In the "you must be deaf category" is the author of this story that appears on Salon and which has been commented upon by Forbes:
What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living
People say we're "rich in other ways," but that doesn't fix the ugly fact that most farms are unsustainable
Oh really. Where were you living? In a box?
Anyone who has looked at this topic and not been predisposed to be completely and totally enamored with the concept of modern "homesteading" would have been well aware of the fact that these small scale agricultural enterprises are not economic in a modern economy. I've blogged about it here:
For that matter, the economics are tough for people who simply want to get into agriculture, but are unrealistic about a 17th Century agrarian model of farming. I've blogged about it here:
And its not just me. Did she check out Kevin Ford's posts on the New Catholic Land Forum, as he slipped slowly into having to abandon his farm? What about Devin Rose's blog as he tried the same thing and also failed? Hmmm?
Apparently not.
Let's look a little closer at this.
My farm is located in the foothills of Northern California, 40 miles east of Sacramento on 10 acres my partner, Ryan, and I lease from a land trust. In the heat of summer, my fields cover the bronzed landscape like a green quilt spread over sand. Ten acres of certified organic vegetables trace the contours of a small valley floor. Tomatoes glow crimson. Flowers bloom: zinnias, lavender, daisies. Watermelons grow fat, littering the ground like beach balls.
Shoot, this isn't even the classic American homestead acreage model.
19th Century Nebraska homestead. This would be a prosperous homestead. A married couple with at least three, and probably at least four if not six children (the two adult men are possibly hands). Nice house, and a windmill. They've farmed right up to the house. They're on at least 40 acres, if not more.
No, this is something like the Italian peasant model.
Italian peasants on their way to Tivoli. They're riding a donkey. The donkey is carrying their product. In other words, they're poor farmers, probably on a small acreage, taking their product to a big city. They'd probably have preferred to be in the United States farming on 40 acres.
And, in the spirit of getting older and crankier, let's be blunt. By "partner" here, I'm going to assume that the author means romantic partner without the benefit of marriage. I'm not going to lecture anyone on this, but farming is a really hard, stressful, way to make a living even in the best of times. Ryan and Jaclyn would be better off being married partners as at some point any kind of business partnership is pretty darned stressed under in this line of work, let alone a romantic one that has no legal or formal constraints. But this all says a lot, really. A hip, cool, couple living the hip cool lifestyle in a hip cool location doing the hip cool organic thing. Of course this is doomed to failure. There's a reason that farming has never been hip and cool. It may be romantic, in the classic definition of the word, and I'll admit to feeling that way about it. But hipsters need not apply as it isn't hip. At some point, when somebody decides its not that hip and cool to be working hard in poverty, the romance of this informal arrangement may very well wear immediately off, and that's the end of it, irrespective of the destructive consequences of that.
The point is that this occupation has been engaged in by human beings for millennia and the basic nature of it, right down to daily living, is highly defined as its been through the refiners fire. If a person isn't aware of that, and more if they intend to reinvent major aspects of it, they better have analyzed that down to the elemental level.
As a further aside, on using terms, the author of this item says she "owns" the farm. No you don't. You lease it. You are a tenant. Don't fool yourself. Owning is owning. Leasing is leasing.
Wife of tenant farmer on the Texas Panhandle, and therefore a farmer herself. This farm would appear to be considerably larger than 10 acres.
Son of tenant farmer, 1930s, Oklahoma. At this guys age he was undoubtedly in the Army a few years later, and probably never went back to being a tenant farmer.
Now, a lot of operations lease land. But to lease 100% of your acreage, save in family operations, does not equate with "owning" anything.
So, back to the acreage.
So you are committed to an economic outflow on land you don't own, and on an acreage that doesn't even meet the American agrarian standard of 40 acres. Freed slaves wanted 40 acres, not 10, for a reason. No wonder that Forbes deemed this farm to be "Medieval". To quote from Forbes:
There’s a really delightful little essay over at Salon about the trials and tribulations of someone trying to make a living as a small scale farmer. Her point being that despite the vast amounts of labour that she and her partner throw at their 10 acres they’re not in fact able to make anything much of a living. This is entirely true of course: their income looks to be about that of a prosperous peasant farmer in the Middle Ages. And that’s the delightful part of the essay, although it’s not quite noted. Simply because the economics of all this is implacable. If you’re trying to live off the produce of 10 acres then your maximum income is going to be the value of what can be produced off 10 acres: not a lot. This is why the Middle Ages, when 90% of the population were trying to live off such plots (often a little larger, 20-30 acres was about right for an English villein) were so darn poor by our standards. This is also why other areas of the world, where people are living off such small parcels of land, are poor today.
That's about right.
Farming, circa 1330.
Save it doesn't even rise up, or down, to that standard.
The author notes that she heard an interview of people entering this lifestyle, and I've seen quite a few recently about it myself. I think I've linked some in here. Here's what she noted, which related to the point immediately above.
What the reporter didn’t ask the young farmers was: Do you make a living? Can you afford rent, healthcare? Can you pay your labor a living wage? If the reporter had asked me these questions, I would have said no.
Duh!
Farm incomes have not had rough parity with urban incomes since 1919. And that's on conventional production farms. What does that mean? Well, what it means is that the level of income for participation in the economy has been below the average urban income since that time. In practical terms, that means there's less money around for buying that X Box, or that new television, or healthcare.
And with only 10 acres are you seriously suggesting you pay labor? People farming on 10 acres don't have paid labor, and they never have. Labor on a small farm is husband and wife, father and mother, uncle, aunt and cousins, and close friends whom you are going to help next. Not you, "partner" and paid labor.
And with only 10 acres are you seriously suggesting you pay labor? People farming on 10 acres don't have paid labor, and they never have. Labor on a small farm is husband and wife, father and mother, uncle, aunt and cousins, and close friends whom you are going to help next. Not you, "partner" and paid labor.
Now, having said that, I'll note that on actual realistic farms and ranches, people often make do around this topic as people are capable of doing and acquiring in a way that urban people are not. More realistic agrarians, quasi agrarians, and conventional farmers are well aware of that. They fix their own machinery, do things in a manner that is cheaper than a more electronic and mechanized manner, grow much of their own food, etc. Indeed, one of the real changes in post 1930 agriculture has been a push away from subsistence in farming and I feel that's bad.
But if you are looking at ten acres, that's something else entirely. If you are a market farmer, you are on a market garden, not a farm. Or, as Salon says, you are a Medieval tenant. You aren't even a Russian pre revolution tenant, which at least had the commune to rely on.
And that means you are going to have to live like a Medieval tenant. No income for health care? No kidding. You'll have to rely on yourself, your family (although given your "partner" situation, you don't have a family like they had) and your community, all of whom live in the same tiny village and go to the same small church, all of which matters to them above all else. You don't have that social network. They were eating what they produced, caught and killed and that alone, and therefore had a diet that varied little compared to what you are used to. They didn't think themselves hip and cool as they drank fair trade coffee as they didn't drink coffee, or tea, or soda, at all. They drank beer, and they brewed it and consumed it in massive quantities as the water was lethal. And they lived close to death.
Old Believer village in Alaska. Yes, they live on little plots (I don't know how little), and they fish as well (they don't try to be limited). But they're not living near the big city and they're an isolated, non hip, group living an intentionally isolated life in a distinct ethnic and religious community with defined community beliefs, relationships and networks. You, dear hip and cool neo homesteader, are not.
Now, I'll confess to agrarian leanings. But a person has to be both aware and have some sense of history before they leave their hip coolness and try to engage in the world's oldest fixed labor. Forbes is correct, ten acre plots haven't been viable since the Medieval period, and even then most farmers were tenants in most of Europe. There's a reason that European farmers immigrated anywhere, North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and even Africa, to do the exact same occupation they were doing in Europe. . . farm. And that reason was land.
And there's a reason that all over Europe farmers, when they had a chance, wanted land reform. The Irish didn't keep the land lords when the English went, now did they? And up until 20 years ago farming remained the biggest business in Ireland. The English farmers struggled for and got their land after World War One. French farmers got it after the French Revolution. Everywhere you look, you'll see, if you look, that the thing farmers wanted was to own land, not till the landlords land on a tiny substance plot.
Sheesh.
Now, all this from a person who laments the inability of the average person to get into agriculture now, and would frankly like to see that changed. But at a certain point, you have to look at an ill thought out endeavor and shake your head. This isn't helping anyone, its confirming the opposite. This is going to fail and fail badly. Indeed, most homestead in the second half of the 19th Century and early 20th Century failed, but at least they were more realistic. Pie in the sky endeavors ignoring agriclutural history and agriculture's nature aren't helping anything.
And that's my problem with the neo homesteading movement in general.
