Ranting to /dev/null

Hipsters to farmers

The NYT is reporting on an apparently growing trend of hipster-types in Williamsburg et al ditching the city and starting small farms in the surrounding countryside. The farms started are organic, unsurprisingly, and they target the premium markets of nearby urban areas.

Small family farms--particularly in the northeast--have been going out of business for years, because agribusiness is really the only way to make money on conventional agricultural products. Sure, there are a lot of old-school farms still around, but success at farming has always depended on luck far more than other forms of making a living, and I'd bet that most farms are only one or two really bad years away from folding up. For example, it would not surprise me at all of the persistent drought in the southeast leads to the shuttering of hundreds of small farming operations.

The reason these young 'uns can make a living at this is because they aren't directly competing with agribusiness (leaving aside for the moment that most "organic" brands are actually owned and operated by major food processors). They're producing small quantities of high-priced goods for rich people, whereas your typical farmer produces small quantities of insufficiently-low priced goods, tending to put him out of business. Let's not pretend that this actually has the potential for a large-scale reformation of American agricultural consumption; what they're doing doesn't really scale, as production per acre has got to be way lower than more modern ways of doing this. But if catering to rich markets is the only way of small farms making a go of it, I think that's a transformation worth making for the aesthetic benefits of keeping small farms around.