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1 year agoI think the primary difference, at least in the hobby farmers I know who are young, idealistic, and just getting started, is that they aren’t expecting to scale the operation beyond some arbitrary point - beyond which, it stops being fulfilling and starts being a giant pain in the ass. Conversely, the dairy farmer I know who has the largest operation in the county is a stand up dude, who avoids cutting corners but is getting squeezed big time by small artisanal operations with street cred and big, industrial operations with margins. The middle, where there used to be a huge swath of family farms, is a bloodbath of debt and suffering.
I imagine most of these new hippies are trying to stay small.
Yep, that’s what I was driving at. If you’re a “medium” the cards are stacked against you and there are very few levers to pull (if any) to level the playing field at all. The only reason the mid-sized guy I know is able to survive is that he owns all his land outright and his family has been amassing acreage for three generations. Even still, he’s in a tough spot and the mega farms are buying up what is left of the family farms all around him and doing crazy shit like trucking manure across the state on a scale that he just can’t compete with.