8 ms·

Farms have continued to grow, echoing Earl Butz' (Nixon's Secretary of Ag) "get big or get out" philosophy. However, there are several studies out there showing

Farms have continued to grow, echoing Earl Butz' (Nixon's Secretary of Ag) "get big or get out" philosophy. However, there are several studies out there showing that a greater portion of the world's population is fed by small farms: - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(17)30007-4/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5... - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/12/124010/meta;jsessionid=2466C7EE2E851B482831E2CC0E38A7F1.c3.iopscience.cld.iop.org https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/12/1... - http://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/284666/ http://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/284666/ Small farmers need support, it's worth learning about local arms of organisations such as https://viacampesina.org/en/ https://viacampesina.org/en/, for example https://landworkersalliance.org.uk https://landworkersalliance.org.uk

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
Isn’t the solution to increase these farms’ economies of scale? So the same civilisation-enhancing forces that drove development 10,000 years ago can show their force more broadly?
- fsloth 6y ago
  What economies of scale specifically do farms have? A farm is not a factory where you can create a uniform process...
  - oblio 6y ago
    Well, as a simple example, you can't efficiently plow or mechanically harvest lots of land which are very small or have a weird shape. If you aggregate them, it becomes much more efficient. Same thing goes for purchasing equipment or supplies, you can buy in bulk for a large farm. Modern farms ARE factories.
    - kebman 6y ago
      What you are saying is true, but a lot of people hate the thought, since a farm has historically been a family working within a small community or a village, first and foremost for their own benefit, with the surplus going back to the village or greater society through trade or cooperation (or later by force through taxation by the Lord of the land). This was a good and healthy life that produced strong people. For thousands of years the farm was the producer of civilization and culture. Today, on the other hand, it has been reduced to a factory, and culture and tradition is increasingly molded by political organizations who sometimes don't have the family's best intentions at heart. The unit has been operationalized and a big part of what it once meant to be a farmer in a close-knit community has instead been reduced to being a factory worker on minimum wage (or less, if you're an illegal immigrant).
      - oblio 6y ago
        That's a "Golden Age" perspective. At best it was true for a minority of people for a rather short moment in time, compared to the time agriculture has been around. Historically agricultural workers were slaves or at best serfs. In any case, a brutal lifestyle, generally for someone else's benefit. Well, what you're saying does apply to a category of countries, underdeveloped ones. Countries at very low levels of what we'd consider civilization. There people were either shepherds or subsistence farmers but closer to what we'd call hunter-gatherers.
        vagrantJin 6y ago
        > Countries at very low levels of what we'd consider civilization. Industrialized.
        oblio 6y ago
        Not even. Large farms first appeared in the Fertile Crescent more than 5000 years ago.
        iguy 6y ago
        > Historically agricultural workers were slaves or at best serfs. This was certainly common, but e.g. England hasn't really had serfdom for 5 centuries (after a gradual decline). Quite a lot of the labor was hired servants, perhaps a majority, although (IIRC) the median servant worked alongside only one or two others. So not family, but still a lot of family-sized groups.
    - fsloth 6y ago
      Modern farm business is made to look like a factory by the big business, but that is not a proof that this maximizes yield per acre, or makes food as cheap as possible. This is not an anti-corporate slur, I am just pointing out that if you have n acres of land under big ag, you would need to implement a more boutique ag operation on the same piece of land to come up with a sane comparison. Since this is really not feasible generally I would like to know has someone actually studied this. For example, soil is not necessarily uniform, and smaller scale operation might utilize the specific area of land for a mixture of landraces that might improve the yield than the monocrop that was designed to be able to produce crop in a generic industrial process, but not might for example be optimal for any soil.
  - cm2187 6y ago
    Not a farmer but I imagine better amortise the cost of machinery, better optimise a process when done at scale.
  - jbj 6y ago
    I'd imagine a lot of things can be streamlined from big companies that individual/independant farmers can't keep up with; one thing that came to mind was those big circles visible on aerial photos like those pictured here https://www.quora.com/Why-do-they-make-circular-crop-fields-in-Saudi-Arabia-I-have-just-accidentally-seen-it-on-Google-Maps https://www.quora.com/Why-do-they-make-circular-crop-fields-...
  - opencl 6y ago
    Ecen a pretty basic set of modern farm equipment and facilities will run into the millions of dollars, and will have very low utilization on small farms. A single modern combine can harvest >100 acres per day. With multiple big fields of crops that have different harvesting times your equipment will spend much less time idle.
    - yorwba 6y ago
      That's right, but it's not necessary to aggregate small farms into large ones to maximize machine utilization. It's also possible to separate the machine-owning part from the other aspects of farming and aggregate only that, by forming an association of farmers who share equipment. (Shared ownership of the means of production, so to speak.) In German, that's called a Maschinenring. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maschinenring https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maschinenring Not sure whether the concept is unpopular in the English-speaking world, or just not considered noteworthy enough to warrant its own Wikipedia article.
      - mywacaday 6y ago
        In Ireland we have agricultural contractors who specialise in owning/operating big equipment that are only contracted in when needed but they are then very busy at certain times of the year an 18 hour days for a few weeks wouldn't be unusual. Literally making hay while the sun shines I guess.
      - Retric 6y ago
        The overhead of transporting this equipment between farms makes the process significantly less efficient. The difference between harvesting 2,000 acres a day and 1,700 might not seem like a lot, but add in transaction costs and you can be talking 5+% higher food costs ignoring subsidies.
        yorwba 6y ago
        If you merge multiple small farms into a single big one, the overhead of transporting this equipment between farms turns into the overhead of transporting this equipment between different parts of the farm. The distance that needs to be covered remains the same. Sure, the hand-off between farmers needs to be scheduled, but is that going to make the difference between 2,000 acres a day and 1,700? Do tractor drivers on big farms never take a break?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    Harvesting, planting, fertilizing, irrigating... are all uniform processes. Larger farms can invest in more machinery (and more expensive machinery), and build more infrastructure for themselves. They can do more sophisticated testing of their crops/animals, can monitor the things they need to monitor to a higher level, they can absorb loss-incurring seasons more readily. All of that is economies of scale.
  - refurb 6y ago
    Buying a $500,000 machine (that has massive throughout) makes sense when you’re farming 10,000 acres, but not so much when it’s 20 acres.
  - javiramos 6y ago
    Leafy greens production is quickly being standardized and automated in a highly controllable format. e.g. [0] It would be reasonable to assume that the farming of many other crops will eventually transition to fully automated indoor formats. [0] https://infinite-acres.com/ https://infinite-acres.com/
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Not really. Leafy greens are expensive in the store for what you get: a lot of labor required, and spoil quickly after harvest. It makes sense to automate indoors. Most crops need a lot more space, and a lot less labor. Indoor farming is not economical for these. Don't get me wrong: there are a number of crops where it makes sense. They are an important source of nutrients (and taste!), but a poor source of calories overall.
      - onecommentman 6y ago
        Or to grow in a small home garden. Leafy greens are the easiest crop to grow in a small plot, or even indoors. Greens, fruits and tomatoes/peppers are the easiest for home growers to become self-sufficient. The labor is credited as exercise and therapy.
  - estsauver 6y ago
    I commonly hear farming described as "Geographically distributed manufacturing" in the industry. It's a lot closer to a uniform process than people think.
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    Others pointed out the economies of scale in terms of production. I will point out that a large farming operation also has more resilience against risk. If some minor disaster takes out one of the fields on this farm, a blight on the one field, there are many other fields that may still be intact. This is even more so when you are Big Ag and you have multiple farms in different states. You might lose 5% of your crop to a bad hailstorm or an early frost in Oklahoma, but 95% of it is intact, while the small time Oklahoma farmer has no such consolation. Agriculture isn’t just a numbers game for production, but also for spreading risk.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Which is why historic small farms tended to be a lot of small fields. You didn't only only one patch of ground you had several. If the wheat field failed, maybe the barely elsewhere did okay and so you can at least survive until next year.
  - opinion-is-bad 6y ago
    Just a few: Tractor amortization over additional acres. Administrative overhead rarely scales linearly. Better prices on inputs from ordering in larger quantities. Access to new tech that is too expensive for smaller operations to justify. A farm is very similar to a factory in many ways. You buy inputs (especially Nitrogen) and convert those into a usable output using biological machinery. This becomes especially true for people planting permanent crops (I.e almonds) where you also need to consider the maintenance on the plant (pruning, etc) as it ages. Uniformity of process is actually another place that large farms benefit. They can afford the quality managers capable of designing such systems. An owner-operator with one guy working part-time for him is less likely to bother.
- Retric 6y ago
  My old boss operates a 1,000 acre farm as a hobby due to that efficiency. Sure it was a “family farm” but it was a trivial portion of their income and involved 10-15 hours of work a week. It’s hard to argue that’s a bad thing.
  - prepend 6y ago
    When you say operate do you mean do all the work? Or manage the farm and hire people to do that? If the former, would you say what kind of farm it is, 1000 acre farm that’s easy enough to spend 15 hours a week seems interesting to me.
    - foxhop 6y ago
      Any monocrop or one sufficiently subsidized is my guess. I grow a lot of food for myself and my family on less than an acre using hand tools. I don't focus on single crop because that would yeild a feast-or-famon phenomenon. Grow what grows well in your context and locality, part time. Additionally, a focus on perennials will significantly chop the work hours needed to just reaping the harvest. For more subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RussellBallestrini https://www.youtube.com/c/RussellBallestrini
    - fouc 6y ago
      There's definitely lots of low effort options for farming. Look at permaculture farming for example, key ideas behind it involve no-tilling, sculpting the landscape with various shapes like berms, which create microclimates, arranging rows of trees to retain moisture, etc. There's a lot of ways to make the land work for you, but can take a few years to get it to a highly productive state.
      - Loughla 6y ago
        Just for reference, I've lived on our current place for 20 years or so, and it has taken absolutely every one of those years to get to a point that our 'permaculture' farm is anywhere near running efficiently. The amount of work involved in that process is simply staggering. There are principals that can be effectively integrated to a backyard garden. But, to have as close to a self-sustaining cycle as you can, you're going to invest thousands and thousands of hours. Honestly, I have never figured up how many hours we've spent on this, just because it's a hobby and quantifying it would spoil part of it for me.
- tengbretson 6y ago
  The problem is that the economies of scale are invested in and enjoyed by the biggest players first, so by the time they can be enjoyed by the smaller farms the markets have already adjusted to make it a necessity just to stay above water.
- legulere 6y ago
  Do you mean agricultural output per money or agircultural output per area? The latter one does not scale with bigger farms but shrinks.
refurb 6y ago
I think you lose a lot of granularity when you just measure a farm by size. A 20,000 acre “farm” that only grazes a few thousand head of cattle because it’s practically desert could be much less productive than a 100 acre farm in the most fertile region of the world. So it wouldn’t surprise me that the smaller farms feed an outsized proportion of the population.
- EdwardDiego 6y ago
  Exactly, there's some rather large farms in the NZ high country, and they tend to measure stocking rates for their more marginal land as "hectares per head" - much like measuring an M1 tank's fuel consumption in "gallons per mile".
- 3pt14159 6y ago
  I know a guy that set up a food operation in a sea container in Toronto. It was a whole ecosystem of food producing organisms. Fish in the water, herbs like dill, tomatoes, all sorts of stuff. He'd sell it at 4x grocer prices to pricy restaurants near-by. His reasoning in putting it in a sea container was that he could always find a spare place to park it / electrify it with all his friends in the construction industry. Made enough to live in Kensington Market, which is a hipster / hippy part of Toronto.
  - wolfram74 6y ago
    I grew up in Iowa, so my fascination with hydroponics is partly from the technical intrigue, but also an egalitarian philosophy. A locales food security with conventional agriculture is heavily dependent on the quality of their soil, while with hydroponics and derivatives it's more a function of their engineering prowess (and available infrastructure).
wsc981 6y ago
I'd like to see more people do small scale farming anyways, mainly to support themselves, not in the first place as a business to get rich from. Big farms tend to focus on a few crops (cash crops). Small farms that are meant to support a family would do better by having a great variety of crops. It's also nice to support a local community this way, by selling some extra produce to local markets or people in the local community. My girlfriend has a small 3 rai (~5000 m2) farm. Originally she only grew rice ... or rather some Myanmar people grew rice on her farm for a small amount of money. In the past 1.5 year my girlfriend transformed the farm to support our family. Now about 1 rai is used for rice (enough for our family) and the remainder is used for growing fish, fruits (bananas, coconuts, mangos, ...) and vegetables (Thai aubergines, long beans, cauliflower, spring unions, ...). Having a greater variety of crops also protects a bit from bad harvests or bad market prices. It makes one more anti-fragile. In the future we should probably buy some land to grow the farm to about 5 rai and from then on we should be able to fully support ourselves with fish, fruit and veggies. I think Jon Jandai has some nice ideas on setting up a small scale farm [0]. --- [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2eoQyYoUww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2eoQyYoUww

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

Isn’t the solution to increase these farms’ economies of scale? So the same civilisation-enhancing forces that drove development 10,000 years ago can show their force more broadly?

fsloth 6y ago
What economies of scale specifically do farms have? A farm is not a factory where you can create a uniform process...
- oblio 6y ago
  Well, as a simple example, you can't efficiently plow or mechanically harvest lots of land which are very small or have a weird shape. If you aggregate them, it becomes much more efficient. Same thing goes for purchasing equipment or supplies, you can buy in bulk for a large farm. Modern farms ARE factories.
  - kebman 6y ago
    What you are saying is true, but a lot of people hate the thought, since a farm has historically been a family working within a small community or a village, first and foremost for their own benefit, with the surplus going back to the village or greater society through trade or cooperation (or later by force through taxation by the Lord of the land). This was a good and healthy life that produced strong people. For thousands of years the farm was the producer of civilization and culture. Today, on the other hand, it has been reduced to a factory, and culture and tradition is increasingly molded by political organizations who sometimes don't have the family's best intentions at heart. The unit has been operationalized and a big part of what it once meant to be a farmer in a close-knit community has instead been reduced to being a factory worker on minimum wage (or less, if you're an illegal immigrant).
    - oblio 6y ago
      That's a "Golden Age" perspective. At best it was true for a minority of people for a rather short moment in time, compared to the time agriculture has been around. Historically agricultural workers were slaves or at best serfs. In any case, a brutal lifestyle, generally for someone else's benefit. Well, what you're saying does apply to a category of countries, underdeveloped ones. Countries at very low levels of what we'd consider civilization. There people were either shepherds or subsistence farmers but closer to what we'd call hunter-gatherers.
      - vagrantJin 6y ago
        > Countries at very low levels of what we'd consider civilization. Industrialized.
        oblio 6y ago
        Not even. Large farms first appeared in the Fertile Crescent more than 5000 years ago.
      - iguy 6y ago
        > Historically agricultural workers were slaves or at best serfs. This was certainly common, but e.g. England hasn't really had serfdom for 5 centuries (after a gradual decline). Quite a lot of the labor was hired servants, perhaps a majority, although (IIRC) the median servant worked alongside only one or two others. So not family, but still a lot of family-sized groups.
  - fsloth 6y ago
    Modern farm business is made to look like a factory by the big business, but that is not a proof that this maximizes yield per acre, or makes food as cheap as possible. This is not an anti-corporate slur, I am just pointing out that if you have n acres of land under big ag, you would need to implement a more boutique ag operation on the same piece of land to come up with a sane comparison. Since this is really not feasible generally I would like to know has someone actually studied this. For example, soil is not necessarily uniform, and smaller scale operation might utilize the specific area of land for a mixture of landraces that might improve the yield than the monocrop that was designed to be able to produce crop in a generic industrial process, but not might for example be optimal for any soil.
- cm2187 6y ago
  Not a farmer but I imagine better amortise the cost of machinery, better optimise a process when done at scale.
- jbj 6y ago
  I'd imagine a lot of things can be streamlined from big companies that individual/independant farmers can't keep up with; one thing that came to mind was those big circles visible on aerial photos like those pictured here https://www.quora.com/Why-do-they-make-circular-crop-fields-in-Saudi-Arabia-I-have-just-accidentally-seen-it-on-Google-Maps https://www.quora.com/Why-do-they-make-circular-crop-fields-...
- opencl 6y ago
  Ecen a pretty basic set of modern farm equipment and facilities will run into the millions of dollars, and will have very low utilization on small farms. A single modern combine can harvest >100 acres per day. With multiple big fields of crops that have different harvesting times your equipment will spend much less time idle.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    That's right, but it's not necessary to aggregate small farms into large ones to maximize machine utilization. It's also possible to separate the machine-owning part from the other aspects of farming and aggregate only that, by forming an association of farmers who share equipment. (Shared ownership of the means of production, so to speak.) In German, that's called a Maschinenring. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maschinenring https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maschinenring Not sure whether the concept is unpopular in the English-speaking world, or just not considered noteworthy enough to warrant its own Wikipedia article.
    - mywacaday 6y ago
      In Ireland we have agricultural contractors who specialise in owning/operating big equipment that are only contracted in when needed but they are then very busy at certain times of the year an 18 hour days for a few weeks wouldn't be unusual. Literally making hay while the sun shines I guess.
    - Retric 6y ago
      The overhead of transporting this equipment between farms makes the process significantly less efficient. The difference between harvesting 2,000 acres a day and 1,700 might not seem like a lot, but add in transaction costs and you can be talking 5+% higher food costs ignoring subsidies.
      - yorwba 6y ago
        If you merge multiple small farms into a single big one, the overhead of transporting this equipment between farms turns into the overhead of transporting this equipment between different parts of the farm. The distance that needs to be covered remains the same. Sure, the hand-off between farmers needs to be scheduled, but is that going to make the difference between 2,000 acres a day and 1,700? Do tractor drivers on big farms never take a break?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  Harvesting, planting, fertilizing, irrigating... are all uniform processes. Larger farms can invest in more machinery (and more expensive machinery), and build more infrastructure for themselves. They can do more sophisticated testing of their crops/animals, can monitor the things they need to monitor to a higher level, they can absorb loss-incurring seasons more readily. All of that is economies of scale.
- refurb 6y ago
  Buying a $500,000 machine (that has massive throughout) makes sense when you’re farming 10,000 acres, but not so much when it’s 20 acres.
- javiramos 6y ago
  Leafy greens production is quickly being standardized and automated in a highly controllable format. e.g. [0] It would be reasonable to assume that the farming of many other crops will eventually transition to fully automated indoor formats. [0] https://infinite-acres.com/ https://infinite-acres.com/
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Not really. Leafy greens are expensive in the store for what you get: a lot of labor required, and spoil quickly after harvest. It makes sense to automate indoors. Most crops need a lot more space, and a lot less labor. Indoor farming is not economical for these. Don't get me wrong: there are a number of crops where it makes sense. They are an important source of nutrients (and taste!), but a poor source of calories overall.
    - onecommentman 6y ago
      Or to grow in a small home garden. Leafy greens are the easiest crop to grow in a small plot, or even indoors. Greens, fruits and tomatoes/peppers are the easiest for home growers to become self-sufficient. The labor is credited as exercise and therapy.
- estsauver 6y ago
  I commonly hear farming described as "Geographically distributed manufacturing" in the industry. It's a lot closer to a uniform process than people think.
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  Others pointed out the economies of scale in terms of production. I will point out that a large farming operation also has more resilience against risk. If some minor disaster takes out one of the fields on this farm, a blight on the one field, there are many other fields that may still be intact. This is even more so when you are Big Ag and you have multiple farms in different states. You might lose 5% of your crop to a bad hailstorm or an early frost in Oklahoma, but 95% of it is intact, while the small time Oklahoma farmer has no such consolation. Agriculture isn’t just a numbers game for production, but also for spreading risk.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Which is why historic small farms tended to be a lot of small fields. You didn't only only one patch of ground you had several. If the wheat field failed, maybe the barely elsewhere did okay and so you can at least survive until next year.
- opinion-is-bad 6y ago
  Just a few: Tractor amortization over additional acres. Administrative overhead rarely scales linearly. Better prices on inputs from ordering in larger quantities. Access to new tech that is too expensive for smaller operations to justify. A farm is very similar to a factory in many ways. You buy inputs (especially Nitrogen) and convert those into a usable output using biological machinery. This becomes especially true for people planting permanent crops (I.e almonds) where you also need to consider the maintenance on the plant (pruning, etc) as it ages. Uniformity of process is actually another place that large farms benefit. They can afford the quality managers capable of designing such systems. An owner-operator with one guy working part-time for him is less likely to bother.
Retric 6y ago
My old boss operates a 1,000 acre farm as a hobby due to that efficiency. Sure it was a “family farm” but it was a trivial portion of their income and involved 10-15 hours of work a week. It’s hard to argue that’s a bad thing.
- prepend 6y ago
  When you say operate do you mean do all the work? Or manage the farm and hire people to do that? If the former, would you say what kind of farm it is, 1000 acre farm that’s easy enough to spend 15 hours a week seems interesting to me.
  - foxhop 6y ago
    Any monocrop or one sufficiently subsidized is my guess. I grow a lot of food for myself and my family on less than an acre using hand tools. I don't focus on single crop because that would yeild a feast-or-famon phenomenon. Grow what grows well in your context and locality, part time. Additionally, a focus on perennials will significantly chop the work hours needed to just reaping the harvest. For more subscribe to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RussellBallestrini https://www.youtube.com/c/RussellBallestrini
  - fouc 6y ago
    There's definitely lots of low effort options for farming. Look at permaculture farming for example, key ideas behind it involve no-tilling, sculpting the landscape with various shapes like berms, which create microclimates, arranging rows of trees to retain moisture, etc. There's a lot of ways to make the land work for you, but can take a few years to get it to a highly productive state.
    - Loughla 6y ago
      Just for reference, I've lived on our current place for 20 years or so, and it has taken absolutely every one of those years to get to a point that our 'permaculture' farm is anywhere near running efficiently. The amount of work involved in that process is simply staggering. There are principals that can be effectively integrated to a backyard garden. But, to have as close to a self-sustaining cycle as you can, you're going to invest thousands and thousands of hours. Honestly, I have never figured up how many hours we've spent on this, just because it's a hobby and quantifying it would spoil part of it for me.
tengbretson 6y ago
The problem is that the economies of scale are invested in and enjoyed by the biggest players first, so by the time they can be enjoyed by the smaller farms the markets have already adjusted to make it a necessity just to stay above water.
legulere 6y ago
Do you mean agricultural output per money or agircultural output per area? The latter one does not scale with bigger farms but shrinks.

refurb 6y ago

I think you lose a lot of granularity when you just measure a farm by size. A 20,000 acre “farm” that only grazes a few thousand head of cattle because it’s practically desert could be much less productive than a 100 acre farm in the most fertile region of the world. So it wouldn’t surprise me that the smaller farms feed an outsized proportion of the population.

EdwardDiego 6y ago
Exactly, there's some rather large farms in the NZ high country, and they tend to measure stocking rates for their more marginal land as "hectares per head" - much like measuring an M1 tank's fuel consumption in "gallons per mile".
3pt14159 6y ago
I know a guy that set up a food operation in a sea container in Toronto. It was a whole ecosystem of food producing organisms. Fish in the water, herbs like dill, tomatoes, all sorts of stuff. He'd sell it at 4x grocer prices to pricy restaurants near-by. His reasoning in putting it in a sea container was that he could always find a spare place to park it / electrify it with all his friends in the construction industry. Made enough to live in Kensington Market, which is a hipster / hippy part of Toronto.
- wolfram74 6y ago
  I grew up in Iowa, so my fascination with hydroponics is partly from the technical intrigue, but also an egalitarian philosophy. A locales food security with conventional agriculture is heavily dependent on the quality of their soil, while with hydroponics and derivatives it's more a function of their engineering prowess (and available infrastructure).

wsc981 6y ago

I'd like to see more people do small scale farming anyways, mainly to support themselves, not in the first place as a business to get rich from. Big farms tend to focus on a few crops (cash crops). Small farms that are meant to support a family would do better by having a great variety of crops. It's also nice to support a local community this way, by selling some extra produce to local markets or people in the local community. My girlfriend has a small 3 rai (~5000 m2) farm. Originally she only grew rice ... or rather some Myanmar people grew rice on her farm for a small amount of money. In the past 1.5 year my girlfriend transformed the farm to support our family. Now about 1 rai is used for rice (enough for our family) and the remainder is used for growing fish, fruits (bananas, coconuts, mangos, ...) and vegetables (Thai aubergines, long beans, cauliflower, spring unions, ...). Having a greater variety of crops also protects a bit from bad harvests or bad market prices. It makes one more anti-fragile. In the future we should probably buy some land to grow the farm to about 5 rai and from then on we should be able to fully support ourselves with fish, fruit and veggies. I think Jon Jandai has some nice ideas on setting up a small scale farm [0]. --- [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2eoQyYoUww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2eoQyYoUww