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Comment on It is very therapeutic to garden, though.

FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

This article about the study:

Aragón conducted a study on farm productivity of more than 4,000 farming households in Uganda over a five-year period. The study considered farm productivity based on land, labour and tools as well as yields per unit area of cultivated land. His findings suggested that even though yields were higher for smaller farms, farm productivity was actually higher for larger farms. Similar research in Peru, Tanzania and Bangladesh supported these findings.

And then the Actual Study HERE:

What explains these divergent findings? Answering this question is important given its consequential policy implications. If small farms are indeed more productive, then policies that encourage small landholdings (such as land redistribution) could increase aggregate productivity (see the discussion in Collier and Dercon, 2014).

We argue that these divergent results reflect the limitation of using yields as a measure of productivity. Our contribution is to show that, in many empirical applications, yields are not informative of the size-productivity relationship, and can lead to qualitatively different insights. Our findings cast doubts on the interpretation of the inverse yield-size relationship as evidence that small farms are more productive, and stress the need to revisit the existing empirical evidence.

Meaning the author is advocating for more scrutiny against the claim and against land redistribution as a policy stance with the intention of increasing productivity.

First, farmers have small scale operations (the average cultivated area is 2.3 hectares).

The definition of “small family farms” in this case is on average more than 5 acres, which would absolutely be under the umbrella of subsidized industrial agriculture in developed nations.

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LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
5 acres is miniscule compared to conventional agriculture, at least in the US. So these aren’t backyard gardens but they are likely quite different from agribusiness as well.

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- FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  If you think 5 acres on average isn’t subsidized or industrialized then I challenge you to try it out of your own pocket: fertilize with shovels, till with a hoe, water and pest control without anything but hand pumps or windmills, reap the harvest with a scythe.
  
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  - LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I don’t know why you’re assuming small farms need to be worked with medieval technology—that’s not what I’m saying at all. What I am saying is that 5 acre farms are far smaller than typical for modern agribusiness, and the differences in management are enormous. And I’ve actually worked on a farm that was 8 acres and we did much (though not all) of the labor by hand.
    
    The average US farm is just under 500 acres. It’s totally different to grow food on that scale.
    
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    FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You don’t know why Industrialized farming is Industrialized? Are you for real, right now?
    
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  - Perhapsjustsniffit@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    We do all by hand on a 1/2 acre of mixed veg. We feed our family of five and sell our extras. All the work is done by two adults. 5 acres would be insane and we are hard workers. I can’t imagine that size without a tractor.
    
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    Hule@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Wait, 5 acres wouldn’t be all vegetables! Fruit trees, grains, grassland all spread in time so you can work on them when your vegetables don’t need attention.
    
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  - enbyecho@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Absolute nonsense. Hyperbole is not helping your argument.
    
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mozz@mbin.grits.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yeah, that's why I included "per unit of land." It is in practice a little more complex, and a lot of times the smaller farms are more labor-intensive.

My opinion is that modern farming is efficient enough that we can very obviously sustain the farmer, and sell the food at a reasonable price, and it all works -- the only reason this is even complicated at all and we have to talk about optimizing for labor (certainly in 1st-world farms) is that we're trying to support a bloodsucking managerial class that demands six-figure salaries for doing fuck-all, and subsistence wages for the farmers and less than that for farmworkers, and stockholder dividends, and if we just fixed all that bullshit then the issue would be land productivity and everything would be fine.

But yes, in terms of labor productivity it's a little more complex, and none of the above system I listed is likely to change anytime soon, so that's fair.

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