Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Only in the land of North American industrial mega-corp agriculture would 80 acres be "micro" anything.

The farms next to me (I live rural) are 20-30 acres and are farmed by professional subcontractors that employ dozens of (immigrant seasonal) labour for picking etc. and use heavy machinery that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and are shared between multiple farms.

Likely if your old boss operated a 'micro' farm it was only using a fraction of that acreage.

Also 3 acres is not a "garden", it's a very labour intensive high production "market garden" and could in fact be called a farm of a type. That's 360x360 feet, and maybe you can't visualize that, but it's large. It would require machinery and hired labour to manage. No single individual could plant weed and cultivate that single-handedly. My garden on my acreage is 100x100 and if I could actually keep up with it would easily produce enough for 5 or 6 families.

I'm not saying it's a profitable farm, but it's a kind of farming. You could easily produce $10-$20k of revenue out of intensively market gardening something of that size.

But even more if you were to do cut flowers or something higher profit. My neighbour is very profitable with lavender and has about 3 acres of it and makes quite a bit of money off just that. But he is connected deeply to the flower business, so knows the game well.

A 3 acre high quality vineyard could produce $10k in revenue just selling the grapes where I am. If you made that into wine (capital intensive and regulatory hassle and not allowed on that small of acreage, but still) you could actually make many multiples of that and make a good living once you covered your upfront costs.

So yes, it's possible to 'farm' on small acreages and make an 'ok' living if you don't mind busting your ass. Just not the stereotype of what people think of as farming (coy/sorn/wheat/sorghum cash cropping, etc.)

Myself I have a bad back now, so no thanks on the pay cut, I'll keep these things as a hobby :-)

My dad and grandfather both kept 2-3 acre food producing gardens as hobbies. So, I am well aware of what's involved.

At those scales you want machinery, but you can use a Garden Tiller instead of a disk plow behind a tractor etc. Their are actually a lot of moderately expensive tools that scale up to ~80 acres without hitting the very high costs of an actual farm. Also often possible to find an actual farmer willing to lend you equipment for a large cut. ~2,000 hours of effort is a significant hobby, but less than many WoW players as a direct comparison.

10k in revenue before expenses is not much and is easy for that to end up negative after expenses and even in the best case your likely paying yourself well below minimum wage. As to wine, again that's something you can do completely independent of a farm by just buying grapes.

Fair enough

Another thing I was going to point out is that farms smaller than 10 acres are actually the norm in many parts of the world. High intensity plots using walk-behind tractors and hand labour are common in Asia and in some parts of Europe. Much of Europe's vegetable production happens on 2-3 hectare properties.

So I'm just objecting to you characterizing these small operations as "not farms" -- IMHO they're farms. But they don't conform to the typical NA cash crop / livestock farm that's common here.

You're right I should preface this by limiting things to America. Making 7$ / day or 210$/month is a living wage in much of the world, but only adds up to ~2,500$/year. I am sure many of these farms provide a better standard of living than many of my ancestors had.

But it's not just incomes and labour costs. It's equipment prices, it's also land prices, it's land availability, and in North America subsidies for cash cropping favour that kind of farm. But also a huge part it is equipment costs and other costs that favour huge economies of scale here that is not necessarily the case in some parts of Europe, Asia, etc.

Look at what Chinese small farmers farm with -- small nimble walk behind tractors. Now try to get yourself one of these in North America. A BCS or Grillo walk behind fully equipped (rototiller/rotary plow, decent sized engine, cultivator attachment, etc.) ends up being at least $10,000 worth of an investment. Chinese farms are using similar equipment at a fraction of the price (just look on Ali Baba for example. But of course you can't import that without huge tariffs, shipping costs, and regulatory hurdles). On top of that they can get small equipment we can't get here: balers and combines that fit on small tractors or walk behinds and cost little. And they get access to markets as small growers that you can't get here.

Let's say I wanted to get into hazelnut production here. Or buckwheat. Something unorthodox like that that is not soy or corn. I'd be on the hook to not only grow the crop and harvest it and etc. there'd be no market that would take my small amount of crop and pay me for it and process it. To make it worth my while I'd need to grow hundreds of acres and get my own processing equipment and become a large agri corp. And so assume a huge amount of risk.

In places that have vibrant agrarian economies (most of NA does not) and high populations and a diversity of things grown there are more options for processing, etc. A place like Burgundy for example has a huge amount of small wine growers and makers and they form cooperatives and work together to process and market their grapes among a large number of businesses. But the model in North America is far more capital intensive.

Some areas are not capable of growing whatever you would like. Huge areas of the United States don't get enough water to support most kinds of farming. In northern Montana for example, the average land required for each cow/calf pair is 40 acres. If you had 80 acres there and could scrounge up enough water you could rent some equipment for a few days each year and grow alfalfa.

I imagine it's because there are tax advantages but anecdotally in the Silicon Valley suburbs (Los Altos Hills/Portola Valley/Atherton) there are a high number of one to three acre farms and vineyards.

You get property tax relief for maintaining the land as agricultural.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com