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If you look at
the history of little teeny farms, it isn't good. This is usually found in
countries where inheritance laws/customs decree that a family farm be split
equally between children. This tends to cause farm sizes to get smaller and
smaller over time. Per-person productivity declines (even as per-acre
productivity rises), because people don't have enough land to work. The
result is grinding poverty -- not just a "third world"
nonindustrialized existence, but the edge of starvation.
This happened in many countries (see Malthus), which is why the American
colonies were so exciting to Europeans. They weren't restricted to some
inefficient little three-acre landholding. They could grab all the land they
could handle, thus maximizing their per-person productivity, and also
maximizing their personal well-being.
That's why many cultures have had the custom of passing on the family farm
whole and intact to only one child, most likely the eldest son. Women are
married off to other families. Younger sons typically have to make a go of it
somewhere else. In return for this gift of an estate (or family business),
the eldest son typically has to care for the parents in old age. Ideally,
each farming family should have the most land that they could possibly handle
alone, or maybe a little more.
What happens to the younger sons? They could, conceivably, work as
agricultural workers on someone else's land. By definition, this would be
someone with more land than they could handle themselves, or they wouldn't be
hiring anyone. In this way, ideally, the people/land ratio would equalize to
the level that maximized per-person productivity with the traditional
techniques of the day.
The result was a great surplus of people -- all those younger sons and their
wives -- who needed to find a livelihood that wasn't in farming. They ended
up in the cities, of course, which is where everyone who isn't an
agriculturist ends up. There, they would provide some other sort of good or
service. In this way, the economy thrived. If 100% of the people are farmers,
there isn't anyone to make all the things that can't be made on a farm. If,
say, 20% of the people are farmers, that means that 80% of the people aren't
farmers, and can produce all the goods and services of a complex and thriving
civilization.
We've taken this to an extreme today, where about 2% of the people are
farmers, and 98% of the people are engaged in something else. Arguably, we
would be better off with a different method of food production, because this
system produces horrifically bad food. This different method of food
production -- more local, higher quality -- could well be accomplished by a
much larger number of family-owned farms.
Let's say the total population engaged in food production were to rise to
10%. That is five times more than today. However, in terms of the economy as
a whole, it is not that much different. The portion of people that are not
farmers goes from 98% to 90%, a 10% reduction. Actually, since about 10% of
people today are unemployed anyway, we could move to a 10%-farming situation
with no reduction in non-farming output.
Some people have suggested that as many as 30% of the U.S. population could be
engaged in agriculture. I'm not sure this is such a good idea. This would
mean that the not-farming population would decline from 90% to 70%, a 23%
reduction. Having five times as many farmers (2% to 10%) could be a good
thing, but do we really need fifteen times as many? They wouldn't create any
more food than people today, although it might be better quality.
You could think about it in money terms, if it helps. Let's say that the
farming population increased from 2% to 10%, a multiple of five. However, the
amount of food produced would be about the same, because you can only eat so
much, and the land can only produce so much. It follows that the cost of food
(at least in relation to the other goods and services) must rise by about
five times also. If we assume that we want to pay all those new farmers at
least as much as farmers today for their labor (arguably too low as it is),
then the total amount of dollars spent must also increase by five times. This
doesn't necessarily mean that supermarket prices would rise by five times,
because much of the cost of supermarket food is the processing, not the raw
materials. But, you can see the basic idea.
Now how do you feel about having the farming population rise not just five
times, but ten?
What is fairly clear is that we can't -- and shouldn't want to -- become a
"nation of farmers." That might have been OK in 1860, because the
population in 1860 was 31 million people. There was enough land in the U.S.
that all of those people could have as much land as they wanted. Today, the
population is about ten times that, or 309 million people. If we had the same
ratio of farming population (call it 70%) today as then, that would mean 10x
as many farmers, and thus each farm would be about 10% the size. This is a recipe
for grinding poverty. I mean Bangladesh-type poverty.
Let's see what the math looks like. There are about 641,680 square miles
under cultivation today in the U.S.. This does not include rather large areas
of excellent farmland that have fallen out of cultivation, especially east of
the Appalachians. However, it includes areas that may not be cultivable (or
shouldn't be cultivated) in the future, such as areas that demand heavy
irrigation, and are causing salinization and depleted groundwater. So, let's call
it a wash and say that the land under cultivation in our ideal "nation
of farmers" future is the same as today.
There are 640 acres in a square mile, so that's 411 million acres.
We will assume a farming family has four people, and that 70% of the population
has a "family farm." That works out to 55 million farming families.
Each family would have 7.5 acres.
That is not a lot. Indeed, it is rather too small. Remember, the 411 million
acres would produce about the same amount of food as it does today. The main
difference is that there would be 220 million people farming, instead of
about 6 million today, making the same amount of food (or less) from the same
amount of land. Remember that in 1860, all the farmland in the United States
was farmed by 31m*70% or 22 million people. Can you imagine the economic
contraction this would mean? I don't mean "the simple life." I mean
"I live in a shack made of twigs on the edge of starvation."
That would still leave about 90 million people to live in cities, which is
three times the entire population of the United States in 1860.
Let's put it this way: what if five million people -- from places like Las
Vegas perhaps -- wanted to move to Vermont and have a "little teeny
farm"? The population of Vermont today is about 600,000. And they
already own all the farmland. The math just doesn't work.
Some people today are going even farther, and suggesting that we have some
sort of future by converting today's Suburbia into micro-farms. The Suburban
ideal was always the "little teeny farm," even back in the 1830s.
Instead of adopting the Traditional City design, even in small villages as
was common in Europe, Small Town America was built on the "farmhouse on
a quarter-acre" model that is identical to suburbs today (except that
many suburban plots today are smaller than a quarter acre). The fact of the
matter is, this sort of hobby gardening is a grossly inefficient way of
making food. Just talk to a real farmer about what he thinks about a
quarter-acre farm (actually more like an eighth-acre since some of the land
is occupied by the house itself and some other bushes, trees and porches).
Look, I have nothing against growing some tomatoes in your backyard, but it
is a hobby, or perhaps a survival technique as urban Russians or
Cubans discovered. I can tell you one thing it is NOT: it is not
sustainable. You aren't going to have a civilization that lasts for a
thousand years that is based on eighth-acre hobby gardens. There is no
example of this in all of human history, anywhere in the world. For good
reason too.
This is just a continuation of the Suburban Fantasy! The same old idiot
fantasy that has been going on for over two hundred years!
Stop fantasizing!
I'll tell you what can work: you could have 10% of the population on family
farms, growing food in a healthy, natural way, and 90% of the population
living in cities. The 90% of the population living in cities should be living
in a proper city, which is to say a beautiful Traditional City, rather than a
Suburban Fantasy of little quarter-acre ersatz-micro farms. 10% of today's
population is 31 million people, which is more than the total number of
farmers in 1860.
If 10% of today's population were on family farms, the average farm size
would be about 52.5 acres, which is the kind of nice big farm that a family
could operate and make a whole lot of food. The kind of nice big farm that
people had in 1860, which is why the U.S. drew immigrants from around the
world.
Do you see what I mean when I say there is no alternative to the Traditional
City?
Can we stop wasting our time with this "little teeny farm" fantasy?
For the most part, the progressive farmer types -- the permaculturists and so
forth -- have done a pretty good job of outlining how that 5%-10% of the
population that might conceivably be involved in food production could go
about their efforts in the best way possible. Actually, I think that the
progressive farmer types still have a lot to do. Few people seem to have
completely assimilated the concepts of Masanobu Fukuoka, who is the most
sophisticated farmer type that I know of (and he was a full-time farmer, not
a part-timer). The real advantages, as I see it, are from abandoning the
European grain/meat/dairy pattern altogether. We should have a lot less meat,
a lot less dairy, somewhat less grains, and more vegetables. This would tend
to solve the farming issue the easy way: just don't do it. About 70% of U.S.
grain production goes to feed livestock for meat. If you have fewer livestock
(much fewer, like 70% less), and that livestock is grass-fed (in the case of
beef) instead of grain-fed, then your grain farming needs basically go away.
Thus, I think that food production and cooking/cuisine should be considered
as a whole. Just substituting grass-fed beef for corn-fed beef, or organic
corn from chemical corn, doesn't really get us where we need to go.
The problem emerges when this progressive farmer pattern, which might be
perfectly good for that 5%-10%, is assumed to be a template for the entire
civilization. It's not a matter of population, either. The world population
at the birth of Christ, 1AD (acutally 4 BC but close enough), was 200 million
people. For the whole world. And the world population in Babylonian times,
1500BC, was about 40 million, or about the same as the population of
California today. But even then, there was a pattern of cities and farms.
Two separate and distinct formats. Athens. Babylon. Rome. Beijing.
Alexandria. Tenochtitlan. And the farmlands that supported them. What we
didn't have was some sort of homogenous even goo of little teeny farms, or
some mixed-up blend that is not properly either a farm or a city.
The normal pattern of human development, over the past 5000 years. By
"city" I mean an urban place, which follows the traditional pattern
of urbanization, which I call the Traditional City. It could be a very small
village or a giant metropolis. Here we can see a village which is definitely
a village, not a farm, and farmlands which are definitely farmlands, not a
village. Two separate and distinct patterns, both serving the needs of the
other.
Another example of the same principle, from Germany. A metropolis follows the
same pattern, just on a much larger scale.
Sometimes I wonder why these simple and obvious things, which humans around
the world have done for thousands of years, have today become esoteric
knowledge.
OK,
farmer fantasists. I'll offer this: let's say 20% of the population was
farmers, but that consisted of 5% full-time farmers and 15% part-time
farmers, who collectively did the work of another 5% of full-time farmers, so
the result is equivalent to 10% of full-time time farmers as described
earlier. This is about 62 million people, doing what 21 million people did in
1860.
What about those 15% of the population that are part-time farmers? There are
two basic options. One is that they don't have any other income-producing
activity. Thus, they don't have much in the way of wealth -- they live like
Buddhist monks -- but they have a lot of free time. No 2500sf farmhouse. No
fancy horse and buggy. No iPhone. Maybe they have a 450sf strawbale cottage
they made themselves, and a bike. But, unlike the family farmer of 1860, they
don't work 12 hours a day six days a week, with a break on the Sabbath. That
could work. But it still means 80% of the population is living in Traditional
Cities.
The other possibility is that these 15% of part-time farmers also have some
other source of income. This would either mean a part-time job, or, for a
family, perhaps one full-time worker and another (wife probably) that maybe
splits part-time extreme gardening with child-raising and housekeeping.
Let's look at this arrangement. First, the wife doesn't have a job -- which
is actually rare these days. Obviously, you can't have two parents with
full-time jobs plus farming plus kids and housekeeping. Not enough daylight
hours.
So, let's assume that the husband has a job that doesn't involve farming
(because then they would be in the 5% of full-time farmers). Where is this
job? Unless they have some sort of Internet business, it probably means the
kind of job you'd have in a city, in an office or factory, hospital, retail
store or something of that sort.
In short, the person is working in a city, whether a metropolis or perhaps a
small town or village.
This family's primary business is thus the husband's full time job, not the
wife's part-time extreme gardening hobby. The viability of this arrangement
depends on the husband being able to find adequate and satisfying employment,
while still being able to live on a piece of land suitable for extreme
gardening, which we could put at a minimum of three acres and could be ten or
more. This can be quite difficult in rural areas.
So now we have a problem. The house is on three or more acres, but the job is
in a "city" of some sort. How does the husband get to work? Today,
the typical answer is "in a car." So, we have automobile dependence
built into the equation.
It doesn't quite have to be that way. You could have a small village that is
perhaps a mile or three away, and the husband could commute to the village on
foot or bike. Still, you'd have to have some sort of adequate job in the
village, which is not that common. (The main purpose of villages in farming
areas is to provide services to the local farmers.)
The second option is that the family could live in the village, but the
farmland is outside the village. Then, the wife would commute the mile or
three from the village to the farmland/extreme garden.
Where are the customers for the part-time farmer? Obviously, if everyone is a
part-time farmer, then nobody has any local customers, because everyone is
making more food than they eat. The big customers for the part-time farmers
would, of course, be people in the cities. So, the food would have to be
collected and shipped to metropolitan areas. Although the food may be of very
good quality, you still aren't going to get the "meet the farmer in
person at the farmer's market" experience, unless perhaps the farmer
travels to the city to go to the market.
What the farmer fantasists are really fantasizing about, it seems, is the
idea of producing food in the backyard of a suburban house in a large city.
There is nothing particularly wrong with this as a hobby, but of
course it is hardly even a part-time business at this stage. The typical
suburban plot is maybe 1/4 acre on the large size, and it can easily be
smaller than that. The house itself and some other niceties occupy some of
the area, so the acual area available for food production is perhaps 1/8th of
an acre. (In the suburban Los Angeles house I grew up in, the available land
would have been more like 1/20th of an acre, and that is only if you used
every possible bit.) This might be barely enough to provide fresh vegetables
for the family itself, but wouldn't leave much for the neighbors.
Nathan
Lewis
Nathan Lewis
was formerly the chief international economist of a leading economic
forecasting firm. He now works in asset management. Lewis has written for the
Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal Asia, the Japan Times, Pravda, and
other publications. He has appeared on financial television in the United
States, Japan, and the Middle East. About the Book: Gold: The Once and Future
Money (Wiley, 2007, ISBN: 978-0-470-04766-8, $27.95) is available at
bookstores nationwide, from all major online booksellers, and direct from the
publisher at www.wileyfinance.com or 800-225-5945. In Canada, call
800-567-4797.
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