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Comment by voakbasda | Hacker News Reader

Small family farming is already dead unless (a) you are willing to turn a large fortune into a small one or (b) you are willing to live in poverty.

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Farmers in every generation of my family's existence in the US. The current ones are decidedly not poor. Maybe not a lot of free time but not poor.

To be clear, I was speaking more toward starting new family farms. Few families can afford to invest the capital required to compete with families like yours that have inherited generational wealth. Put those assets on a balance sheet charted over time, and I suspect their net value has decreased relative to their productive returns. If so, that’s a large fortune turned into a small one.

Do you honestly think your family could start from scratch and still successfully compete in a saturated commodity market entrenched with others in such a position?

And don’t talk to be about nice markets, because that’s far less farming and much more marketing (as another commenter pointed out).

Sure they have wealth that was grown over time. My family started working somebody else's land. Why would you expect starting a farm now to be easier than way back? There are constantly farms or land in farm country for sale. If owning is too much, starting as a sharecropper is still a possibility. Like any business it requires a lot of hard work and risk to make a successful farm. It is still very possible to start small farming and build up.

All of that is separate from the value destruction of inflation. We would all be better off with a stable measure of value.

This is my experience as well. Ranchers and farmers that are established are quite wealthy. Maybe sometimes that's paper wealth or paired with seasonal debt up to their eyeballs. Also probably some extremely single-threaded dependencies (JD and JD authorized repair outlets, seed strains, etc).

Agreed that a lot of it may be paper wealth. Farming is capital intensive. Having a successful farm often means hundreds of thousands to millions in equipment and infrastructure. Anybody with that kind of capital is absolutely not poor.

Ya, usually paired with significant political capital as well. Ranchers in the west make up a mess of state legislatures, are strong conservation advocates (although in an indirect/slightly selfish way), and so on. If I had the money to plan for and survive the land-value tax issue, I'd probably buy a mess of land and hand it back over to an operator.

Not entirely true, small family farming can compete in niche, specialty and high end produce, they can capitalize on having a pretty farm (because "real" farms are incredibly ugly but people have pastoral fantasies), and farm stands can be profitable if they're in the right location.

That’s true, but it’s also exceptionally rare.

In that version, you are fundamentally not a farmer, you are a marketer.

Source: grew up in a farm town. Go Wheat Kings!

I disagree. If your soil is depleted and dead, under sprawling petrochemical monocrops... you are fundamentally not a farmer.

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