Re:
Posted: Thu May 13, 2010 1:34 pm
My Mum runs a small holding (40 acres). Breaks even on the produce but makes small fortune in UK and EU subsidies for planting a tree or having a wooden gate instead of a metal one. Farming strikes me as a national scam, and farmers are fantastic at exploiting every last penny that is available."GodalmingYellow" wrote:Inefficient use of land?"SmileyMan" wrote:I was actually joking, of course. I like a joke before I go hunting gay babies with foxes (is that right? I can never keep up with the latest stereotype)"GodalmingYellow" wrote: Oi!
Actually I have a dream of owning a rural self sufficient small holding. I'm all for localism.
The interesting question is, should you be encouraged or discouraged from your smallholding? On the one hand, it's a really inefficient use of land, but it's environmentally pretty sound.
I like the liberal capitalist view - try and regulate behaviour through the creation of artificial "markets" to prevent a tragedy of the commons. If they stopped fucking around with carbon trading, we could be reducing CO2 pollution already.
I would have thought that use of sufficent land to be self supporting is entirely efficient use.
Don't even get me started on environmental issues...