I’m not that old. 45 and 50 weeks to be precise. My nephew of 9 and 51 weeks tells me this is now the appropriate way to convey your age to other people.
Phoebe Bridgers - I Know The End
Also, I’m not quitting my job (or my other job).
I am, however, always looking for interesting problems to solve. And I have a new problem to solve. This will be, more or less, the story of solving that problem.
For a variety of reasons, I find myself as the owner of a 120 acre farm in Southwestern Wisconsin. I grew up in the suburbs. I grew up in malls and video arcades. I don’t know anything about farming.
What I do know about farming is that people aren’t buying 120 acre farms these days. The agricultural economy is fracturing. Large farms are getting larger and small farms are disappearing. Medium-sized farms basically don’t exist any more.
We have achieved peak commodity production. Commodity prices are crashing. Agricultural production is consolidating. A global economy and more agile supply chains (in theory … more on that some other day …) has driven prices for commodity goods through the artificial floors that the USDA has used to prop up agricultural systems for years. Economies of scale are mandatory to get per unit costs below the margin necessary to make a profit from growing things for other people to eat.
Stated differently, it is cheaper to import tomatoes from Mexico than to grow tomatoes in the US. So US tomato growers need to get bigger in order to compete in the supermarket. Getting bigger reduces the per unit cost.
Getting bigger also brings its own problems. When all of the lettuce in the US comes from a single farm in California, when that farm has a salmonella outbreak, all of the lettuce at WalMart gets recalled. Or maybe it’s a Swedish farm and the lettuce is killing children in Finland. It’s hard to keep them all straight these days.
Large farms are also terrible for the environment. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (“CAFOs”) have numerous environmental impacts. For example, an 8,000 hog farm will produce about 9.4 million gallons of manure each year; enough to pollute wells and aquifers making the water undrinkable.
So, this is my problem. I now own 120 acres of farmland in Southwestern Wisconsin. It seems silly to turn it into a nature preserve (though my friends have suggested starting a music festival, or, in the alternative, a dirt bike track). So, how can I turn 120 acres into something that makes money in a way that doesn’t kill people or destroy the environment.
I have some ideas…