For a timely and thought provoking essay on small farms and today’s hodgepodge of value challenge please click here.

by Paul Hunter

Scale in farming, the size at which a farm can be successful, boils down to three interrelated issues: access, control, and lifestyle. At the industrial scale, the only people who can farm are those who have access to the capital necessary to secure suitable land, equipment and inputs. At such a scale there is no way a young person can get access to these necessities unless he or she is already wealthy or at the minimum well-connected, or is born into a farming family that will give the young person a substantial hand. Why otherwise take a chance offering good tillable land to a nobody? Let him buy marginal acres. And with the encroachment of cities and suburbs onto the farming landscape, the price of land is being driven out of reach of anyone who hopes to make a living from what might be grown there. continue reading…

In his book Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want, Curt Carlson, president and CEO of SRI, a Silicon Valley research firm (and clearly not a farmer), remarks in passing:

“The only thing we have an industrial policy in place for in this country is agriculture-a nineteenth century industry.”

Which might show us how far, in the minds of some high-tech players, the thinking and practice of farming have gone astray. To view it as a “19th century industry” controlled by a government-led “industrial policy” is to get two things wrong at once.   continue reading…