Here are some highlights.
- Most farms are family farms. "In 2010 of all the farms in the United States with at least $1 million in revenues, 88 percent were family farms, and they accounted for 79 percent of production. Large-scale farmers today are sophisticated businesspeople who use GPS equipment to guide their combines, biotechnology to boost their yields, and futures contracts to hedge their risk. They are also pretty rich."
- "Farmers are flush with cash."
- Farmland is receiving considerable attention from professional investors, including hedge funds. What the worst that can happen from that?
- "Prior to World War II, it took 100 hours of labor to produce 100 bushels of corn. Today, it takes less than two hours."
- "...in 2009 U.S. farm output was 170 percent above its level in 1948, having grown at a rate of 1.63 percent a year. Those figures understate the productivity revolution, because these increasing harvests have been delivered with fewer inputs, particularly less labor and less land."
- "Continuous technological improvements have resulted in a system of crop farming that someone who left the countryside 20 years ago would be hard-pressed to recognize, and certainly couldn't operate."
- "Ever since people first domesticated cereal crops in the Fertile Crescent 11,000 years ago, farming has followed a seemingly immutable pattern - plow your field, seed your field, harvest your field, repeat. But today, farmers can skip the plowing step."
- The U.S. today has more bus drivers than farmers.
BTW, I think The Atlantic is the best magazine today for its price, and attracts viewers of every political flavor.
