

Change we can stomach - Alex3917
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/opinion/11barber.html

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hugh
_In fact, small farms are the most productive on earth.A four-acre farm in the
United States nets, on average, $1,400 per acre; a 1,364-acre farm nets $39 an
acre._

Who writes this stuff? Doesn't anybody think about it before it gets printed
in the New York Times?

Four-acre farms tend to grow high-value (and probably labour-intensive) crops.
There's no point owning a four-acre farm if you're going to use it to grow,
say, wheat (40 bushels per acre per year, $9 a bushel, so that's $1440 a year
gross).

I'm not sure what you can grow which might yield you $1400 an acre. Maybe
tulips, or battery hens? Whatever it is, it's probably something you can't
sensibly scale up to 1364 acres. (And where did the number 1364 come from? And
let's not get started on the fact that 1364 acres isn't really what you'd call
a "large" farm. )

Anyway, I'm not just nitpicking on journalistic innumeracy. I really suspect
that the whole conclusion (that small farms are more productive than big
farms) is completely wrong.

~~~
mynameishere
_I'm not sure what you can grow which might yield you $1400 an acre._

When 20 acres costs 3 million dollars, some land has to put out a lot more
than that.

<http://www.bergmanvineyards.com/pf_dm.html>

Also note:

<http://countrystudies.us/russia/60.htm>

 _Private plots also played a role in the Soviet agricultural system. The
government allotted small plots to individual farming households to produce
food for their own use and for sale as an income supplement. Throughout the
Soviet period, the productivity rates of private plots far exceeded their
size. With only 3 percent of total sown area in the 1980s, they produced over
a quarter of agricultural output._

~~~
hugh
Yes, I'm sure wine grapes would have to be among the >$1400/acre net crops.

As for the Soviet example, don't you think that's more likely to be telling us
something about private vs collectivized farms, rather than something about
large vs small farms?

I'm sure there must be data out there somewhere on the efficiency of large vs
small farms. Hell, I'm sure there are people who spend their lives studying
that kind of thing. Presumably there's some kind of complex productivity vs
size curve which varies depending on what crop you're raising (as well as a
bunch of other variables) and I'm sure if I went to hang out in the
agricultural economics department for a while I could find out far more than I
ever wanted to know about it.

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Alex3917
This isn't especially intellectually interesting, but I submitted it anyway
because it provides a few good web app ideas.

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Prrometheus
Is there an easy way to get past the login page, or do I have to sign in to
NYtimes.com?

~~~
Xichekolas
Google the headline. Last I checked the NYT lets people in for free if they
came via Google search results.

Or just use bugmenot.

