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Comment by ahelwer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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