Again I doubt that if you are talking the same ground growing the same crop. No amount of intensive labor is going to increase yields of staple crops beyond what is achieved with machine farming with chemical weed control. The sited work achieves it's conclusions by comparing low production range land to truck gardens. Also they discard food sold as "commodities" or animal feed as somehow not being "Food".kenneal - lagger wrote:Large farms are more productive per person employed i.e they are most efficient at turning oil into food, hence cheaper. Small farms and gardens are more productive per acre than a large farm but more labour intensive, hence more expensive. Large farms produce mainly commodity crops such as grains and others mentioned above while small farms are better at producing vegetables. The old fashioned mixed farms were more productive and are more sustainable because they rely less on oil and gas based inputs.
The UN produced a report recently, referred to elsewhere on this site, which said that the future of food production in the world was small scale, organic agriculture. It provides food and work in one go.
Compare the yield of the suggested small farms worked by hand to the mile long lettuce fields of California's central valley growing the same crops and the results would be quite different.
Better yet take a section in Iowa and cut it into ten 64 acre small farms and compare it to the next section farmed as one field. same crop, same soil ,same weather. Then you would have an apples to apples ( or more likely a soybean to soybean) comparison.
Now I'm not against small farms as I own one. My topography makes it not suitable for large scale machine farming and I could grow all my own food on it if needed but even using state of the art methods I could never achieve yields per acre equal to big Ag as much of my land is steep enough to only be useful as grazing ground and wood lot. The gardens do do quite well on a square foot basis if I stay ahead of the weeds but If my labor is worth anything near minimum wage it's cheaper to buy produce at the market.
