Market Economics

Aside from the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, I can think of no great boom in American history built more on enthusiasm, and less on profit. ~Tom Phillpott


While listening to a song over at Log Cabin Homestead I couldn't help but think of this article which looks at the economics of local farmers markets and the current state of small scale farming:


"The overall income picture for small commercial farms is dismal. Key USDA stat: Farms with annual revenues between $10,000 and $99,000 -- which describes the vast majority of farmers' market vendors -- have an average operating profit margin of negative 24.5 percent.

Simply put, small farms lose money, and their losses are financed by the off-farm incomes of the families that run them. From this angle, so-called sustainable farming looks like a precarious enterprise.

Why, then, do farmers' markets and CSAs continue to grow and multiply? Why do people still farm? The local-food revival, it seems to me, runs on passion: people's desire for connection to the seasons, to the soil that feeds them, to powerful flavors that can't be manufactured with chemicals or preserved over 1,300-mile delivery hauls. Aside from the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, I can think of no great boom in American history built more on enthusiasm, and less on profit.

Yet passion has practical limits (as investors in, say, Pets.com learned in 2000). For local farms to supply significantly more than 2 percent of the nation's produce (or meat, dairy, and eggs, for that matter), small-scale farming will have to become an economically viable activity.

Some optimists argue that market forces are already quietly working to achieve that goal. The argument goes like this: surging consumer demand for local food -- coupled with rising energy costs -- has convinced the large supermarket companies to rethink their far-flung supply chains and seek out small-scale producers near individual retail outlets. These corporate buyers will pump cash into local farm economies across the nation, reviving the fortunes of small-scale farmers.

Certainly, evidence for this scenario abounds. The phrase "local is the new organic" has become commonplace. Having turned organic food into another consumer fetish drained of much of its original meaning, the big corporate retailers are setting their sights on "local" cache. Shoppers entering Whole Foods outlets can hardly grab a basket without reading "buy local" propaganda."


I think much of what the writer states and then glosses over is summed up well in these words:

People's desire for connection to the seasons, to the soil that feeds them, to powerful flavors that can't be manufactured with chemicals or preserved over 1,300-mile delivery hauls.

Now apart from economics of mammon there is the dynamics of home economics which can be found in Wendell Berry's works, a collection of fourteen essays, which can be found here: Home Economics at Cumberland Books, a great source for literature and writing. Where the root of economics is stewardship through proper household management. This being the greater good, if you will or the driving "Why" behind what has become an agrarian push to the shove of modern societies "madness of the masses". To know what benefit it is to live with ones own, spend time in common tasks and instill value to the soul of sons and daughters so that they to may live to do likewise from generation to generation. Until next time..............

To live is not to pass time, but to spend time.