounted for approximately 56,521 farm businesses. " (That would be a little over $27,000 depending on exchange rate.)
Someone with ambition could, or maybe already has, compare UK distribution of farms with US.
I'm intrigued by a sentence in a recent Times article about agriculture in the Ukraine. We've become conscious of how important the country is as an exporter of grain. This was a quote from a Ukrainian farmer, but what was intriguing wasn't the quote, but the description of the farmer--he was Dutch and part of a 1,000+ organization (don't remember but it might have been a co-op or a corporation) running a big farm in the Ukraine. I wonder how and why he got to Ukraine, and how unique he is. (I'm aware some Dutch farmers have emigrated to the US for dairy operations.)
Also intriguing are the pictures of the Russian convoy and vehicles which are stalled, or stuck in what looks to be very rich, stone free soil.
Modern Farmer has a piece on John Deere's self-driving tractor, which really sounds like a package of software and sensors which can be added onto different tractors. Civil Eats has a longer piece on how the rising prices of farm land make it hard for beginning farmers, especially those of color, to set up an operation.
The two factors work together with others to make a vicious cycle. The higher the cost of entry by buying land and equipment the greater the premium for going big.
Modern Farmer reports on a "no fence" system for goats. Unlike "no fence" systems for cats and dogs, no buried wire marking the boundary is needed, just GPS and other sensors.
It seems as if the same technology would work for any mammal, which would mean an end to one spring routine--fixing fence, which involved replacing fence posts which had rotted, driving in fence posts which were still good but had been heaved up by the frost, replacing rusted out barbed wire, etc.
Laws about fencing date back centuries. Depending on the agriculture in the area sometimes it was the responsibility of the animal owner to fence his herd in, in other areas the responsibility of the crop grower to fence out free roaming animals. "No fence" tech would seem to be the responsibility of the animal owner.
One blogger I follow is Foothill Agrarian who raises sheep in California. He and some of the organic farmers have a system where they move their grazing animals from one field to another, or paddock to another, which involves movable fences. Invisible fences would ease that work.
The TV weather this morning showed rain moving into southern California. One of the blogs I follow is Foothill Agrarian, written by parttime sheep rancher and extension service employee. His most recent post was on fall, his favorite season, and the complicated planning he and his partner needed to do to plan for the upcoming year. The main complication was/is the prospect of rain or continued drought which impacts the forage available which impacts the health of ewes which impacts the lamb crop...etc. etc. So the prospect of rain, though I'm not certain exactly where in California he's located, likely cheered him.
Meanwhile, a few weeks ago another farmer I follow on twitter was concerned over the inability to harvest and store rain, given the rains which were dominating the weather in NY. I remember the years on the farm when we faced that problem, meaning we had to buy hay during the winter and/or buy molasses to put on the hay which we got in the barn only after it had been rained on (cows didn't like to eat such hay without the addition of molasses).
Back in the days when ASCS operated a disaster payment program IIRC the yields we used would be determined by averaging past years' yields, but dropping the bad years. That to me reflected farmer optimism--the normal yield was always better than the straight historic average of yields. Now I see it as a reflection of what humans do: use motivated reasoning to support their desired outcome.
There's been maneuvering in the House over how to handle the estate tax, particularly with regard to farms. The argument is that increasing the estate tax (has the term "death tax" been obsoleted?) means that heirs of farmers will be forced to sell out to pay the tax, rather than continue to farm the family's heritage. This is regarded as obviously wrong and evil, especially by farmers.
Saw that recently about 75 acres of Iowa farmland were sold for $22K an acre, which is incredibly high. I suspect economists might say there are benefits to forcing land onto the market, rather than passing it on from parents to children. The alternative to selling would be to take a loan backed by the acreage to pay the taxes, which seems to be the strategy the billionaires use to get spending money from their stockholdings in their IRAs. Presumably an increased estate tax would cut the market value of the land.
At any rate, it seems the farmers' political power remains high, and there won't be big changes in the estate tax for farms. Here are some facts:
Under current estate tax law, $11.7 million in assets are exempt from taxes for heirs. In 2019 -- the last available year from the IRS -- the exemption was $11.18 million. That year. there were 2,570 estates that paid taxes on $77.2 billion in assets (on average about $30 million per estate). There were 269 taxable estates that reported farm assets worth $1.3 billion (on average $4.9 million per estate). With the exemption, that means those farm estates averaged about $16.1 million in value. The average overall tax rate paid that year was 17%, according to IRS statistics.
James Rebanks is a skilled writer whose book I enjoyed. He's got a new book for sale, already released in the UK and now in the US on August 3.
I haven't read the new book, but anticipate I will, likely from the library. Civil Eats has an excerpt from it, describing his visit to Wendell Berry in Kentucky and to Iowa.
While he calls Iowa farmers the "best farmers that ever lived", he doesn't like our production agriculture, mourning the transition we've made over the last 60 years or so.
I agree with him there have been big tradeoffs, but I'm not as negative as he is about current agriculture. I don't know how well his sheep farm could support his family without, I'm guessing, significant support from his writing.
But he's worth reading.
Civil Eats has this piece on Jesse Frost, who operates a .75 acre no-till farm in Kentucky.
It all sounds good, except when he says his operation grosses $70K, and apparently uses 2+ person-years of labor--i.e., one paid employee and Jesse full time, and some contribution from his wife.
I can accept that his out-of-pocket expenses, assuming he owns the land outright with no mortgage, are low. But $70K divided by 2 is $35K each, which isn't much over the minimum wage progressives would like to see. I can also accept that food costs for his wife and him would be relatively low, especially if they freeze and/or can a lot. But I'm not convinced that the cash returns are sufficient for a lifetime supporting a family through all the ups and downs. It may well be enough with the wife's outside income, likely providing health insurance and covering SS.
I think the following analysis applies equally to current problems in developing nations and to the history of agriculture in the US, particularly when you consider the South from 1865 to 1985 or so:
In our evaluations, we often see different results across different segments of farmers—even when assistance is pretty uniform. Farmers with relatively high incomes tend to leverage their access to financing and irrigation to take full advantage of training, often making dramatic gains in production and sales in just one season. In contrast, subsistence farmers and women have more difficulty improving their situations through training, given the multitude of constraints that they face. As a result, we have found income gains concentrated among the top quartile of farmers, with more than half of farmers no better off than when the program began. These findings highlight a natural tension in the sector between helping the poorest of the poor reach food security, on one hand, and helping more established producers formalize their operations, on the other.
A quote from Chris Jones, an Iowa environmental engineer (doing a demographic analysis of Iowa farmers,
Of these white folks, 80% are male and the average age is almost as old as I am: 58.9 years
He's fighting Iowa CAFO's polluting water, with facts and complaints. A good cause, but I picked out this factoid to comment on.
I remember in Infoshare Sherman County, Kansas was one of the trial counties for providing on-line access for farmers to some of the data USDA agencies had for them. Mike Sherman, then the CED, had some data on the average age of his farmers--somewhere in the 50's IIRC. A problem then, a small part of the problem, was the older farmers generally weren't into computers, so what we were trying to do had no appeal.
But to my title--I suspect if we had data going back to the Revolution on the age distribution of farmers we'd find they were consistently older than most working Americans. Why? Because since the Revolution the proportion of US workers engaged in agriculture has been declining, sometimes fast, sometimes slowly. That means some farm children left the farm for the city, while their parents stayed on the farm, thereby skewing the age distribution.
I read a paragraph like this, and it triggers me:
Agroecology is at a crossroads. The farming system—which is primarily practiced in the developing world but is gaining some traction in the U.S.—incorporates a suite of ecological growing practices into a wider philosophy rooted in shifting power from global agribusiness companies to peasant farmers.
The assumption behind it is that the "peasant farmer" way of life is preferable to any other. The further assumption is that big companies push farmers off their land. But what if the way of life available off the farm is, on the whole, what one prefers?
I retain some affection for farming as it was in the 1940's and 50's. There were good times and good memories. There were also downsides, and for me, a misfit between me and the possibilities of the style. Part of that was the advance of "production agriculture", to use a relatively neutral name for market-oriented farming, with increasing investments required to compete. So I was pushed.
But in my case, it was mostly pull. And I think over the course of history there's been more pull than push. To say otherwise is, in part, the romanticism of the liberal/progressive left.
Walt Jeffries at Sugar Mountain Farm has been a very quiet blogger for a good while, and it's been even longer since I blogged about him. (I'm sure I did, but too lazy to check.) He and his family have pigs, plus other livestock, on a farm in Vermont.
He ceased right after he had gotten the necessary inspections to butcher their hogs on the farm and sell the meat across state lines, as well as within Vermont. Building the butcher shop had been a multi-year endeavor, chronicled in the blog. After that he may have had less material to use in the blog. Don't know. I also thought maybe his children might have had problems with his blogging as they grew to adulthood, which would explain his silence.
Anyhow, he's recently returned to blogging, at least a little. His latest post reports the approach of fiber optic cable to his farm. He might go with that way, as opposed to Musk's Starlink system. He credits the USDA broadband effort. That's interesting because he's basically a libertarian type, reluctantly dealing with the regulations needed to get his butcher shop and retail sales operation running.
This is dedication, or perhaps just the usual spring-rush routine. Never lived on a row crop farm so I don't really know.
