8 Things I Learned While Farming this Summer [View all]

[KurtNYC]

1. Farming is a gamble. You pay most of your expenses up front, February through April, and you don't see any revenue until maybe July. Many things can go wrong -- hail storms, drought, extreme heat, deluge of rain, insect damage, blight and the fluctuating market price for your crop(s). You are betting that you can recover all your cost AND get paid a decent wage for your time.

2. Hybrids do much better than heirlooms. Better resistance, better output. More tolerance for weather extremes. Not much of a surprise but I got to test and measure the differences first hand in several crops like potatoes and tomatoes.

3. You should sell your crop, or at least line up a customer, before you plant it. The middle of summer is no time to be looking for a buyer. The bigger the customer the less they will be paying for your crop. If you sell to McDonald's then you must lock in your price well in advance of the season. You take all the risk and must deliver what you committed to even if you have to buy it on the commodities market and then sell to them at a loss.

4. Farming shares a lot of tactics with fascism -- eugenics, mono-cultures, chemical weapons, electrified fences and tight cost controls. Agriculture was the basis for slavery and today is the basis for a schizophrenic immigration policy that allows people into the country just so that they can work well below minimum wages, in dangerous conditions with no rights and no recourse.

5. Most consumers have no idea where their food comes from and most of those don't care as long as it is cheap.

6. Every farmer competes with virtually every other farmer in the world. If you want to grow celery anywhere but Oxnard California then you have no chance of selling it at wholesale and making any money. Why? Because celery is hard as crap to grow (long season, bugs, labor, etc) and Oxnard is the best environment in the US for it. Almost every crop has a region which is much better suited to it. Georgia has onions and peanuts. The central California Valley produces most of the almonds in the world. Some orchards in the northeast have gone unpicked for years because the labor to do so alone is more than the finished product (juice, concentrate, individual fruit) coming out of China. Relatively cheap shipping is key to this equation. If fuel goes way up, local producers will have an edge but that won't happen until fuel doubles or more.

7. Every farmer is a scientist. They have to be. Testing, researching, measuring, analyzing. They know their crop(s) and everything that goes into the cost of producing them. If they don't, they don't last. They are opinionated but those strong opinions have come from years of closely studying their own methods and revising them. Much of farming is proprietary and secret.

8. Farming is only going to get tougher. Longer weather patterns. More extremes. Rising input costs. Tightening border controls and less available labor. It all adds up to making farming a bigger gamble than it has ever been.