Big Farms Are About to Get Bigger

http://www.american.com/archive/2013/december/big-farms-are-about-to-get-bigger

by digisth • 13 years ago

22 33 13 years ago

american.com

rmason2• 13 years ago

I spent twenty years in the fertilizer business and worked with farmers big and small every day.

Here's the facts:

1. Farming is a low margin business

2. The only way to succeed is to be a great manager at large scale

3. Most of the technology is used to allow farmers to successfully manage larger and larger farms

4. Most of these with a few exceptions truly are family farms or if they were in town what we would view as small business.

5. The biggest challenge for the farmer in software isn't collecting the data but receiving actionable information from it.

bryanlarsen3• 13 years ago

So true. Everybody moans about the rise of the big corporate farms, but in many ways those farms are smaller than the 7-11 on the corner. Sure, they may be incorporated for tax purposes, but they rarely have more than one or two employees with the majority of the work being done by the owners' family. The land and equipment are worth millions, but that's not accumulated by a corporation selling shares but through the heavy use of mortgages by a family over many generations.

maerF0x03• 13 years ago

Seems some small farmers disagree with your "facts" 1&2:

Joel Salatin of polyface farms makes more than his neighbors (particularly on a per acre basis) by throwing away "big agribusiness" truisms like single purpose machinery, monocultures, and chemical stimulants for the land. He uses symbiosis instead, creates a premium product that his customers are willing to pay a premium for, all without subsidization (iirc).

CapitalistCartr• 13 years ago

There is a small market for specialization; my parents did it well. But the bulk of food comes from the farm rmason is talking about, the massive amounts of grain, vegetables, and meat that feeds America. The plural of anecdote isn't data.

Groxx• 13 years ago

There's a premium market for almost anything, and it almost always is an exception to whatever runs the non-premium side of the market. TBH I don't think this has any effect on what the root comment said.

Avshalom• 13 years ago

You can not feed a nation on "a premium product" that you have to "pay a premium for"

Which is not to say I have any strong investment in the belief that current large scale farming is optimal however I'm poor but inconveniently need food from time to time, so unfortunately I've gotta throw my weight in with the "what ever gets me rock bottom grains and legumes" camp.

bryanlarsen3• 13 years ago

A typical dryland farmer can produce a bushel of wheat (60 pounds) for less than $3/bushel, assuming typical weather. That's all that 99% of consumers care about. Everything else is niche.

Universities are working hard to bring these techniques to the mass-market farmers. GPS-enabled equipment has already let farmers massively reduce the amount of herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers they use. Machine vision technology shows great promise in bringing the rest.

LargeWu• 13 years ago

His yields are also almost certainly less than his neighbors, as well. I love what Salatin is doing, but there are tradeoffs, one being that it probably doesn't scale that well.

maxerickson• 13 years ago

The census publishes statistics that back this up:

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/agriculture/farm...

Most corporate farms are owned by families and a bunch of the remaining corporate farms are held by a small number of people (less than 10), which isn't the colloquial idea of a big business.

protomyth4• 13 years ago

I get the feeling that people have repeated the phrase "corporate farm" so often and don't really get what that stats you pointed out mean. It has the word "corporate" so it is bad, but you would have to be stupid beyond belief not to incorporate a modern farm even if it is a hobby farm. You sell something, you incorporate.

cpher• 13 years ago

This seems consistent with my experience working with Iowa farmers from 1997-2001. We were seeing consolidation of family farms into even larger family farms at that time. Many small producers were forced out of business due to low commodity prices at the time. And the bulk of the landowners were cash renting their land to the producers. So, a "family farm operation" likely included land that they rented but didn't actually own. You would be shocked to learn of the amount of millionaire landowners in Iowa who live on small, humble acreages and simply rent their land to farmers.

There was a large contingent of "hobby farmers" who owned land through their family, but it was a "side project" for them. They often had jobs with the USDA, etc or other sources of income. Equipment was insanely expensive and capital intensive.

I'm not in the ag industry now, but computer technology in '97-'01 was like a magic elixir to farmers. Very little software existed to help them turn data into actionable information. I'm sure today it's very different.

Edit: I'll add that the "state-of-the art" at that time was to use military-grade GPS receivers (which we got as a part of USDA) to track soil samples and create GIS heat maps and basic fertility plans. There were no on-board computer systems. :)

protomyth4• 13 years ago

"Farming is a low margin business"

You can do quite well if you manage moisture effectively. Those dryers are not cheap.

bradleyjg• 13 years ago

6. Knowing how to farm the federal government is just as important as knowing how to farm the ground. Perhaps more.

bpodgursky• 13 years ago

"What we have gained in efficiency and by avoiding the overuse of scarce and potentially environmentally damaging inputs, we may be losing in the connections of the farm family to the ancestral place."

What a stupid quote. If it's a tradeoff, call it a tradeoff--you are not losing environmental savings by losing the "connection of the farm family to the ancestral place", you are trading something sentimental for direct benefits to the environment and cheaper food.

himanshuSingh• 13 years ago

It's amazing the insight that is uncovered about a farming operation's efficiency and potential lost revenues when one takes the time to gather all the information in a useful way.

We believe so much in the benefits of using technology to better manage a farm can have on the bottom line that we give Farm At Hand away for FREE.

www.farmathand.com

protomyth4• 13 years ago

My main quibble with this article is that a lot of the "revolutionary data" is already known and used. Farmers know the yield others are getting. Elevators are reporting what they are taking in to big companies doing investing. Satellite pictures and some aircraft pictures are already used.

The image of the farmer as a simple, non-tech person is pretty pathetic. The current generation of farmers are pretty sophisticated. You cannot make it this far without being that. The amount of data a farmer wants is pretty impressive.

The JD thing in the article is the newest and I'm not sure its going to be a ongoing proposition if the farmers don't benefit financially from their data. A lot of farmers run their combines all harvest by starting them in the south and working their way north as the harvest progresses. You have to pay for a vehicle that makes most high-end sports cars look cheap. They also aren't the cheapest thing to maintain. That harvest run of data is know to the farmer and would be worth some cash.

sliverstorm4• 13 years ago

The image of the farmer as a simple, non-tech person is pretty pathetic. The current generation of farmers are pretty sophisticated.

Many members of the current generation of farmers even have college degrees just as serious & relevant to their field as any other science.

Big Farms Are About to Get Bigger

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