Hawaii Condominium Farms

In the 1970s, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz told America’s farmers to “Get big or get out!”  Since Butz issued his proclomation, farms have been getting bigger,and farmers have been getting fewer.

Earl Butz was right.  Farmers do need to get big or get out – if they are growing commodities.  In the commodity marketplace, whoever grows the most commodities for the least amount of money tends to win the consumer dollars.  Therefore commodity farmers really do need to get big in order to realize their maximum economies of scale.

But wait! How do commodity crops address the need of hungry city people for real food, grown in real soil, by real farmers?  Can you imagine a neighbor pounding on your door to show you a tomato he purchased that was grown on a 10,000 acre industrial farm with millions of other tomatoes.  Not likely!

When it comes to the high-value foods city people love to tell their neighbors about, it really is not necessary for farmers to get big or get out to make a decent living.  In fact, small parcels of land, located close to the hungry metropolitan marketplace, can be made to be perfectly suitable.

That is the formula real estate developer Peter Savio used to convert Hawaii’s defunct sugarcane and pineapple plantations into very profitable, and very small, condominium farms.  And so we ask the man with the plan: How can an unprofitable big farm be converted into
profitable small farms?

Leave a comment: Can unprofitable big farms be converted into profitable small farms?

Tune in here, for the syndicated Michael Olson Food Chain Radio Show #1375 October 18, 2024 Saturday 9AM Pacific