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Comment by ahelwer | Hacker News Reader

To be clear, when you say efficient, you mean percentage of profit (value produced/costs) is lower in aggregate than if that same patch of land were part of a much larger farm. I submit this definition of efficiency ignores the distribution of those profits, which currently support a group of people owning the fruit of their labor - as opposed to those people being locked into dead-end wage labor jobs working at a much larger farm, while the real profits flow to a single entity.

When people talk about the hollowing out of the middle class, this is exactly what they mean. Capitalism is very efficient at producing wealth but extremely inefficient in distributing it.

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Your system means that when your local garden fails your family starves to death. With the large farm we have insurance so that when (WHEN not IF) there is a crop failure we just buy something from a farm far away. Distance is important here: crop failures tend to be because of a situation that affects your entire village so you can't fall back on a local safety net, you need a large one with a distribution network. The distribution network in turns requires a lot of people not working the farm but instead distributing things around. To make this work you need large farms with surplus.

In short your ideals sound good, but they just don't work out. Too many people are needed off the farm to pull it off, but you put them on their little farms.

Correction - the local system means that when the local system fails _for years on end_ then the remote part of society needs to step in to support those who are starving locally. But this is true, no matter how high you push things. If something kills all the okra (see Interstellar) then we'll have to fall back on spinach _as a society_ if we have one mega-farm. If everything on the planet dies off then we'll have to flee the solar system, or get support from neighbors in the local galactic cluster.

I don't know what Intersetellar is (obviously a book/movie but I don't care to look it up).

What is the local vs remote system? When you have small farms local is you, and remote your neighbors who you walk to. When you have large enough farms you can generate enough surplus that the world cares - and they are generating enough that they can afford to play nice. Small farmers in general don't generate enough surplus that they can feed each other across the distance of a continent.

Support from a galactic cluster is nice in SciFi, but in reality space is too big. It is questionable if Earth/Venus could support each other, as our orbits are often too misaligned to do anything in time. (the fast trip to mars involves Venus so things are even worse). Going between stars - forget it, by the time we find out about a problem they are dead or have survived.

Does not follow. I'm not talking about subsistence farming. Nothing stops you from buying food from small farms further away that didn't experience crop failure.

Your small farm doesn't have enough surplus in the good years to pay for the transport cost to get food from farther away.

No, I mean it's less efficient. A large field can be farmed with larger machinery which is more fuel, time (and yes, cost) efficient than smaller machinery. There is less time spent moving between fields which can be critical for something as weather sensitive as harvest. Large machinery typically produces bigger gaps between tramlines and reduces spillage when turning, leading to greater yields and less waste.

You're just restating what you said and what I accurately interpreted: the costs are higher with smaller farms. You define this as inefficiency. I point out this definition of efficiency only considers amount of surplus generated, not how the surplus is distributed. With larger corporate-owned farms the surplus is distributed in a very inefficient way.

I'm talking about the process of turning sunlight into food. If you want to make that process use as few resources as possible (especially fossil fuels) then you need big fields with large machinery. Distribution of wealth is a different topic.

It is astonishing to me that you can look at how technology has impacted labor over the past half-century and believe that this definition of efficiency, which by necessity includes human labor cost as something to be minimized for the benefit of the recipients of the resulting surplus, has nothing to do with distribution of wealth.

I'm saying that's a different argument, and not one I raised.

You incorrectly inferred my meaning from my original post and are now doubling down, I'm not sure why.

It's as simple as this: We want to produce as much food as possible from as few natural resources as possible, emitting as little carbon as possible in the process. Large fields are more efficient at this, for reasons I've spelt out already.

Even in a fully communist society this would be true.

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