Darryl Shannon wrote:
>OK, Farming and "efficiency". Of course, efficiency is one of those
>slippery words. Efficiency is meaningful only when you consider ONE
>variable. But if you maximize the efficiency of that one variable, you
>are probably ruining efficiency on other variables.
<snipped description of large vs small efficiency>
>So, in order to say whether small or large farms are more efficient,
>you first have to define what you are measuring. Tons of food produced
>per acre? Net profit per acre? Gross sales per unit of labor?
>Calories harvested per calories expended?
I think the measure I'd use, and that I've heard my father use, is "cost
per pound of milk produced". This includes cost of labor, cost of fossil
fuels, cost of feed, cost of depreciation to the land, et cetera-
essentially *all* the costs involved in producing milk (or any other
product), including the long-term costs. That last is an important one. A
lot of farmers, as I think someone pointed out, *did* get rich in the 70s
and even the 80s, but for most of them it was because they managed to
harvest their short-term gains in the form of the productivity of their
land and essentially distilled it and sold it off, then got out when the
getting was good, if they were smart. I've seen a lot of people go broke
trying to get productivity out of farms that were burned out by
overproduction.
At any rate, the large farms in this country are *not* efficient in terms
of cost per pound of milk. They can still make money, in part by not
factoring in some costs (like long-term degradation), in part by what I
call the WalMart equation. Most stores have to sell their products at a
certain percentage profit or they go broke, because they're only selling
so many of that product; but WalMart is so big they can make a profit by
selling the products at a lower percentage profit. So if a small store
needs to sell something at a 5-cent profit to stay afloat because they
only sell a thousand or so, WalMart can sell the same product at a 1-cent
profit and make the same amount of profit by selling five thousand of
them- undercutting the competition at the same time, because everyone
goes to WalMart since they sell things more cheaply. In much the same way
the large farms can get away with wasting more money and more resources
per pound of milk than a small farm can because they're selling so many
more pounds.
But it doesn't change who's wasting more, or who's more efficient.
Kat Feete
--------------------------------
Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why.
It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or
the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to
show you that life was really very jolly and thoroughly
worth living.
- Terry Pratchett
