In the over-developed world ...
Micro-farming may not be a particularly good way to make one's living,
and it is often a *lousy* lifestyle.
Take the $60K gross income figure that has been bandied about for 2
acres worked by hand. I think it's significantly higher than most
people could realise, but let's use it. Deduct something like $3K per
acre for direct production expenses, plus another $1K for debt service
on the land. Assume two people working very full time for 9 months of
the year, and working a bit for the other 3 months. For the sake of
illustration, let's use 72 hrs/person-week in-season (six 12 hr days,
with Sunday off), and 10 hrs/person week off-season. Many people work
even more than this.
This results in 5840 hrs in-season, plus another 260 hrs off-season,
for a total of 6100 hours. This work is to be compensated by $53K net
before the "employer's" 7.65% share of the self-employment tax, or just
under $49K after that *part* of the tax. This puts things on a par with
employment off the farm, and works out to $8.02 per hour, with no
benefits.
I don't think that's anything to get excited about as far as hourly
compensation. I've been on quite a few micro-farms as an organic
inspector, and by August most of these farmers have what I call "The
Look" --- a hollowness and near-desperation in the eyes that can barely
wait for a really hard frost to put an end to it all for a few months.
Few micro-farmers I know make even minimum wage for their work. Maybe
I'm a "softie," but I'd way rather work 40 hrs per week at $11/hr than
80 hrs per week at $5.50. The divorce / break-up situation with
micro-farming families is not pretty.
=====
In the developing world ...
This is indeed the norm in many places I've worked, though I would not
always categorise it as a success. This is especially so when
micro-farmers concentrate on cash export crops to the detriment of
self-sufficiency. I've seen kids starving on micro-farms (kwashiorkor
in Colombia, for example), with widespread malnutrition elsewhere. In
countries where agrarian "reform" has eliminated primogeniture (such as
Bolivia) many "farms" are now below 1 acre, and simply are no longer
viable. The ejido system in much of Mexico was a disaster for the land,
which has now eroded to the point that it has trouble supporting anyone
(eg. Michoacan).
Many micro-farmers in the developing world do not have the ability to
make their land productive --- especially where agrarian "reform" broke
up larger holdings and distributed them to any and all peasants. In
Zimbabwe right now, productive white farmers are being driven off their
land by the government in the name of agrarian reform and racial
"equity." Do not be surprised if you hear stories of widespread hunger
in Zimbabwe within 10 years, maybe 5.
Don't draw from what I'm saying here that I am opposed to ordinary
people having access to land in the developing world. However, simply
plopping a peasant down on a small parcel and telling him it is now his
... has a pretty sorry track record.
One of the few examples of real success I've seen was in Lambayeque,
Peru, where after the agrarian "reforms" of 1968 had split up the most
successful haciendas, the peasants on two of them banded together and
hired the former owners back as manager and overseer. After some years
the peasants had come to understand how to maintain productivity on the
piece and continued under a centralised (but cooperative) management
structure. Nearby haciendas that ended up as numerous micro-farms in
the hands of the individual campesinos are generally deforested
disaster areas, to the extent that it has altered local climate.
Small *CAN* be good, but the idea that small is *automatically* better,
and that peasants are automatically noble does not fit well with
reality in either the developing or the over-developed world. We need
well-managed farms, of all sizes, and management ability is most
decidedly scale-neutral.
Bart Hall
Lawrence, Kansas
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