Farming in a nutshell (if you own your farm): Asset rich, Cash poor, worth lots, earn little.

Farming is the only business that buys at retail, sells at wholesale and pays the freight both ways.

Small farmer in Ontario Canada here. Good thoughts all through the video. I feel the primary obstacle facing new entrants into farming is the valuation of farmland. It has been divorced from any realistic return on investment in the agricultural context. The acre of agriculturally zoned land is now predominantly valued as if it were a residential or commercial building lot up for grabs by the highest bidder by developers. Prices of between 10,000 - 30,000 dollars an acre do not pencil out. You cannot expect to ever service that debt by farming the land...let alone make a profit to live on. Offshore and domestic speculators, residential developers, are both hungry, wealthy, and prepared to essentially steal farmland away from ordinary farmers, or potential future farmers. Once it is covered with houses or shopping centers it is forever destroyed for food production. Then the farmers who give in and sell their multimillion dollar land near urban areas, proceed to outbid local farmers in lower priced areas and thus prices everywhere get driven up endlessly in a sort of societal suicide. None of it is sustainable. Enormous land holdings, amassed by established corporate farms over many years, are beyond the reach of most younger/newer/potential farmers or ranchers. And so the only buyers for those farms of several thousand acres are speculators and consortiums from other places. Think Bill Gates, China, etc. If the agricultural economy were allowed to exist apart from the larger real estate economy, and land was valued according to what it is truly worth as farmland, then most agricultural land here would sell for 1000-2000 dollars per acre, you could get a loan, farm the land, make the payments, and pay it off in ten years then begin actually making money farming it.

Your points are all well and good, but do any of them really suggest that farmers aren't capitalists? Farming might be regulated and subsidised and weather-dependent, and there might be more lucrative ends to their capital - e.g. housing - but even being able to talk about liquidating an asset means farmers are in a position to use capital to their desired ends. Assuming they own the land (i.e, not tenants) and sell their produce, this is materially no different to a factory owner, or a car dealership. You have assets, whether that's a factory, a sales-room and stock, or a farm, and use them to produce goods that are then sold. Farmers have capital - wealth in the form of land, available for the purpose of growing crops which they sell for profit or subsistence.

I’m an Englishman who farms in NZ. Making more money with lower prices and 0% subsidies. Not even red diesel!

1. Land cannot be in a free market. Ownership is government controlled. Lets say you were a German who own a castle and lands in WW2, if it was in Bavaria, you probably get to keep it, but if it was in Koenigsberg, then for sure you no longer own it. 2. Humans need food. We don't get to opt out of food. We can opt out of consumer electronics, concert tickets, luxury items, but not food. 3. Agriculture and everybody else have opposing incentives. A farmer actually profits during a famine (assume he has crops left to sell). An abundance of crop is actually detrimental to the farmer but a wonderful thing for everybody else. 4. Farming food takes lots of time. We cannot simply turn on the factory and make food instantly. 5. In order to make sure there is a steady supply of food for the population, we must ensure an abundance of crop. That means forcing farmers to overproduce. Economically, that hurts the farmer because the product will have low prices which may not cover costs. So, we must compensate farmers so that they overproduce. Its like the military. We compensate servicemembers for risking their lives for our mutual defense. If we leave it to the free market, volunteers and charity, there may not be enough defenders since the volunteers and suppliers of the effort would be at a loss while the non-contributors gain.

There is no "free market". In almost no area of economics. Capistalism is not " free" . Not in a sense that privates trade with privates without state interference. Privates (mostly big ones) influence politics so politics rule in their interest. Agriculture is not a free market, at all. Its one of the most regulated and subsdize economic activities. Love your videos. Loved this one. But the title is misleading. Tanks anyway.

I am a capitalist dairy farmer I produce a niche product (raw guernsey and Jersey milk). I sell it for as high as I think I can. I don’t have my hand out every month taking whatever the processor decides they want to pay me.

You need to start with defining your terms. You claim farming doesn't work in a free market and then go on to describe all the laws and government regulations that made it not a free market in farming.

If farming wasn't feasible why do farmers remain in agriculture? If farming wasn't feasible why do manufacturers make equipment for farmers? If farmering wasn't feasible why don't farmers sell up? Farmers have had a BOOM since the end of WW2 and their LAND and the FARMSTEAD has seen a HUGE increase in values, it is the hidden wealth/gold mine that farmers don't crow about when farms do come up for sale. If in my business I bought an industrial unit for £20,000 in 1960, today it would probably be worth £750,000 to £1,5MIllion subject to condition, yard area, access and other key features. Also, farmers escape a lot of tax, one of them being they can run on rebated diesel (red diesel) unlike the construction industry which has to suffer the use of white diesel in plant machinery. Farmers are feather bedded where other industries are ignored!

Refreshingly intelligent analysis which I find realistic (many of my family have farmed).

You’re an analysis of farming is very impressive and you speak very well as most Brits do. However, I think you’re overthinking the farming thing and you’re leaving something very important out of the equation; the love of farming and the land, plus family and faith. there are many, very young farmers in their 20s and even teens who are buying their own land, yes, going deep into debt because they love farming. Certainly they realize they will never become wealthy and will work much harder and put in many more hours, than say an industrial or retail job. I follow 30 or so farming families in the US and many say that the income from these KZfaq videos has built their homes and purchased farm equipment allowing them to survive as farmers.

Wow. I think I need to send this to the Education Department at Lloyds Bank! This is a fascinating and coherent appraisal of our English Farming System at least. Thank you for your efforts, and how thrilled I am to see a younger man's passion for our industry at work.

To anyone here who hasn’t read “The Grapes of Wrath”, it is extremely important American classic literature written by John Steinbeck that describes the journey of a farming family whom was forced off of their land by the big banks and were forced to pack up everything and move west during the depression and dust bowl era of the 1930s. If you are into reading truly great literature it’s a fantastic read.

The fundamental problem with capitalism is that it considers land as capital. Land is not capital; land is the SOURCE of all capital. In other words, it is the source for ALL resources. And since each human has a right to life in our systems; we all also have an implicit right to the resources needed to sustain our life. Those resources must either be provided without cost to the people who have been denied access to land thru land deed schemes, or they must be allowed to live on the land and gain their own subsistence without obligation to ANY landlord. This principle is demonstrated in prisons where people have been denied the right to obtain their own resources, therefore necessary resources are provided to them… and demands that they work to attain those resources would be considered a forced labor encampment. Common Law had no provisions for remote land ownership. You had to occupy the land to “own” it. This makes logical sense when it comes to adequate resource allocation for everyone on the planet. The planet is the common inheritance of all who abide on the planet; that is why land “ownership” is a work of fiction that exists only on paper, backed up by the guns of the lazy and powerful. ✌🏼

I've been going through all of your videos and it's amazing how this perspective is so rare in any mainstream "left" discourse. Between the academic left and the "online" left there seems to be very little interest in actually engaging with production as a concept, especially domestic production. Stuck between techno-optimism and non-scientific organic farming fantasies. Surely anyone concerned with third world exploitation must realize that globalization in a "post" colonial world will lead to more exploitation and third world economies that can't diversify while being locked into comodity export markets. And if we want to take our collective foot off the neck of the developing world we have to substitute their exports with domestic production. All this to say that I wish more people on the left were exposed to these ideas and realities, thank you for making these! Looking forward to the next one.

If you own the means of production and sell your goods on a market -> You are by Definition a Capitalist. Now, not every "Farmer" owns his own means of production, there are Farmers who only have rented the means of production from a owner. They don't really own the Farm yet manage it. There its like CEO and sahreholder. Either way you work on a market and you produce things to sell them on it. This means all capitalist pressures and Laws apply to you just like any other industry.

This analysis is so mistaken, albeit that maybe there’s a Wittgenstinian point about the use of the word “capitalist”. Farmers are paradigm capitalists. They have to take the resources (capital) available to them - the land they own or rent, their livestock and machinery, and their financial resources, whether retained profit or bank facility, to produce crops and/or animal products. They have to buy seed, animal feed, fertilizer, fuel and services such as veterinary help or servicing of machinery and ensure that they can sell for as good a price as possible to recover the annual costs, the cost of servicing their capital (rent and interest), any labour costs and ensure that they have made enough to live off and provide capital for the next year’s cycle (although the cycle may be less than a year in some specialist or quasi-industrial operations, such as chicken hatcheries). This is capitalism in one of its purest forms. Farmers are not the only capitalists at risk from the weather. Ask any proprietor of any tourist or leisure-based business. The land is not an inexhaustible resource. Its value lies in its fertility, and there are countless examples from history where it has been lost - our Brecklands, those parts of central China whose eroded soils became the loess deposits elsewhere, the abused chernozems of Ukraine in the Soviet era. Have you ever seen a Fenland blow? They are also not the only capitalists at risk from the “market” - every business supplying products or services in a market economy (most being regulated for good political reasons - whether this works well is another question) is at risk from changes in the buying habits of their customers. In my lifetime even the “learned professions” have discovered this to be the case. I come from a farming family, but like my brothers decided that getting up at 3 am to deal with a difficult calving was not for me, so went to university, qualified as a solicitor and entered private practice, being a partner (i.e. capitalist entrepreneur selling professional services) for 33 years. OK, there may have not been any early mornings struggling to get a calf out of a distressed cow, but it was just as stressful and uncertain as running the family dairy farm. Orwin seems to be under the impression that only large joint stock companies are capitalists and that they are somehow immune to these pressures. This now looks incredibly naïve. Remember British Leyland, GEC, Woolworths, ICI, Pan-Am, and many other examples of large capitalist enterprises, once seen as invincible giants of their national economies that have failed due to competition and failing to provide products and services that the customers wanted. It is also untrue that farmers cannot change what they do to respond to changing markets. The mostly annual cycle of most farms is much shorter than the product development cycle of most manufacturing businesses. Orwin should have read his contemporary A G Street’s Farmer’s Glory to see how farmers had to be (and were) flexible in their farming activities in the 1930s to respond to changing market and governmental policy conditions. The land ownership position is also not as set out. Not owning the land you farm does not prevent you being a capitalist - you simply have rent as a capital cost. While the price of land has increased in the last 50 years various investors have acquired agricultural land as a long-term investment, it fell during the inter-war period and in the prolonged agricultural depression of the late 19th century that lasted until the First World War. And as to labour, agriculture is in exactly the same position as any other business enterprise, except that the flight from the land has been enormous, driven by low pay, working conditions that are unattractive to most and mechanisation removing much of the need for large numbers of unskilled workers, except in those sectors (like vegetable growing) where the need tends to be seasonal and unable to support full-time employment. Finally, as to the bars to entry, this is something that is not unique to farming. In the service sector, you are likely to have to invest heavily in IT. The general high cost of property affects anyone who needs premises for their proposed business. Any machinery you need will be sophisticated, computer-controlled and is likely to be expensive with limited sources of supply Farmers live in the same changing world as the rest of us. They are possibly even more subject to the whims of government policy than some, but as a retired deputy money laundering officer in one of my firms, I am not certain that the Rural Payments Agency is any worse (slower perhaps!) than any governmental organisation you have to dela with, in the UK or elsewhere. Nonetheless, I am interested in this, so will subscribe! BTW - I recommend reading Clifford Selly’s Ill Fares the Land if you can find a copy for an insight as to where we were in the early 1970s and what were then seen as the challenges for farming in Britain.

Again i'd like to object to the use of the political terminology here. A socialist is someone with socialist political leanings, independent of their occupation and class, while a proletarian/worker is someone who sells their labour in exchange for a wage. A bourgeois/capitalist is someone who owns capital, which includes farmers though as explained in the video they have different needs and modes of managing their business compared to an industrialist with a monocle and top hat. If anything, from what you described a farmer resembles an artisan the most, who's both the owner of the tools for his labour and the one doing the actual work

If farming didn't work under capitalism, we'd all have starved to death by now. It operates differently, but is held together by the same forces as all work. That doesn't deny tenant farmers have it hard - but that is a separate issue.

Hidden landowners. 17% of land in England and Wales remains undeclared at the Land Registry. Someone owns it - we just don’t know who. There is a strong likelihood that the owners of this undeclared land are members of the aristocracy and gentry, meaning that their combined share of the country may in fact be far higher than 30%. Because aristocratic estates remain in families for centuries, they are not generally sold on the open market, and will not have needed to be recorded with the Land Registry. According to Anna Powell-Smith, the Land Registry has committed to comprehensive registration by 2030, though it is unclear how this will be achieved. Powell-Smith and Shrubsole propose a government requirement to make all land registered, with details of its beneficial owner, before it can receive farm subsidies. Given the amount of land used for farming, it is hoped that this would incentivise owners to register the land and help solve the mystery of England’s undeclared land.

I recently discovered this channel, shame it has so few views. Every video is so interesting

NZ farmers receive no subsidies and thrive selling their produce on the open market. Why do you British make farming so complex for? Improve your logistics, cut off the handouts, no complaining about eastern EU farmers, and compete. Socialist theology is for universities, not farms.

I am in awe that there is video footage of guys sowing a proper field by hand. Not even a horn seeder!

Great video. Perspective changes everything. Fair I think to say that there should be restrictions on who/what can own land. It certainly shouldn’t ever be allowed to be an investment.

Hi, farmworker here! I appreciate and subscribe to this channel :) Around 8:45 you seem to imply that methane is not a form of carbon in the atmosphere, which it most certainly is. Furthermore, the result of methane decay is just more atmospheric CO2--as I am sure you are aware, so the idea that this somehow separates agriculture from other industries seems off to me. I think you make a much better point with the comment that agriculture is situated within the carbon cycle. Aside from the fossil fuels burned by farm vehicles and embodied emissions in farming inputs, the rest of the movement of carbon that happens in agriculture follows natural processes of primary growth and metabolism that are all part of the natural carbon cycle.

Barter is the only free market.

As usual you open up another overlooked chapter in farming history to very illuminating effect. Fascinating about Orwin and you explain beautifully what an unusual market chain farmers are located in. But I disagree with you about capitalism. As the post-War Marxist historians argued (Hill, Hobsbawm et al) capitalism first developed in English farming. Aristo land owners became rentiers, while their tenants were small scale capitalists who hired labour (former serfs) to work the land, even if they usually mucked in too. Crucially, and this is what defined farmers as capitaliists, they extracted surplus value from their workers. Today, as you say, many farms are worked solely by family members because of the development of ag. tech. But they remain small capitalists - even the 14% of farms which are still tenanted require expensive equipment. Strikes me that British farmers are classic petiit-bourgeois, squeezed by big capital, monopsony, nature, the vagaries of government policy ... .

"...and then you have to buy tractors and implements and stock..." sounds to me that farmers require quite a bit of capital. Farmers need the land, the crops and the tools to work, I'd argue a farmer is already a capitalist. Even closer to the model of a free market, less the oligopol we've today. Oligopol as in a few companies rule the market, behaves a bit diffrently than the ideal. Also quite a few rules and regulations (some quite needed, other more akin to barriers or tools of big corps vs little ones) with subsidies being the deciding factor. Concerning farming I'd say we`ve arrived at the opposite of the free market, we've got state controlled farming via the subsidies. In that sense I'd agree farmers are not capitalist, as there is no free market.

Excellent video, thank you for your research and the time you took to present it. I am glad that I found your channel. My opinion is that we should view history in the context of it's time. In your video you are referencing a specific period when food was very expensive and hard to come by. Millions of farmers were heading off to fight the Great War and there were food shortages and rationing. Although we as farmers today may not be motivated solely by profit, we are acting on a global commodity market and and our buyers will try to go for cheaper. This changes when global supply chains are disrupted, for example in for mentioned times of war. This is why every country should keep an effective agricultural sector by subsidizing domestic agricultural production and controlling imports. Planned collectivization only worked with the Israelis and the Kibbutz system, everywhere else it was a disaster.

Interestingly, the futures and commodities markets are developed out of the uncertainty of farming before capitalism became a concept...which points to their inherent capitalist nature...

Agriculture still relies on seasonal labour, in usa mexican illigal labour and in europe eastern europeans, eith al the labourlaws being ignored for that time of year

I recommend you to read about he works of Alexasander Chayanov; despite being an fervorous soviet, his views in the peasantry are very interesting

*sigh* *Puts on hazmat suit* *Scrolls down to comments section*

I love these topics. Subscribed from India.

Here in New Zealand we call dry stock farms: ‘large lifestyle blocks’. And we call small lifestyle blocks: ‘Life Sentence Blocks’. The poor return on investment here is crazy. The dairy farmers here are more capitalist in the way they think, but even they don’t make much money now. It’s a miserable industry at the moment.

By definition, if you are producing more product than you need to feed your family in order to sell it, you are working under capitalist thinking. This would only apply to a homesteader who farms to feed their family, and trade to fill the gaps of what they don’t produce.

Great video, but you need some Chris Smaje on that bookshelf!

Growing food in our own yards (including raising chickens) should become more common. All other farms should be cooperatively or socially owned.

First video I watch from your channel. This is great, thank you for the content and info, keep it going!

Some areas of farming have operated within the free market for decades - pigs, poultry, horticulture. Worker ownership of the means of production would not anticipate individual workers owning their own means of production to the exclusion of others and having the freedom to sell it to whomever they wished.

Great thought provoking video! I do agree that land-owned farmers business should be distinguished from more extractive, monopolistic, and financialised business systems involved in the equity market. However, The land-owned farmers activities are capitalist, as they follow these activities: 1. For profit entrepreneurship 2. Private ownership of the means of production 3. Market exchange as means of allocation 4. Wage labour The main difference is that they are getting ripped off by a dysfunctional market, as well as the natural limitations of profit making that you mentioned. Socialist sectors in uk include public-owned parts of nhs and education system.

Hence, government subsidies. Powering the large number of cookbooks and TV how tos and fashionable spots about the trendy eateries. Almost a charity, in many ways, and not a series of accidents as subsidies are involved, in the form of contracts. Many historical equivalents. Liked the ones about why many in the Old World left because of the oppressive landowners or royalty as they were often seen to be oppressive (serfs or the equivalent) to come to the New World to become landowners themselves in the pattern which they had alleged to be fleeing. The most recent example of this is when, during the US Civil War, Lincoln started the Homestead Act that gave free of charge, certain amounts of land, often previously occupied by the original locals, it they improved cited land in an agricultural way. Lincoln did this as he had thought that the referenced War was going to last a while, and he had wanted a way to feed the North's troops.

Was never into framing, but somehow got this video recommended. Know nothing about C.S. Orwin except fo what you told in this video, but can tell you that Russian communist had imposed state ownership of the land and the crops in their own nation and in nations the conquered (like my own, Ukrainian nation) and that resulted in artificial famines, like Holodomor, which were in turn deliberately exacerbated by Russians as a means of quelling any resistance in other non-Russian nations which lived under the occupation of Russian Soviet regime. Which is why Ukrainians view it not only as a disastrous economic measure, but also as a gemocide (becauuse all the artificial famines of the 30-s were somehow harder on non-Russian nations). That said, it is still a dubious economic policy which might seem attractive only because Britain haven't tried it on a national scale. At it's core is a substitution of mutch land owners with just one - the state. But how well could it work, concidering that the state is not the farmer and just another landowner who is much more incline to impose measures (rather than negotiate) than any private land owner.

Dreamworld farmer and realworld anti-capitalist here. Farmers are people who dance across the entirety of the same policital spectrum as every other occupation in society. This video is a good introduction, though I didn't feel as though it really got to the point of what the title was advertising and would like to see you pursue the concept of farmers and political systems further. Perhaps it would be good to discuss the ways in which farmers of the past, present, and future who operate(d) under a capitalist system are harmed or have their efforts corrupted. Perhaps you could try discussing the ways in which a capitalist system makes decisions for a farmer. Ordered a copy of Orwin's book and subscribed to the channel. Looking forward to reading the historical perspective and seeing where your videos end up.

What about futures markets?

just found your channel. interesting stuff.

You are correct in categorizong the small farmer a true socialist. Socialism is where the worker owns the means of production, and a small independent farmer is exactly that. Ditto for "mom and pop" small businesses. Having the state own the business or farm "on behalf of the people" is Communism, not socialism. One thing you overlooked in your video is the impact of hyper regulation, especially in this era where those making the regulations are utterly disconnected from those they are regulating.

Ok so I don't know if this is an idea that's already in use BUT. What if we used to stock market to speculate on the harvest and have the investment pay the farmer a fixed amount no matter the result? They'd be pressure to drive the price up to a point where the farmer can look at their input costs and see there's profit to be made before investing a dime into it. It would also naturally push the farmer toward growing what's most likely to grow, as the market would study what has the best chance of being harvested (But would still have to accept lower returns occasionally for crop rotation). To take the capital costs out of the equation all the land and equipment is owned initially by the state and is issued to the farmer at a lease cost which should be low because they can use purchasing power to buy equipment in bulk and move machinery and storage allocation around between farmers based on need and capacity. Now to give the farmer the incentive to make sure the crop has a good yield by allowing a good harvest outcome to start to reduce the lease payments by the percentage of the assets costs. If it's a good yield, the lease costs go down by a fraction of a percent or more. If it's a bad yield (Farmer got paid more in the agreed amount speculated on the crop) then the lease cost goes up a fraction of a percent or more. Here's the kicker, the stock market has people also betting that the crop will have a bad yield, so the payments on this put is used to pay the farmer out an agreed amount (less than the payment for a good output) If the cause of the bad harvest is due to adverse weather conditions but not for any other reason, (So if it's due to planting to early or late in the season or errors in the paddock from say, adding too much fertiliser and as a result burning the crop that's on the farmer). Alternatively, if they have the capital they can purchase the land and pay it off conventionally with a bank loan and simply lease the equipment only instead. Any harvest which makes more money than the farmer gets in their agreed payment, it's used as a measure of how much less money they need to pay on their lease of equipment and/or land. Essentially if the lease cost reaches 0 they've either paid off the land and now own it. (if they've leased it to begin with or their equipment leasing costs are now 0). Bear in mind a series of bad farming harvests after this may drive the price of the equipment up again. If the farmer gets out of farming earlier the equipment would go back to the state and be repaired and reused elsewhere. Now they may choose to give up before paying the land off, they should still make money on good harvests if they had picked crops with high payments on them, less their expenses (The crop seeds, fuel, fertiliser and pesticides) I think it might add some stability into farming

There are a few other main actors in food. The consumers don't really have the power to not eat food, but they can slide sideways into cheaper brands and they retain the power to vote. "People who eat food" is probably a pretty large electoral block. Distributors are both chains and wholesale traders. Sometimes they have both roles, a wholesale trader can own a chain. Food gots to reach people. This can include some competition or a trust. The fewer they are, the more pressure they exert. They are in turn more or less pressured by consumers. Industry processing is closer to industrial production. There is room to abruptly change suppliers, to evaluate competing ones. Sometimes the industry is independent, sometimes owned cooperatively. How much processing varies. There is a negotiation with distributors on a market.

A very interesting group of videos .Thanks for sharing.

In a circular economy no resource is truly exhaustible, except for the energy provided by the sun technically.

I would somewhat agree if you follow traditional agricultural models the way it's taught at colleges. There's been many agricultural innovations in the last 40-50 years where many of these issues are minimized. Even the issues tenant farmers face can be mitigated by using things like movable infrastructure. I'd suggest looking at some of the work done by Joel Salatin, Mark Sheppard, Richard Perkins and Darren Doherty. Personally I think the key to the success of farming is not more specialization in farming but more generalization. Joel Salatin has a great talk he gave about fiefdoms, which is available on youtube. I highly recommend watching that as a starting point.

I enjoy your videos, thank you. I think of restaurants as socialist, because the people club their money together to afford what they could not afford alone, and they benefit themselves as a community by doing so. Of course people will say that I am wrong, but that is a given.

Would you relate this to forestry too ?

Panoramic overview! So much information to think about. Thank you.

I enjoy learning about farming from you, thank you. :)

0:14 subscribing is not free. I’d have to hit the button.

Capitalism isn't against worker ownership of the means of production. It's just against sending people who participate in other forms of work to the gulag.

Orwin, not a scientist, not an economist. But he was an ideologue.

I think the conclusion should be farmers are not necessarily capitalist. Owner-operators are consistent within a socialist system, but a tenant farmer on privately held land is clearly proletarinized labor. This is especially true in colonized lands where the tenat farmers are likely the original owners of the land they now work for others. Large farms that employ wage labor are capitalist because of their relation to labor and the means of production. Here in the united states that wage labor is usually done by highly exploited racialized labor, I'm not sure of the conditions elsewhere. And of course, being an annoying vegan I ask what is the class position of the cow in animal agriculture. Ultimately farming does create unique class positions that are not directly analogous to industrial class positions.

Quick fact check: when methane oxidises in the atmosphere, it combines with oxygen to produce 2.75 times its mass in carbon dioxide. The carbon doesn't magically disappear. That's on top of the fact that in the time before it decays, it's a very significantly more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So - is it really possible for intensive farming (as in, intensive enough to feed everyone without lots more deforestation) to be non extractive? - Not convinced! Unrelatedly, I always had the impression that the classification of farming as capitalist in the popular imagination, refers specifically to the idea that lots of farms these days have landlords that are "big ag" companies who like short term returns and who pressure farmers into using unsustainable techniques to increase yield and extract dividends at the expense of the land. I always thought that this idea was being deliberately contrasted with smaller farmers who own their own land and have a long term interest in it.

8:45 Methane decays into... carbon dioxide.

Roofers can't work in bad weather and strong winds.

I think "distributism" is the word you are looking for, where ownership of the means of production is chopped up and widely distributed. Not "socialism" where the means of production are communally owned as one big block and no one person or family gets the benefit from doing the work to maintain it.

Now you mentioned lower labour costs-yes, but to buy the machines you need a lot of money so you need to pay off you debt. So in the past you were regularly paying wages, now you are are paying off credits. No matter good or bad year, season or not

Does point #7 really hold up to scrutiny? Only a few years after the cited work was published, the US was hit by a series of severe dust storms that manifested as a consequence of bad farming practices that depleted the topsoil. Even just a few minutes earlier in this video crop rotation was mentioned... I don't see how point #5 doesn't apply to other businesses, either. If a large mining company decides to establish a mine to extract some mineral ore, then it will only be years later that the first ore can be sold - in that sense the mining company is still "planting a crop for the market that does not exist yet", and it's not like the mine can just change production, either. While individual farms (point #6) might be small businesses, there's farming cooperatives like Arla that are market giants able to throw around a substantial amount of capital.

The argument that a farmer is a socialist because he owns the farm on which he works is a misinterpretation of the term, Socialism in its name means the social (collective) ownership of production. We get the worker ownership definition from Marx, who was looking at economics from the industrial and urban perspective, we can see the result of this in the soviet union where farmers who owned land were labeled kulaks and killed. The farmer who owns the land on which he farms is a capitalist, he aims for the improvement of his situation by expending capital and labour now for future gain, financially he may take a loss, but as you explained with the example with your father, he did so because the alternative is less satisfactory. There is more to this as well, as mentioned farming is not as massively profitable as other industries yet many remain farmers, this is because people fundementally misunderstand what profit is in economics, money is a good way to represent your gain and expendature of resources but profit is not always material, you do not buy confort items to make money but instead to gain satisfaction of a different kind, a mental kind or spiritual. Farming is not just a business, its a lifestyle and many feel satisfied with the life, routine and consistancy of that profession, to the point that monetary profit is not everything. All that is still a profit to them, even if you cant measure it.

This is brilliant....

Forestry is a little similar. The trees you grow now won't be ready right off. But the trees the last generation planted will be.

Global farmers union is important to fix comodity price and union to export and import now Government are exploting farmers in every country if farmers are united we will survive other wise we are in very bad situation.I am from India, Maharashtra state now every day farmers are susiding in our State.

From which planet is this guy? Oxford SigmaTauEpsilon?

8:45 methane does decay in the atmosphere but it gets oxidized into H2O and CO2, so it's equally harmful long term and more harmfull in the first 8 years

Maybe this can be truth along UK economic specs but for the mostly third countrys like Brazil (where I'm from) the farmers are the most capitalism and wealthiest people be fair, because of the monoculture and the cheap rich soil and really vast amount of land. Lands here are 1/8 of the price of you told on UK and can produce a lot more even with the same amount of land, besides that the advance of pesticide and new types of cultures much more stronger than before really can overcompensate the weather and of course the subsidies of governament are ridiculously high, most of commodities are tax free on exportation (and some even to importation like somes pesticide components) and not enough the government subsidie the lend porcentage to 2-3% at year when the medium porcentage to borrow money is around 11% at year for any another business (industry and services). 1 milion Pound sterling is equal 7.3 milion real and with that you can buy 654.82 acres of rich soil for 4 milions reals and use the rest to buy suplements and etc.

I think you need to check your definition of Capitalism. If it is the investment of "capital" in order to create income or wealth, them I am definitely a capitalist. Because I DO own my own land, and I am constantly investing in improvements, infrastructure, technology and genetics. All of this investment is targeted at building wealth. The fact that that wealth may not be realised until a subsequent generation sells the land, or the fact that the return on investment is subject to considrable risk and variability, does not detract from the basic principle. Capitalism is not a dirty word. It has been primarily responsible for lifting the majority of people out of deep poverty over the last several centuries. It can be done poorly and it can be done well. The moral and economic failings of *some* who have tried it, do not detract from the principle.

Very good. Just a homegardener here.

Like Joel Salatin says "farmers think they should just get paid because they're special"😂

I am a farmer und agree with the term of being a sociallist

All of the exceptions laid out here apply to other businesses and other sectors of the economy, as well. Dependence on weather, dependence on land, dependence on fickle consumer demand, having to deal with long-term planning and not being able to respond quickly to crises, being more or less environmentally-friendly, all of these things apply equally to other types of businesses that everyone else would agree are capitalist. If we're defining capitalism by how hard it is to create/sell/make a profit from a product, then every failed or unprofitable business is definitionally not capitalist. If you own a means of production, employ workers for wages to work those means of production, and those workers create a product you sell for profit (Subsidized or no), you're a capitalist. If you own a means of production but work it yourself and don't employ workers (A family farm for instance), then you're neither capitalist or working class. You're somewhere in the middle. The video should have been titled "Why farmers have it worse off in capitalism," and socialism shouldn't really have come into the picture.

You make quality content but maybe this is the difference in warm temperate farming in the Southern United States and in the UK. Corporations are most definately buying up small farms in the US. Chemical, seed and biotech are all strategizing capture games on rural America. Really just w@rfare morphology.

... we reject the socialist label because it doesn't fit whatsoever. I'll speak for myself but I'm capitalistic in nature and I know other farmer who are the same. I think you se capitalism as wanting to be rich. Capitalism is not its about meritocracy. Ofcourse the market as it is is terrible for farming but that's why we find better ways to sell our produce. Some of us create shops so we don't have to deal with big enterprises, some of us sell to restaurants and others process their product into jams salad mixes etc. Most farmers hate that they live on subsidies. Whats wrong with the current market is that we are forced to obey certain climate laws while other countries aren't so they can produce more than us a sell for cheaper.

In marxist term. Contemporary farmers are in fact capitalists, they are petty-bourgeois, as they essentialize own and control their own capital, like an artisan does.

If farmers hire people and machinery to work on their own private land, to produce goods that the land owner will negotiate on the market, how is this not capitalist? You might be a small capitalist, with not enough cash flow to differentiate you much from your workers, but the way you make your living is essentially different from them. That makes farmers capitalists.

Farming would be more interesting if maintaining rural infrastructure was an easy choice when we go to making investments. Instead of paying our taxes. As social appeal. For engineering.

Colonial ideal shepherd. The way forward is so far removed from the dominoes they have laid.

They are, and it's a good thing.

What a weak argument. Other businesses don’t face the same exigencies as farming? I beg to differ. Also, soil is inexhaustible? The hell it is.

Using land for solar panels is stupid we dont have enough land for houses and farms . We learnt the hard way the reliance on others for oil /gas yet we are doing the same thing with food . Each house, industrial and retail building should have its own solar not the fields.

Planting durians can make you a multi millionaire.

Interesting. Looking to permaculture a nut and fruit orchard.

Neither are those who work for themselves unless they want to be.

Great video Oli, keep up the good work!

Industrial Agribusiness 👀

Socialism is not when no capitalist. Farmers are just that farmers. They own their own land. They don’t share it with other farmers.

Longer time lines and higher levels of risk, does not make it any less capitalist

There is also the fact farmers have for some time relied on Socialism in the form of farm subsidies for their security.

Loved this analysis. However, I have a key point of disagreement at 12:01 where the fact that farmers (i.e middle peasants) own the land, which is their means of production, is used to argue that farmers are socialists by definition. But this argument is wrong on two aspects: 1) the farmer does extract surplus value and does intend to use said surplus value to expand production i.e participates in self-exploitation because of complete entanglement with the 'commodity form'. 2) Middle peasants are akin to petit-bourgeois self-employed workshop owners. This form of 'petit-bourgeois socialism' is a system that seeks to reverse (or perhaps, prevent) the natural course of development of capitalism which tends towards greater centralisation of capital ( i.e. industrial large-scale farming) while the scientific socialist vision is to use this central tendency of capitalism to its own advantage.

This guy(book author) was realy short sighted on his understandi g of soil health and human biological integrity. They take human health and pound the round peg into a square hole and call it a match.

If farming is so unprofitable, why are yeoman farmers still around? As per acre productivity have rose and food prices fallen, cutting out margins, why should smallholder farmers be supported by subsidies? Since farming has fallen the 1870s, hunger has also declined and food security improved anyways

You are no taking into consideration, that a modern society provision is made, to the support farmers with subsidies. Thus ironing-out the worst wrinkles. Also the structure of UK farming is still feudal and can't be use as a general standard.