Small-Scale Farming is About to Change Forever

How Small Farmers Will Have to Adapt to the End of Cheap Money

Here’s a long-ish excerpt from my book, First Generation Farming, that I think is one of the more important takeaways from the text:

…alternative agribusiness was able to make some headway with consumers anyway owing to artificially-elevated spending power that is rapidly vanishing. You may recognize this for what it is: plain old luxury marketing appealing to peoples’ desire to be elite. The difference between farm-to-table and, say, Rolls Royce, is a simple matter of honesty: the latter doesn’t pretend that an ideal world consisting of a Rolls in every garage is possible or even desirable.

Farm-to-table, on the other hand, has the mind-bending task of convincing people that the commodities it produces are, in fact, luxury items. It accomplishes this by a.) proclaiming its vision of an ideal world where everyone’s eating hugel-grown carrots and pasture-raised chicken at a 3X price premium, and b.) suggesting this ideal world doesn’t exist because most people — but not you — are too stingy to pay the real price of food. Farm-to-table threads a tiny needle of buyer psychology: you’re not paying 3X the price of food because the product is 3X better (as is the case with e.g. luxury cars); you’re paying it because it costs 3X more to be a part of “the…