The Small Farm Future Blog

Small farms can recoup the extra land they lose to infrastructure

Posted on July 14, 2013 | No Comments

One potential argument against small-scale farming I’ve heard from various sources lately, including Ford Denison (though to be fair, being a thoughtful academic, he was as I recall only raising it as a possibility), an impassioned audience member at a talk I gave at Off Grid and – implicitly – a local objector to my planning application is that small farms may involve taking out potentially productive agricultural land for houses, barns and other infrastructure and so are relatively less efficient than larger farms.

As always, there are all sorts of complexities involved in assessing such claims, and inevitably they touch upon wider issues of global food policy, social equity and so forth. But I thought I’d crunch a few simple numbers based roughly on my own situation in the hope of illuminating the issue even if only a little.

So, our holding is about 7.25 hectares (18 acres) in size altogether. If we succeed ultimately in realising our plans for it, it’ll have a house of about 200m², a barn of about 250m² and a 2x250m track on it. That amounts to about 950m². Let’s call it 1,000m² and then double it to make life harder for ourselves, or perhaps to take into account the various extra little bits of land that tend not to be available for farming if you have buildings and such things. That 2,000m² amounts to about 2.75% of the total land area – let’s call it 3% to make it harder still. Even so, that doesn’t sound to me to be an awful lot of land taken out of production – I think we tend to underestimate just how much the land taken up for development is dwarfed by the scale of agricultural land.

When we bought the land it was down to permanent pasture in its entirety, and had been used for grazing beef cows and other non-dairy animals. This is fairly typical of the kind of small-scale holdings bought by people wanting to get into farming – small parcels of established arable land are rarely purchased for this purpose. So a relevant efficiency comparison would be to look at the productivity of a small farm with 3% of its land now taken out of production set against the productivity of the same area on a grass/meat farm without the 3% deficit (again this is quite generous to the larger farm, as obviously some of its land will still be out of production). Suppose that it’s a sheep farm, producing 250kg of lamb meat per hectare annually (which is fairly generous…I think) – across our whole 7.25 hectares, that would amount to about 25,000MJ of food energy, but with 3% taken out for buildings it’s closer to 24,000MJ. So to compensate for the land lost to production, the small-scale farmer on our 7.25 hectares would have to intensify production on the remaining land to the tune of about 1,000MJ overall.

Suppose we did so by growing organic potatoes (yield 25 tonnes per hectare, or 93,000MJha^-1), which yield about 27 times as much gross food energy per hectare as the lamb. There’s probably some algebraic formula by which I could calculate precisely the exact area of potatoes needed but my brain’s a bit too addled in this hot weather to figure out what it is, so let’s just suppose that we’ll grow ¹/₈₉ of a hectare of potatoes and 7.018 ha of lamb, with the remaining 0.22 ha given over to buildings and infrastructure. That would yield 1,045MJ of potatoes and 24,163MJ of lamb. There – we’ve more than made up the deficit by growing ¹/₈₉ of a hectare of potatoes, which equates to 112m² or less than half the size of a standard allotment plot.

Conclusions: obviously there’s more to the debate than my calculations above. On our site, we’re not in fact producing that much lamb and we’ve done crazy things like plant trees (although we’re hoping to increase our sheep numbers and they’ll be able to graze underneath the trees, which also have a wind sheltering effect on potatoes, wheat and other such crops). But gross farm productivity is really a different issue, and not something that we necessarily need to be maximising right now. There are also issues beyond the farm gate about the additional pressure on rural resources of having a larger number of smaller farms – something I’ve written about in more detail here under the auspices of the Royal Statistical Society. In a nutshell, I think this could turn out to be a problem if all the extra rural people expect to live urban-type lives (as is typically the case nowadays in a country like Britain), but not necessarily if they live a different kind of life (the internet may help to ease the transition from one to the other). However, I think my calculations also show that additional infrastructure on small farms doesn’t really take up much room, or lower production that much, and to the extent that it does it’s very easily remedied by a minor intensification in production that can be readily achieved by an onsite farmer. And in the longer term, building infrastructure on farmland doesn’t really take it out of production anyway. If it’s left uncared for, nature will claim it back within a century or so (at least in our moist temperate climate here in Somerset) – as I discovered on my holding when I found an old tarmac road languishing beneath the pasture that the sheep were happily grazing. So all in all I’d say that I don’t think the infrastructure inefficiency case against small-scale farming holds water. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I…