Last updated on May 1, 2011
One of my coauthors was in town all of last week, so the little time we didn’t spend working on our paper was spent tending to the students in the two classes I was teaching this semester. This explains why I haven’t blogged in almost a week.
Still, I have managed to bookmark everything that has happened to catch my eye last week, and so this week’s blogging will be a mixture of new and (one-week-) old items.
The first of these items was a post by Tufts University’s Parke Wilde discussing a report by Tim Wise, from the Global Development and Environment (GDAE) Institute.
In his report titled “Still Waiting for the Farm Boom: Family Farmers Worse Off Despite High Crop Prices,” Wise claims that US farmers are actually hurt by high food prices — a claim that I find difficult to believe, as does Wilde, who writes:
“There is a long tradition in US farm politics of telling stories about the plight of small farmers and then subtly slipping large family farms under the same umbrella, in order to pass subsidy policies that provide the greatest economic benefits for large farmers. It seems misdirected for GDAE to say (…) ‘these are not small farms’ when the data come precisely from USDA’s ‘small farm’ category, and other family farms are not tabulated. The sales cutoff of $250,000 will sound lucrative to many non-farm readers, who are accustomed to thinking about labor market income rather than sales, but these are quite small farm businesses that are ‘still waiting for the boom.’
Most mid-sized to large family farms, and especially most family-operated crop farms with 800-1,000 acres or more, are doing quite well when prices are high. I imagine that on reflection Wise would agree that farms on this scale were not the intended subject of his concern.”
In my view, this just goes to show that small farms, for all of their romantic appeal, are an oddity in an economy where technology has pushed agriculture toward greater mechanization and consolidation.