Rhrosty do step back from your ideology & take a proper look at things. While I agree completely, emotionally, to your preference to small family farms, I can't agree in practice.

We had a small orchard in Young during my last high school years. Now if you consider me, after school, stirring up some Bordeau mix on an old 44 gallon drum, ladling it into a knapsack spray, & going around sort of spraying the grapes & cherries is efficient, I'm afraid I don't. Loved it though, & the money. Dad paid me a bob an hour for my efforts. I saved enough for my bike from that.

Like most small orchards, the men were at work, as the farms just didn't earn a living, & us kids did the pruning, spraying & much of the picking. None of them exist today, they were amalgamated into bigger holdings or died from lack of care & fertiliser.

Even the bigger holdings, 20 acres of trees was big back then, only required one bad hail season, & they could not service the debt on the equipment & machinery they had bought to handle the "big" acreage, & went broke.

Farmers markets work well for unit dwellers, with weekends to fill, & retired farmers picking up some pin money, but they are not efficient. I agree it is great to get fresh fruit, rather than stuff after a year or more in controlled atmosphere storage, but it is time consuming shopping for the busy.

A hundred utes & small trucks all bringing small quantities to a central area is bad economics when one large truck could have brought it all.

I have watched them come & go around here, mostly go of course. The Hydroponics bloke is up for a mortgagee sale this month. A couple of unusual sever frosts put him out of production for about 5 weeks, & cost him a critical contract I think. Where the hell is that damn global warming when you need it?

The farmer's markets are great for the hobby farmer but are generally a rip off for the customers who really pay through the nose for a lot of the home made produce, particularly the organic stuff.
David

I wasn't talking about hobby farms Hasbeen, but something quite a lot larger.
And yes, plenty of over-leveraged farmers went broke due to sudden adverse conditions! And part of the risk when buying out the neighbors, via an increase in personal debt!
Dairy and wool farmers, largely due to government interference, [removing the guaranteed floor price], or stupidly selling out to foreign interests, for a once only fast buck!
Or because they were poorly advised!
I mean, go to any wind up sale, and there's usually half a dozen tractors etc, with the oldest still perfectly serviceable.
Had they been better advised, they would have paid some tax; soldiered on with still serviceable equipment; and then with the balance of the bounty, bought a few off farm investments.
Far better use of literal millions tied up in depreciating farm machinery. I mean, how many $40,000.00 rental houses, would a couple of million bought?
As for ideology Hasbeen, that's your bag mate; and has basically ruled your life, and made it impossible for you to adapt to changed circumstances!
All according to you and your focus on me, me, me, race horses and a triple bypass, life story!
And as always with poor ickle diddums, the common wage earner is to blame for asking too much, which is (according to you) why you went broke.
Others would have tried something else; like say, manufacturing made to order parts, for vintage cars, trucks and tractors etc; and sold via the direct market/internet.
There's an increasing market for made to order parts, and many can now be printed by (a) 3D printer(s)!
A mate bought a parts transference book, and found that just by looking it up, he could substitute, other manufacturer's parts, in most older american cars, which were once the most popular in the Antipodes.
And I'm sure a determined search with the offer of money, would turn up the specs for many older engine etc parts, enough that any so called engineer, could re-manufacture them.
Rhrosty.

This article is drivel. Modern agricultural techniques have contributed enormously to rising living standards in both the developed and the developing world, both by sustaining increases in food production ahead of the rate of population growth, and by driving down the relative price of food.

Thinkabit is right – improving life expectancy and the comfort and security of the modern western lifestyle disprove any claim that we are poisoning or malnourishing ourselves.

From Wikipedia:

‘Between 1950 and 2000, during the so-called "second agricultural revolution of modern times", U.S. agricultural productivity rose fast, especially due to the development of new technologies. For example, the average amount of milk produced per cow increased from 5,314 pounds to 18,201 pounds per year (+242%), the average yield of corn rose from 39 bushels to 153 bushels per acre (+292%), and each farmer in 2000 produced on average 12 times as much farm output per hour worked as a farmer did in 1950.’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_productivity

Great stuff! The thesis and information is so self-evidently true I find it hard to believe that anyone can argue against it.

Meanwhile why not check out a report titled:
Risk Expert: GMO's Could Destroy The Global Ecosystem.
It is a report on a new prediction made by the author of the intriguing book The Black Swan:The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Taleb is both a an essayist/philosopher and a statistician.

Plus check out these two sites which provide leading edge information on the obviously inevitable negative effects of GMO "foods" and the herbdicides etc that go with them - especially Roundup.

http://gmo.mercola.com
http://www.i-sis.org.uk

Various people rail against the obvious threat of big government, but dont seem to mind the fact that the global food system either now is, or is rapidly becoming under the control of a handful of private corporations. Most of which actively sponsor ALEC, the activities of which are revealed on this site: http://www.alecexposed.org

Anyone who pretends that these outfits are in any way interested in feeding the billions of mal-nourished and starving human beings on this planet is seriously deluded.

Rhrosty you have the totally wrong idea about me. The most I have ever earned is the average wage. I had some great, very serious & interesting development jobs in the plastic industry as a young bloke, but they weren't all that well paid. I thought I was doing pretty well, until I actually discovered what the average wage was.

I went into my own business to give me the time for motor racing, not because it was terribly profitable. At no stage have I ever gone broke, although I have salvaged a couple of companies that were broke.

Interestingly it was similar to what you were recommending, except it was in the latest technology, which no one else was servicing. I offered exchange, McPherson struts, hydraulic power steering, steering racks, & power brakes, when all these were new.

I had to build up a huge stock of stuff to exchange, so that is where any profits went. It was a horrible business, & I was glad to get out of it, but the stock I'd built up did buy the yacht. Like my cars, it was worn out & cheap, & I spent 2 years rebuilding it too.

After work I averaged 5 hours a night, 4 nights a week building & maintaining my racing cars, until I became good enough to be given drives in top cars. I could never afford to pay for the work.

Unlike today, that was not paid. I did earn bonuses for success, shared with all the team. The year I took second at Bathurst for the Holden Dealer team, my share of prize money & bonuses was $50.00. I also finished second in the Gold Star, our Formula 1 championship that year, winning quite a few races, including the Bathurst F1 Race. My racing earnings were $1,100. The F1 cars mechanic was paid just over $3,500.

Continued