210 comments on From Cubicle Nerd to Cucumber Vendor: Learning Small Scale Farming in Mid-life
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210 comments on From Cubicle Nerd to Cucumber Vendor: Learning Small Scale Farming in Mid-life
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Nate,
Every fundamental tenet of modern economics will hold value on the way down, except for the exponential growth crap. These tenets (division of labour, comparable advantage, invisible hands, visible fists, public choice etc. etc.) are universally valid for all humans at all times.
Unfortunately most of the 'return to the soil' community don't understand these tenets. However, in an age of growing scarcity these basic principles will be even more important than they are today. The irony is that our societies can afford luxuries such as Jack-of-all-trades organic farming models precisely because so much wealth has been generated in the conventional economy.
There is a toytown dimension to many of these projects that always sets my bullshit detector running.
With exception of invisible hand, I don't disagree with your list, but you forgot:
rational actor, pareto-optimality, utility maximizing, perfect substitutes, environment is WITHIN the human system not vice versa....the majority of economic tenets will not hold, except those, like many you list, that will be 're-defined' once energy limits and biological constraints are fused into the lexicon. I agree that 'supply and demand' at its core will of course always be germaine - just like it is in a population of elk and wolves, but the ASSUMPTIONS that follow these micro-economic traits rooted in biology are what will morph into something else.
Carolus what is thust of walrasian welfare economics without the 'exponential growth crap'? other than a ginormous toytown dimension? What if all financial markers went away - would Wyomings 'projects' continue to set your bullshit detector off?
Nate,
Actually I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Georgescu-Roegenist with a Hayekian trying to get out. So replace 'every' by a weaselly 'most' or 'many'.
It's just this obsession with fruit and vegetables that gets my gander up, I reckon.
I dislike fruit myself - mostly sugar and some vitamins. But vegetables are key. I am trying to get a nutrition professor to write a guest post for this series on how American diets increase our consumptive behavior via 'cravings' that we attempt to satiate using non-food means.
Selma Hayek?
;-)
Nate I think your browser needs adjustment look above Selma Hayek for the guy I think Carolus Obscurus means. (*see here below*)
I could be wrong though as that Selma does look a bit less like a vegetable than that Fred guy. And of course that hair of his does give him a rather fruity pineapple aspect as well:)
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This might be relevant: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/healthreport/stories/2007/1969924.htm.
This is quite relevant and fascinating thank you for posting it. Corn subsidies dramatically influence the markets for farmers. There is a documentary called "King Corn" that elaborates on this (I haven't seen it but read a review).
For anyone who is curious about why we are fat the answer appears to be fructose so corn syrup and sucrose is apparently 50% fructose so sugar makes us fat and helps us to get diabetes and liver damage which affects moods etc.
Quality food production translates to high brix high nutritionally dense whole foods. These foods don't rot in 2 days in the fridge. The great joy of growing your own food is the dramatic improvement in quality. My garlic is well so much better than any of the stuff at the supermarket that many people are surprised. But then we've been trained to think that junk is normal.
I may do a post on farming for a complete diet sometime. Veggies and fruits are only about 5-10% of the calories people received.
The reasons fruits and vegetables are favored by small scale farmers is that they maximize the $ returned on land.
For example, wheat might sell for $1 per pound but only yield 0.1 lbs per sq ft. Tomatoes might sell for $2 per lb and yield at 2 lbs per sq ft.
If you don't have a lot of land but are willing to invest a lot of time which would your grow?
As I wrote in the shape of food to come, my thoughts are,
Oil is not going to just run dry one day, but simply become scarce, it'll go where it's needed, and thus likely still be used on farms.
As for biofuels, they can't be made in enough volume to keep us tooling around in SUVs (we could manage at best a single barrel of fuel each annually), but can be enough for (say) 5-10% of the population to be farmers with tractors (rather than the 2% or so today).
So we won't be able to fuel as much machinery as we do today. But where is the machinery most useful? That's in grains and tubers cropping, not so much in fruit and vegetable cropping.
Thus in a fossil fuel scarce future, we'll still see 1,000-hectare farms growing grain and combine harvesters, but we'll see more small-scale farming of fruit and vegetables. And this was the Cuban experience. That daft documentary made a big deal of the urban gardens, but didn't mention that out in the countryside the big machines are still burning diesel like mad, and providing the bulk of the people's calories.
So I think small-scale farmers will continue to favour fruit and vegies, and leave the grains/beans and perhaps the tubers to big farms with machinery.
I wouldn't bet on it being that simple. Oil extraction and refining now depends on hugely complex globalised hi-tech. And this is only going to get worse. In the event of a collapse of the global/industrial/capitalist financial/economic system, the physical systems for supplying oil could grind to an absolute halt. And never be restartable again. Indeed they could just rust away, beyond our funds to replace.
We were small-scale, certified organic growers in the early 1980's. Our main crops were tomatoes, as you mention, and strawberries. A couple of points:
1. Although we were making "day" wages, they were insufficient to really cover our financial needs without an outside job (which we didn't have). After a few years we had to make the choice to either "grow" the business or shut down.
Because of our climate and local market, we grew out the tomato plants in five gallon grow bags in our little 14'x18' greenhouse and actually set out plants that were in bloom when home gardeners were just starting their seeds. Our choice was to either greatly expand our greenhouse space or shut down.
It made more sense to shut down when we looked that the economics.
2. It is important to understand your local market as well as the competition in other locals. Early tomatoes were great sellers...until home gardens started to produce (This is a rural area and lots of people put in a few tomatoes.). At that point, sales died. We did participate in a farmer's market 60 miles from us for a year. However, the climate in that area is much milder than ours in the mountains. When we could only bring snap peas, the local growers in that area had a full range of vegetables for sale.
3. Strawberry picking is, obviously, labor intensive. We produced enough so that it was hard for us to keep up. Therefore, we tried hiring a couple of local kids. They did pick but not selectively enough so we ended throwing away a lot of almost ripe fruit. After a while we went back to picking ourselves.
I certainly do not regret that period and we learned a lot about moderate-scale organic production. However, given what we know now about growing and selling, it is clear that we were naive about our income prospects given very limited finances for the operation.
Todd
Reply to Todd regarding strawberries on small farm.
Fella down the road I knew well had gotten a small farm for his family to make some money. He was an 'operating engineer' but nonunion however he worked for a very large 'land development' guy who was also a farmer on the side.
Well he put a bunch of that farm into strawberries. Remember that this part of Ky used to raise a lot of strawberries ,in fact as a teenager visiting my kin here they used to make a bit picking those many fields of strawberries.
So he did and next spring had a very nice crop. Got a decent price too and asked me to install a PC so they could manage the large number of sales.
All was ok but at the end he had to sell at cheaper prices since the market was not that big. Big but not enough.
Next year his kids didn't want to spend the time. His wife was running out of patience. He was pissed so he plowed it all up.
It just didn't work out with the local market. Did for 2 years and then died.
He then of course , left his wife and moved off. Haven't seen him in a while. The farm is still there but idle.His kids went off to get bigger jobs elsewhere. They just didn't have what it took to stick to it and with the 'glammar' of Ipods,yada,yada...it called to them to strongly I hear.
So it goes. What once worked didn't cut it. He tried some Mexicans. That didn't work for they 'cherry picked' he said.
I was saddened to see my friend leave. I loved his strawberries so I resurrected my patch.
If you want it ..you almost gotta do it yourself.
Moral? Modern life. Modern culture.
Airdale
Airdale,
I'm are always doing some kind of experiment, must be my tech background, even as a grower. Anyway, I saw a picture in a hydroponic book at that time showing strawberries being grown in vertical grow bags suspended from overhead "joists." I said, "Ah, ha. No more bending down!"
So, I contacted a company that made grow bags and asked whether I could just buy rolls of uncut bag material (6" diameter). They said Ok. I also happened to have a number of treated 4x4's and a lot 2x6" so I set up a grow area where I could "plant" about 2,500 plants in 6' long grow bags. The plants were fed hydroponically using fish emulsion to keep it organic. The growing medium was peat moss and vermiculite with a few ammendments. I even wrote an article for a back to the land paper here entitled, "It's In the Bag."
Did it work? Not from our perspective. I had trouble getting good moisture and nutrient distribution in the bags. The bags were white and tended to "cook" the berries. Now, I could have experimented with different growing media and put up shade cloth. It obviously was a viable concept that a few more years of work would have made it a real money maker for us. But, there is a time when you have to move on.
Sorry abut your friend.
Todd
Hey, I resemble that remark! It's an important observation. The gallons gas/pounds veggies is telling.
But the experiment here is can a 50 something engineer make the transition to farmer work. Certainly not in a year. I had exactly this discussion with a good friend, also a Master Gardener and landscaper. She had tried to imagine which of the people she knows could make such a transition and couldn't think of more than a very small handful. I too have a fairly good set up - no debt, a 10' clear three car garage and shop, chicken coops, sheds, multiple wells. Home and shop superinsulated passive solar. Still, there is no way I could pay my way with vegetables and fruits - even when I get my entire 2+ acres into production. [And that is as much as I could possibly work myself.] The information load - planning, scheduling, preservation - is astounding.
I can only play at this experiment myself because of external wealth provided by society. Sobering.
cfm in Gray, ME