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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Small Farms Are More Efficient & Sustainable
  • Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2006 18:13:56 -0700


excerpts from
Small Farms Are More Efficient & Sustainable
http://www.organicconsumers.org/Organic/smallfarmsbetter.cfm

Peter Rosset: Here at the Institute for Food and Development Policy, we've
reviewed the data from every country for which it's available, comparing
the productivity of smaller farms versus larger farms. By productivity, I
mean the total output of agricultural products per unit area -- per acre
or hectare.

For every country for which data is available, smaller farms are anywhere
from 200 to 1,000 percent more productive per unit area.

The myth of the greater productivity of larger farms stems in part from the
confusing use of the term "yield" to measure productivity. Yield is how
much of a single crop you can get per unit area -- for example, bushels of
soy beans per acre.

That's a measure that's only relevant to monocultures. A monoculture is
when a single crop is grown in a field, rather than the kind of mixtures
of crops and animals that small farmers have.

It might look like the large farm is more productive because you're getting
more, say, soybeans per acre. But you're not getting the other five, six,
ten or twelve products that the smaller farmer is getting. And when you
add all of those together, they come to a much greater total agricultural
output per unit area than the larger farms are getting.

As farms
get very large, labor costs and logistics become prohibitive, so farmers
switch to machinery, and machinery requires simpler systems. With
machines, you can't achieve the same level of complexity and therefore the
level of productivity that you can with a smaller size.

This system is heavily based on direct payment subsidies tied to the amount
of land that a farmer has. American taxpayers paid a record $22 billion in
direct farm payments last year. Sixty-one percent of those payments went
to the largest 10 percent of American farmers.

Although those subsidies have been presented to us as helping keep family
farmers on the land, they do just the opposite.

Because large farms in the U.S. get such a large subsidy, they can stay in
business even if they're selling what they produce below the cost of
production. The subsidies are tied to area and allow prices to drop below
the cost of production. That prevents small farmers from competing because:
one, crop prices have dropped so low and two, they don't have enough land
to get enough subsidies to live on.



















  • [Livingontheland] Small Farms Are More Efficient & Sustainable, Tradingpost, 12/29/2006

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