In "Dispatches from the Fields," Ariane Lotti and Stephanie Ogburn, who are working on small farms in Iowa and Colorado this season, share their thoughts on producing real food in the midst of America's agro-industrial landscape.
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Should small-scale farmers who grow organically and sell locally or regionally be able to make a middle-class living with farming as their sole source of income?
I've always answered this question with a fervent "yes," at least from a philosophical perspective. But the answer to the follow-up question -- "do they?" -- is nearly always a resounding no.
Sure, there are exceptions. In Southwest Colorado, I live in an immature market for small-scale, local food, so farmers here are probably doing worse on the whole due to lack of market penetration. (When you live in a rural area with low population, you can't just sell to the top 1 or 2 percent of customers -- you really have to have a widespread appeal in order to lift sales, since your population base is so much smaller than if you were selling to an urban center. And that depth of customer base takes a long time to build.) So here, out of, say, 25 vegetable farmers I know selling at area markets, only one of them earns a full-time living from her farming occupation.
The reality is, it's really hard to make a living selling a low-end product that is easily replicable and requires a high quantity of labor, but, comparatively speaking, a low level of skill to produce. And food is a low-end product. Tomatoes at $3/lb, which is what they go for here, are cheap. Like it or not, small farmers locally and across the U.S. are selling a cheap product on a minuscule scale, which, anyway you look at it, is a failing business model.
This is a problem, and the small growers I know have a variety of solutions.
The most common solution I've seen to the difficulties of making a living while being a small farmer involves having a second source of income. Farmers work winter jobs, second jobs, and moonlight as writers, web designers, or other time-flexible occupations.
Another way to get by is to sell higher-end products that make the farmer more money per unit of input. My employer, Dragonfly Farms, sells value-added products to rich people in Telluride, Colo. My boss purchases fair-trade organic herbs and teas in bulk, blends the dry ingredients together (sometimes with herbs we grow) to create her own teas and herbal infusions, pours those blends into tins and sells these as loose leaf, one-of-a-kind teas. She also uses those bulk herbs to make a variety of non-food products, like bath teas, eye teas, and lavender dryer sheets. The profit margins on these products are much higher than those on the vegetables we produce with our own backbreaking labor, primarily because the raw materials for the teas and herb products are produced with cheap (albeit fair trade) labor in developing nations.
Other farmers have also jumped on the value-added bandwagon, noting that fruits like apples, tomatoes, and grapes in portable form (sauce, wine) sell for significantly more than the raw material per pound price, and people pay more for items like goat milk when it comes concentrated into a soap.
Still another contingent of farmers have upped production, noting that if you sell a heaping ton of food, even at low prices, you can make some money. This comes at a cost, though -- when you raise production to sell, say, 30,000 lbs of food per season at an average price of $3/lb (lettuce sells for slightly more, zucchini for slightly less), you have to have more hands to harvest and wash all that food so it's ready to sell to restaurants and at your two Saturday markets. Of course, if you have more workers you spend more money on labor, so the people you hire have to be cheap laborers. This is the model followed, at the largest scale, by places like Earthbound Farm.
Organic farming is no different from conventional farming in this way -- if farmers make the decision to make money by upping the scale of their production, they must minimize their labor costs so that each additional unit of production is more profitable than if they were just growing what they could produce with their own labor. Notably, "small-scale" vegetable farms that are really making money with this direct-to-customer service are often quite large, and rely significantly on their cheap labor to make their operation possible.
And finally, there are niche producers, those who make products like artisanal cheeses, organic cut flowers, or truffles. Based on my own observations, however, and also according to a recent New York Times article, even those farmers haven't been able to drop their day jobs.
Farmers who have chosen not to grow larger, like Torrey Reade, who dropped her Wall Street career to work on a farm, often live at the poverty line, in terms of income. Reade, a Harvard Business School graduate, is hardly ignorant of business profitability principals. But she doesn't seem to be able to make money doing small-scale farming; she instead made a choice stay small and stay poor. The article about her notes that her vegetable sales were crowded out by larger organic operations, and while she still grows vegetables for personal consumption, she turned to beef, lambs, and oats, which now keep her afloat, but barely.
In a world where the dominant economic model is "get big or get out," small farmers, no matter how diversified or creative they are, don't have much of a chance to make a full-fledged living growing food. As a farmer, it seems difficult, nearly impossible, to stay rooted in the desire to stay small enough to farm alone or with a partner if you want to make money. Note that small-scale conventional farming is a livelihood that essentially does not exist, and that the existence of small organic farms is more a function of ideology than a reflection of market functions.
At any rate, while there are success stories here and there, for growers trying to stay small and sell mostly fresh fruits and vegetables, these success stories are very few and far between, and they depend on a precise combination of pre-existing capital, smart marketing, intelligent land and crop management, and hard work put into locating good markets. And even then, it's the rare farm that manages to be the sole income source for a family.
In this economy, if you want to be a small farmer, it's probably more practical to assume it will be an income-boosting hobby rather than your primary source of income, even if it is what you spend the majority of your time doing. I've run into this reality repeatedly over the time period that I've been engaged in the alternative food movement, and as a result, I've come to think of small-scale farming more as one of a diverse set of economic activities practiced by an individual or couple than as a primarily income-generating career occupation.
Maybe I'm getting worn down by the dominant economic system. And I'm certainly starting to think of market farming as being no different from running any small business in America -- from a financial standpoint, if the business owner wants to keep her operation small, it's by and large a losing proposition, and only one worth entering for quality-of-life reasons.
The exception is if one offers a high-end product that rich people will pay a lot for, thus enabling one to keep quantities small, quality high, and the business local and independent. Thus, someone entering small-scale farming, and expecting to stay small, should either develop a value-added product that she can sell at a high margin, or expect to be poor yet happy and work additional jobs to make ends meet.
Although the local foods movement does seem to be thriving, I haven't seen an equivalent jump in the percentage of small farmers being able to base their entire livelihood on their farming occupation. I guess I'm glad there are a lot of people out there who are willing to farm on a small scale because it's what they believe in, but I'm also sad that it's so hard to make money farming. I'm also curious if others, possibly those living near higher-end markets like San Francisco or New York City, have seen an increase in farmers making a livable wage as the number of local consumers and the prices they pay for fresh produce rise.
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Comments
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robertogreen Posted 5:16 am
26 Aug 2008
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salemguy Posted 5:47 am
26 Aug 2008
Off the top, value-added products that can handle shipping may need to be sold on the web, hmm?
Sun-dried tomatoes and fruits? Processed grains? Seeds?
I've recently seen vegie chips, made from dried and ground produce, baked up like potato chips. Great snacks, better than greasy potato chips, to be sure. Seems like a new niche.
These may be silly suggestions as they rely on remote transport, but I'm at a loss to suggest what more might be done in remote locations. Others may have better suggestions.
Fresh organic produce depends on local market access in your model, so it seems like being near population centers... as an "urban edge" organic grower, or grower coop, is an essential early step in organic transition -- but not a solution for remote farms.
Where I am, Willamette Valley, OR, small organic farms have been able to bring produce to market at competitive prices. Local demand has grown well, based on supply, with farmers markets, food coops, CSA's and restaurant sales. We can't rely on price premiums.
You've eloquently captured a set of key issues. We have to get "get big or get out" off our backs. We have to figure out how to get cheap, factory-farmed or imported produce out of local markets, it seems.
In my experience, most conventional, small farmers now rely on other work to make a living, so your comments are not unique to organic growers. I expect the need for other income will continue for all small farmers for some time.
Organic farming generally relies on less petrol inputs... maybe we're just going to have to let the cost of petrol drive agribusiness and their excessive petrol dependencies out of our food supply?
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salemguy Posted 5:49 am
26 Aug 2008
Used to be a lot of food was grown at home, hmm?
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mihan Posted 6:11 am
26 Aug 2008
In other news, I just tried your honey semifreddo, and find it a tad too sweet but delicious with toasted almonds.
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MAD MAC Posted 6:23 am
26 Aug 2008
So that you can have expensive, organically grown food??? Look, for those who want organic, fine. But for those who don't have a problem with big farms, and don't want to spend their remaining disposable income on organic food - not fine.
This is another post in line with the thinking of trying to make "Green" agenda items compulsory on everyone. Guaranteed to create more and more enemies of the movement.
Victory in Pattani
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Pangolin Posted 8:56 am
26 Aug 2008
It doesn't take a Yale education to figure out that when land costs, taxes, input costs and labor put into farming produce exceed the labors value in caloric or nutritional outputs there is a major problem. If you were out in the field looking at a withered tomato vine you wouldn't look in the barn for the problem but at what's limiting the vines ability to thrive. You would check the vine from leaf to root for signs of a problem.
In the case of the tomato farmer and the hired hand listed above the parasitic costs are in the same places. Energy costs and the military-industrial-banking hegemonies tax and price whallop on every working and resting hour. We tax the heck out of the working man to support overseas wars that benefit him not one farthing. Then we tax small properties and exempt large ones. Then we give the money to the already wealthy and exempt the profits they make from not working from taxes.
In a recent year the subsidy paid for my county's rice crop, excluding the cost of providing them subsidized water service and roads, exceeded the value of the crop. The rice farmer's kids roar around town in massive pick-up trucks provided free courtesy of a federal government tax credit and blow tax-free clouds of agricultural diesel smoke into the air. When they're not fishing or duck-hunting that is.
Try as you might to seperate environmental issues from labor and poverty reform you can't. It's not possible to tease out one tiny issue at a time and fix it. We waste resources on futile cycling and reward that waste greatly and consider honest labor and produciton unworthy of reward or resources.
Sounds like cancer to me. Eventually you cut it out or the host dies.
Put the Carbon Back
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Jonas Posted 9:18 am
26 Aug 2008
In case you didn't know, a new big study just debunks this stupid myth.
Study: Organic food not more nutritional.
Organic food is not more nutritional, healthy, sustainable or real than dirty fake agrobusiness food.
This debate is too important for it to become burdened by cheap language.
To me, personally, real food is food that is both nutritious and cheap enough to fight hunger amongst millions of people. Organic food is totally fake in this respect, because it is expensive and only for the well-off people who belong to the bourgeois classes of opulent, wealthy societies.
Agrobusiness and the global food system is perhaps the most efficient way to use resources, yielding the biggest social benefits on a global scale.
And the fact that small farmers get pushed out of the market is not that dramatic. Because it allows larger farmers to concentrate their means and make farming far more efficient.
This can best be seen in developing countries where people are migrating from the rural areas to the cities. They abandon their miserable farming lives, to become wealthier in cities. And all the while, larger farmers take over their land to use it in a far more efficient way. It's the biggest win-win in the history of human organisation.
The move from miserable rural livelihoods, which lead to high fertility rates, and towards cities, with their low fertility rates, is good for the planet. The big farmers stepping in, guarantee the food security needed to maintain declining populations in cities.
When this 'long cycle' is taken through to its finality, the end result is wealthy people, who have few children, and enough money to invest in luxury ideas like organic farming.
But thinking that you can use these thoroughly bourgeois ideas as a model for the developing countries who are only beginning to go through this long cycle, is of course entirely naive.
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Bud Dingler Posted 9:23 am
26 Aug 2008
i make 100% of my living at farmers markets and doing wholesale. its REALLY hard to make an average living.
i get pissed off most of the time reading the smoking dope posts and comments on this web site.
for once a post I agree with.
its a continuum with industrial food on one end and ridiculously priced yuppie food on the other. mark my words we WILL marry the two ends of the spectrum if we want progress. gmo or biotech will bring some solutions to the table eventually and make it possible to grow sustainably with low fertilizer and chem inputs.
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Jonas Posted 9:37 am
26 Aug 2008
In fact, I naively wish that all people on the planet could become wealthy Yups and eat organic, even if it's not better for the environment or for their health, but simply because it's hip.
That would be great.
What is more, many Africans are lucky that they can produce baby maize, luxury flowers, exotic fruits, etc... for that very same Yuppie market. It has pulled them out of poverty.
But then there's this locavore bunch out there, who want to ruin this opportunity for these poor Africans, without thinking of the social consequences.
In any case, good luck with your organic honey. Make sure that you hire a designer to design a flashy bottle made from recycled glass. This sells better in the yuppie market. Hip, eco-correct packaging is important, but you already knew this.
I have absolutely nothing against bourgeois farming concepts, but they are what they are: a niche for well-off people in well-off markets.
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raphsperry Posted 9:38 am
26 Aug 2008
I think it is fair to look at government policy as a major shaper of the market that market that maker small farmers non-competitive. Government is typically seen as the appropriate actor to redress market failures from anti-trust to externalities. Markets do not correct themselves from these failures, and do not function efficiently without appropriate regulation.
For instance, in terms of externalities, small-scale and organic farmers are protecting public resources such as genetic diversity , providing barriers to spread of pests (as opposed to mono-cropping), preventing pollution caused by CAFOs, and avoiding the fertilizer loading that leads to ocean dead zones from agricultural runoff. In short, small-scale and organic farmers are good stewards of the environment. Instead of finding ways to reward small-scale organic farmers for these public services, public subsidies flow to the largest conglomerates that cause these problems because they have more political influence. I suspect that if the scales were balanced, then the cheapest way to obtain the level of stewardship needed to have a long-term sustainable landscape would be to have (small- and medium-scale) farmers on the land growing crops for food while also doing good maintenance.
Also, organic farmers' products promote public health, while many of their competitors' products undermine public health, which ultimately leads to a very expensive health-case system (although private, for-profit management also contributes a lot) and the other public burdens of an overweight and unhealthy population. It's not that large-scale, corporate-owned mega-farms can't provide healthy food and sustainable land management, but that, under their leadership, we have actually moved in the opposite direction. So in the process of (hopefully) moving to sustainable farming and land management, it is not reasonable to trust large-scale operators to write the rules. I can only assume it's people like Stephanie who would actually take not only their personal interest into account but the broader public interest when thinking about the issues of food and land.
Raphael Sperry
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Pangolin Posted 10:25 am
26 Aug 2008
It makes the oil companies rich but I suspect that it isn't doing a damn thing for Kenya since the explosion in oil prices. Your people will have to consider fixing their own problems with their own resources. I suspect organic farming, for all it's flaws in first world economics, works very well in third world economies.
I'm not talking about just dropping seeds in dirt but treating the health of the soil as an investment and the crop as a dividend.
Put the Carbon Back
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MAD MAC Posted 3:44 pm
26 Aug 2008
No it doesn't. That's why so many third world people are malnourished, why some die of malnutrition, etc.
Obviously you have not spent a lot of time in Africa, or you would not write something so ridiculous. Without external food aide millions of Africans would die right now.
Victory in Pattani
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Valentine Posted 1:33 am
27 Aug 2008
Considering livelihood in this more integrated way also then includes considering the quality of life of those rural-to-urban migrants Jonas mentions; I won't deny widespread rural poverty (or the role of bourgeois lifestyles in exacerbating it), but I also don't agree that we can dismiss agrarian & rural ways of life out of hand so quickly; for one thing, the post-migration quality of life of many of these migrants is pretty questionable, and the employment situation when they reach growing (often mega-)cities (especially after they pass through the desirable young-quick worker demographic) is far from win-win. (How many people dispossessed from their farmland, for example, become "wealthy people, who have few children, and enough money to invest in luxury ideas like organic farming"?)
When the political economy Stephanie describes (and Jonas kind of lampoons) seems overwhelming, it may be useful to remember why the food movement has been so attractive to so many people: by providing us a view into these problems of the global food economy, the food system not only illuminates how the labor issues Stephanie describes in rural Colorado are linked to geopolitics and the ethics of more global social questions, but the same food system also provides entry points for activism and highlights the agency we do have in the face of these daunting problems, as Stephanie and Ariane have been demonstrating and documenting for us in their exploration of "the Fields."
These explorations are helpful for the rest of us in figuring out what kind of aspirations we share -- and also in identifying differences of perspective (differences, I might suggest, that we consider with a bit more self-consciousness: many of us are aware that scientific opinion still differs on why organic farming may be valuable, and while the Society of Chemical Industry report you cite provides an interesting view on pesticides, it's not very focused on, say, micronutrients or long-term soil health, so probably not a large or legitimate enough study to be able to completely invalidate claims for the value of organics).
Thanks for this valuable gift -- this gift economy of discourse would be one of those aspects of quality of life that's hard to account in the calculus of mere income.
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Bud Dingler Posted 3:48 am
27 Aug 2008
what does that tell you?
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MAD MAC Posted 3:59 am
27 Aug 2008
Victory in Pattani
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amazingdrx Posted 4:32 am
27 Aug 2008
The coop invests in store sized freezers and food processing and storage equipment powered by wind, solar, and biogas/organic ag. Sale of power back to the utility company paying the coop's bills and long term. low interest debt.
Substitute the coop for the grocery corporation. But still have small scale capitalists, the growers and even consumers, with coop technology and finance help to install renewebale energy at their home locations.
I favor a high tech addition to organic farming that could increase productivity by vastly reducing hard labor. Namely planting, cultivating, fertilizing, watering, insect removing, harvesting robots. Small, solar electric battery powered.
So that just 20,000 poiunds of 3 dollar per pound organic veggies would provide a fair income. If ag coops said build them, would university extension agencies get together with engineering departments and get this organic ag re-evolution going?
PC controlled robots, the computer adequate could make them work. all the favorite organic anto pest planting tactics could be programmed right on the screen. A pest repellant plant here and there. Perfect watering, perfecting fertilizing, absolute weed control, mulching them into green manure daily.
Get some geek students to work on the farm Stephanie! take them away from their militaristic video games. hehey. One of those college/high school engineering contests comes to mind.
No more thousands of dollars per month equipment, fertilizer, irrigation, chemical payments for farmers? Maybe someday.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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featherfish81 Posted 5:27 am
27 Aug 2008
And the fact that small farmers get pushed out of the market is not that dramatic. Because it allows larger farmers to concentrate their means and make farming far more efficient.
This can best be seen in developing countries where people are migrating from the rural areas to the cities. They abandon their miserable farming lives, to become wealthier in cities. And all the while, larger farmers take over their land to use it in a far more efficient way. It's the biggest win-win in the history of human organisation.
The move from miserable rural livelihoods, which lead to high fertility rates, and towards cities, with their low fertility rates, is good for the planet. The big farmers stepping in, guarantee the food security needed to maintain declining populations in cities.
I'm sorry, but I think the long line of farmers who have sold their family land to agrobusinesses for pennies on the dollar and now have no way to make a livelihood would disagree with you. Sure, farm products are now cheaper for us, but illegal immigration is fluorishing. As someone else said, it's all connected.
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Jason D Scorse Posted 5:44 am
27 Aug 2008
Here in CA many small farmers do pretty well because of the much greater demand for fresh food so it depends on where you are a lot
Whether or not organic food is healthier or not people pay a premium for it and it sure seems to taste better to me- I buy 90% organic but will buy some conventional as well if it's fresh- the allure of farmers markets to me is the freshness and sense of community.
Which brings me to my final point- all of this is based on voluntary actions and supply and demand- in areas where people demand high-quality produce and are willing to pay a premium farmers can make a decent living and live the lives they want to- in areas without this demand they can't- people can change occupations, move, or whatever- the point is that at least here in a rich country we get a choice.
Stephanie- I hope your business grows and you will one day be able to make good money doing what you love, but it's not guaranteed and that's the risks we take as you clearly know- again, I commend you for trying and hope you succeed.
We need to focus on the root causes of problems.
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Stephanie Ogburn Posted 8:32 am
27 Aug 2008
Stephanie
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Jon Rynn Posted 10:58 am
27 Aug 2008
You see, the rich countries destroyed the ecosystems and traditional farming systems of most of the now "developing" countries, and continue to do so when it's profitable, but that doesn't seem to be part of your analysis. No, we start with were we are now, and of course, blame the people who would like to see the situation improved, like people who want to buy food from a farm that is not destroying its ecosystem.
Which brings me to the main point I want to state here, that the current global agricultural system has been destroying the soil and water resources on which any agricultural system rests. I'm reading a book called "Dirt" by David R. Montgomery about soil that I would strongly recommend anyone concerned about these issues read. The destruction of the ecosystems on which farming is based has been going on as long as there has been agriculture, and now, with a globally linked system, it threatens to leave humanity without the natural capital needed to feed most of the population.
So organic farming is not simply about somebody's preferences, I would argue that it will be necessary for humanity's survival, both in developing and rich countries. And there is plenty of evidence that small-scale farmers care for their soil and water much more than big farmers do (please read some Frances Moore Lappe if you are not familiar with this concept).
Obviously big farm subsidies should be cut, EU subsidies that kill developing countries' agricultural sectors should be cut, but more than that, considering the huge subsidies Big Farming has received over these many decades, it will take billions subsidized to small-scale organic farmers, here and around the world, to reorient the global agricultural system into something that won't collapse in the next few decades.
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Wolverine Posted 7:09 am
28 Aug 2008
Jon, I wouldn't bother arguing with people like Mac and Jonas about organic agriculture. They've both shown themselves to be enemies of the natural world when it comes to this issue. Mac is an enemy of the natural world in general, as can be seen from his post claiming something to the effect that nature is not our friend and will kill us.
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amazingdrx Posted 7:23 am
28 Aug 2008
But let the individual farmers remain capitalists, then use coops (non-governmental socialism) as a substitute for the things agribizz does now. Food processong, storage, and marketing. These are more efficient with some mass production and facilities combined for all the members to use.
A full time, year round farmers market that competes with the grocery chains would be the goal. And subscription sales to consumer coop members. it's a good business model.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Pangolin Posted 7:49 am
28 Aug 2008
If we could convert the subsidy from per acre or per unit of produce to tons of carbon sequestered over baseline that could be the change needed. Of course fields would have to be sampled as a baseline and tested periodically after but a good soil database would help production also.
Put the Carbon Back
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Jon Rynn Posted 7:55 am
28 Aug 2008
Ag coops have a long and inspiring history (including syndicalist Spain in the 1930s), and might even be a way out for the problems of today's small farmers that Stephanie described -- there were certainly some huge agricultural movements in the late 19th century, such as the Grange, although I'm not familiar with that history.
Thanks for the advice Wolverine, although frankly I use comments sometimes to try out arguments, and Mad Mac and Jonas are good foils.
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amazingdrx Posted 8:04 am
28 Aug 2008
Doing great so far, 10 yard signs ready to deploy, out of maybe 30 respondents. These call lists are raw, lots of dissconected numbers.
Yeah I like the coop model, it blends the collective efficiency with good old small farm capitalism. Government socialism, not so good. Coop socialism, better.
I'm learning a lot from the negative calls here, just like we learn from the negative commenters here. Keep it up mac and jonas. hehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Russ Posted 8:20 am
28 Aug 2008
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