news:q6ualiowpo0k$.
d...@mid.crommatograph.info:
> * Gutless Umbrella Carrying Sissy:
>
>> Oliver Cromm <
lispa...@crommatograph.info> wrote in
>> news:vvkenh19e4u5$.
d...@mid.crommatograph.info:
>>
>>> * Gutless Umbrella Carrying Sissy:
>>>
>>>> And the average family farm is at least a thousand acres.
>>>> (And a hell of a lot of farm land isn't run as family farms,
>>>> it's run by commercial operations with orders of magnitude
>>>> more acres.)
>>>>
>>>> It also allows more automation, which means the same number
>>>> of people can cultivate more acres.
>>>
>>> You must be talking about North America.
>>
>> The US, specifically. I have no idea if Mexico and Canda are
>> similar.
>>
>>> In my native Germany,
>>> average farm size is about 150 acres (55 hectares), and that's
>>> fairly large within Europe. Everything over 100 ha (~250
>>> acres) isn't considered an actual family farm.
>>
>> Family farms are big business these days.
>
> Maybe, but how many employees can they have and still be a
> family farm?
Depends on the family, I guess, and how obsessed you are with what
you want to be true.
>
>> Most farmers have college
>> degrees (plural - usually ag and business) because they need
>> them.
>
> Absolutely. A famous German TV show for kids recently ran a
> four-part portrait of a farm through the seasons (each part in
> the appropriate season). Whatever the season, the first thing
> the farmer did when he woke up invariably was turning on the
> computer. Not much of his day involved touching dirt.
Is the farm equipment - tractors, etc. - as computerized in Europe
as it is here? The bigger, more expensive equipment drives itself
now.
Since I haven't read German since high school, that isn't helpful.
>
> I believe "family farm" is not an official/statistical term.
I believe you are correct.
The
> main categorization in Germany is whether farming represents the
> only/dominant household income of the owner or a sideline. That
> split gives us:
>
> ha
> overall average 55.8
> mainline farms 61.1
> sideline farms 20.8
Does Germany have corporate owned farms? Some of those (in the US)
are huge. And it's hard to tell, sometimes, what's corporate owned
and what's family owned, because the corporations often hire
family-ish groups to run their farms as sharecroppers.
>
> So, that doesn't change much.
>
> Further, 93% of farms in former West Germany and 72.5% in former
> East Germany are "self-contained companies". Not all, but most
> of those are probably family farms.
>
> Average manpower is given as 3.3 people/100 ha, that comes out
> to about 2 full-time jobs for the average mainline farm. Good
> bet that's a family farm, then. Keep in mind that that "average"
> farm is a statistical construct, not real. Workers in the sector
> overall are given as roughly 50% family, 20% paid employees, 30%
> seasonal.
Europe has a lot more incentive to encourage smaller farms, both to
protect the ability to grow enough food domestically to not be
utterly dependent on other countries, and to provide more
employment (smaller farms are less efficient, and take more people)
than the US. So none of that is surprising.
>
> Farms and ranches are not treated separately, maybe because most
> have a bit of both. That might indicate that many of these are
> not "big business", but I'm no expert.
>
There really isn't enough room in Europe for what most Americans
think of as "ranches," though. Thousands of acres of pasture for
huge herds of cattle (or sheep, sometimes), that sort of thing.
Parts of Argentian has the same sort of idea of what a ranch is, I
guess, but a lot of the world just doesn't.