This dynamic changes if they are growing produce to manufacture value added,preserves items.
If you are producing cheese, or tomato sauce, or pesto, for example, the farming activity makes a lot more sense financially. Trying to grow and sell produce is a non-starter. If you can turn it into a shelvable, in-demand, item you can diversify and greatly increase or even just capture profit that you would normally lose.
As I mentioned, diversity is key. You can just deal in one or a few crops. You have to have a range of crops and value added products distributed to a variety of markets and you need to be selling directly.
We have some ultra small farms working here in Ohio doing very well and many have been for generations. It's damn near foolish to shop Kroger for produce here. I know I don't. Not until the ice hits.
Even producing value-added items is a lot of work and mostly a labour of love than of business and this is assuming you have all the stuff you need available around you. These farms in Ohio are the outliers, even here in Florida, where you can technically grow almost the whole year, small farms are rare and usually pretty close to the big cities, most of the time serving as tourist destinations.
If you're going to make cheese, you'll need a lot of cows (even for cheap cheese you'd need at least 10 liters of milk to get to a kilo of cheese) or someone near you that produces enough milk for you to buy and make cheese out of it.
Food production is a heavily specialized, mechanized and complicated job, you need a lot of support and resources around you even for basic canning and dairy products. And then you also have to figure out a way to sell these products to someone at a price they're willing to pay.
It's not by accident you'll see areas heavily focused on specific products (like Winsconsin and cheese) because everyone is, intentionally or not, pooling resources and creating the infrastructure to make it all possible.
There's a traditional soft cheese that is a staple where I'm from in Brazil that is made like queso fresco, but we mix in clarified butter at the end of the cook (it's called butter cheese/queijo de manteiga) that is at risk of disappearing because it's getting harder and harder to produce it locally due to the lack of milk producers and other infrastructure as most milk production has moved elsewhere.
> There's a traditional soft cheese that is a staple where I'm from in Brazil that is made like queso fresco, but we mix in clarified butter at the end of the cook (it's called butter cheese/queijo de manteiga) that is at risk of disappearing because it's getting harder and harder to produce it locally due to the lack of milk producers and other infrastructure as most milk production has moved elsewhere.
are there no vertically integrated cheese production there ? If there is demand for milk why cow farmers are moving away?
Because due to climate change and human action the land has been drying up over the past 50 years and it's not economical to raise cattle there anymore.
If you are producing cheese, or tomato sauce, or pesto, for example, the farming activity makes a lot more sense financially. Trying to grow and sell produce is a non-starter. If you can turn it into a shelvable, in-demand, item you can diversify and greatly increase or even just capture profit that you would normally lose.
As I mentioned, diversity is key. You can just deal in one or a few crops. You have to have a range of crops and value added products distributed to a variety of markets and you need to be selling directly.
We have some ultra small farms working here in Ohio doing very well and many have been for generations. It's damn near foolish to shop Kroger for produce here. I know I don't. Not until the ice hits.