Listening to your report on investors buying farmland, I was deeply impressed by Gary Blumenthal's willingness to demonstrate his ignorance of both agriculture and the economy.
He tells us that "half of all production in the U.S. comes from just 34,000 farms." This says nothing about the relative efficiency of farms with respect to size, it only tells us the status quo, as though mere existence is an indicator of efficiency.
Looking at the data from the USDA census, we find that the most productive farms are small farms with production rapidly falling off as acreage increases. And any positive production on large farms is based on fudging the numbers. If you consider that on these farms it takes an average nine calories of energy to produce one calorie of food crop, you quickly realise that the energy intensive, poorly yielding large farm does not have a future.
Furthermore, traditional peasant systems, elements of which I use in the systems I design, normally require little input in terms of time and energy. Assuming there is a tradition of sustainable agriculture in the region, peasant agriculture is not arduous. What is genuinely disastrous is the repeat of England's Enclosure which is currently being played out across the Third World. It does not "maximise human potential" to force people off the land and into shanty towns to become $4-a-day sweatshop workers.Considering that people like Gary Blumenthal are going to have increasing say over farm administration, my advice to listeners as a designer of sustainable agriculture systems is to start to forgo your flowerbeds and grow as much of your own food as possible.
Douglas Barnes
President
EcoEdge Design Ltd.
