Hmmm. Gibson and Sterling, perhaps, but Neal Stephenson nailed it in “The Diamond Age.” Handmade crafts are a near ultimate luxury good in a world that can duplicate any material design quickly through nanomanufacturing.

Though I tend to think the real luxury will be customized design.

In Thailand, farms of two to four acres produce 60% more rice per acre than bigger farms. In Taiwan net income per acre of farms of less than 1.25 acres is nearly double that of farms over five acres. In Latin America, small farms are three to 14 times more productive per acre than the large farms. Across the Third World, small farms are 2-10 times more productive per acre than larger farms.

In the US, farms smaller than 27 acres have more than 10 times the dollar-per-acre output of larger farms. In Britain a recent study of the hidden costs of industrial farming raised the bill to £2.3 billion — almost as much as the farm industry’s total income. (journeytoforever.org/farm.html)

But, it’s hard to get the cash you need. Farming is highly variable, and small producers don’t have deep pockets. Large producers, on the other hand, get large subsidies, and are taking a larger and larger share of the subsidy pie:

On the Bush Administration’s watch, mammoth industrial farms have collected an ever-greater share of federal farm subsidies. In 1995, they received $3.98 billion, or 55 percent of all federal farm payments. In 2002, their portion increased to $7.8 billion, or 65 percent of all federal payments. Currently, almost 30 percent of agricultural subsidies go to the top two percent of farms and over four-fifths to the top 30 percent.

Indeed, the 2002 census confirmed the consolidation of the U.S. farming sector around a smaller number of increasingly wealthy corporate players. The census found that the most profitable three percent of large farms earn 61 percent of all the money paid for agricultural products in the United States. (economics.about.com/od/naturalresourceseconomics/a/agribusiness.htm)

While there are two million farms left in America, only a quarter of those are small farms:

Of the two million remaining farms, only 565,000 are family operations (www.sustainabletable.org/issues/familyfarms/)

My gut feeling is that small farms may be doing better than two or three decades ago, but they’re still losing ground, and it’s still hard to be a small farmer. To the extent you can survive, it’s thanks to Alice Waters and the whole farmer’s market movement. Still, alot of family farms are traditional. They’re invested in a few staple crops, and don’t have the knowlege or connections to go organic and get the benefits of the higher prices.

The one exception to this trend, and I’ll bet you they’re a large chunk of the remaining family farms, are Amish and especially Mennonite farmers, who are thriving and expanding their territories far beyond their traditional niche in Western PA.

Then again, I know very little about this subject.

The episode of “This American Life” is here:
http://www.thislife.org/pages/descriptions/04/273.html

-D-