{"id":10343,"date":"2014-09-10T05:00:27","date_gmt":"2014-09-10T09:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=10343"},"modified":"2014-09-07T10:35:02","modified_gmt":"2014-09-07T14:35:02","slug":"on-small-vs-large-farms-yours-truly-in-the-washington-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/10343","title":{"rendered":"On Small vs. Large Farms: Yours Truly in the Washington Post"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><strong>Small, diversified farms are less efficient than large ones.<\/strong> Which means that food grown on them is more expensive. Marc Bellemare, an assistant professor in the University of Minnesota\u2019s department of applied economics, calls farmers market produce \u201cluxury goods,\u201d and Tim Griffin, director of the Agriculture, Food and Environment program at Tufts University\u2019s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, explains the dynamic simply: economy of scale. \u201cAs the farms get larger, it\u2019s easier to invest in labor-saving machinery, technology and specialized management, and production cost per unit goes down,\u201d he says. It\u2019s Econ 101.<\/p>\n<p>Even John Ikerd, professor emeritus of agriculture and applied economics at the University of Missouri and an outspoken advocate of the idea that small organic farms ought to feed the world \u2014 an idea Bellemare calls \u201cwishful thinking\u201d \u2014 acknowledges that we\u2019d need many more farmers to make that happen, and that food would be more expensive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>From an <a title=\"Small vs. Large: Which Size Farm is Better for the Planet?\" href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/lifestyle\/food\/small-vs-large-which-size-farm-is-better-for-the-planet\/2014\/08\/29\/ac2a3dc8-2e2d-11e4-994d-202962a9150c_story.html\" target=\"_blank\">article<\/a> in the <em>Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0last week.<\/p>\n<p>In the middle of July, I received an email from <a title=\"@TamarHaspel\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/TamarHaspel\" target=\"_blank\">Tamar Haspel<\/a>, who writes the Unearthed column about food for the <em>Washington Post<\/em>, and who is herself a farmer (she farms oysters on the coast of\u00a0Massachusetts). She wanted to talk about the inverse relationship between farm size and productivity, which I have written about both <a title=\"The Inverse Farm Size--Productivity Relationship: &quot;Proof&quot; that Smallholders Can Feed the World?\" href=\"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/2012\/10\/the-inverse-farm-size-productivity-relationship-is-not-proof-that-smallholders-can-feed-the-world\/\" target=\"_blank\">on this blog<\/a> and in a 2010 <a title=\"Barrett, Bellemare, and Hou (World Development, 2010)\" href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S0305750X09001168\" target=\"_blank\">article<\/a> in <em>World Development<\/em>.\u00a0The end result is the article I link to above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Small, diversified farms are less efficient than large ones. Which means that food grown on them is more expensive. Marc Bellemare, an assistant professor in&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/10343\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">On Small vs. Large Farms: Yours Truly in the Washington Post<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-2GP","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10343"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10347,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10343\/revisions\/10347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}