Edited by EmanuelaBrolandi ()
or if you like farms and rice n shit
edit: Oops hey if you wanna be let out just yknow, let's chat
Edited by swampman ()
they dont make em like they used to
might look into more moveable growing techniques for next year as well as structures like polytunnels since the weather has been very extreme.
i guess i'll look at space buckets or an indoor growing setup depending on where i'm living over winter
this is my favorite bit so far
It follows, then, that the price of land may rise or fall inversely as the interest rate rises or falls if we assume ground-rent to be a constant magnitude. If the ordinary interest rate should fall from 5% to 4%, then the annual ground-rent of £200 would represent the annual realisation from a capital of £5,000 instead of £4,000. The price of the same piece of land would thus have risen from £4,000 to £5,000, or from 20 years' to 25 years' purchase. The converse would take place in the opposite case. This is a movement of the price of land which is independent of the movement of ground-rent itself and regulated only by the interest rate.
But as we have seen that the rate of profit has a tendency to fall in the course of social progress, and, therefore, the interest rate has the same tendency, so far as it is regulated by the rate of profit; and that, furthermore, the interest rate shows a tendency to fall in consequence of the growth of loanable capital, apart from the influence of the rate of profit, it follows that the price of land has a tendency to rise, even independently of the movement of ground-rent and the prices of the products of the land, of which rent constitutes a part.
As in marx as now the main classes are Landowner – capitalist (tenant) farmer – farm labourer
Thinking about the various situations there are -
1. Landowners who collect ground-rent from Tenant (capitalist) farmers on the land they own
2. Landlords who are also capitalist farmers – capitalist farmers who are also landlords (owning land outright)
a. “in house” landlord-capitalist farmers (hiring own labour, no tenancy)
b. contract based landlord-capitalist farmers (contracting out to other capitalist farmers who do not either own or have tenancy rights on the land)
NB. (small) capitalist farmers paying mortgages (operating in a system of “modern” serfdom “the urban usurer replaced the feudal one, the mortgage replaced the feudal obligation” - 18th Brumarie) are common (see below)
3. Landowners who farm their land but do not hire labour (they may and often do extract surplus value from their family) - they own the farm (or maybe more precisely the bank owns the farm due to the mortgage see “modern serfdom” above) but hire no additional labour – the “family farm” - dying out
4. Tenant (capitalist) farmers (no land ownership)
5. farm labourers (proletarians employed in agriculture)
(bare in mind that there is huge variation within these classes e.g. a landord-capitalist farmer may hire one person or may be hiring 10+ in a huge pig farm or something)
so maybe this should be landowner – landowner-capitalist farmer – capitalist (tenant) farmer – (agricultural) proletarian and somewhere the “family farm” fits into that
Obviously these are all subject to a general trend for the accumulation of land in fewer and fewer hands – the smaller capitalist-landowning (almost always mortgaged) farmers and the dying non-hiring “family farm” have a general tendency to be swallowed up by the big landowners (1 and 2) and be pushed into either tenant (capitalist) farmers or proletarians
On the subject of mortgages, because most small capitalist farmers, family farmers etc posses little free money capital and most equipment, buildings, improvements etc require (very) large capital investments – enormous mortgages are very common and this then drives people to sell up, often to large estates.
Accumulation of land, rising prices,
Who really owns Britain?, Country Life, 16 Nov 2010 posted:At the beginning of the past decade, an acre of decent, but not outstanding farmland, was worth about £2,500 per acre. Since then, prices have grown steeply and, according to our farmland index, now sits at £5,769 an acre-£7,000 per acre is not uncommon.’ Savills’ market research paints a similar rosy picture, with prices of £9,000 an acre being achieved from prime arable land in the South-West this year and £9,600 per acre for prime dairy land in the North-West. And, although fewer than 100,000 acres of farmland a year are now traded in England, leading estate agents are starting to notice subtle changes in the sort of people buying prime agricultural or sporting property.
http://www.countrylife.co.uk/articles/who-really-owns-britain-20219
looking at that quite from Marx I posted earlier, this is as expected with interest rates at “record lows” and a general trend of declining interest rates from around 1980. the UK base rate has fallen steadily from 16% in July 1980 to 0.25% in 2016 (http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/boeapps/iadb/Repo.asp)
Figures wise its hard to find useful stuff, the UK state collects loads of data which is really fucking useless and little that is decent:
in 2002/3 the mean farm size was 56.6ha, and yet the number of farms under 50ha was 225,000 of 303,000 (74% below “average”). tenant farmers farmed 32% of the land but represented only 18% of farmers and 100% of them would be better off expropriating that land from the parasitic landowner class
Thinking of round me the whole area is dominated by large estates, the smallest I can think of is 3,000 acres. None of them are owned by aristocratic descendants (although these are very frequent c1/3rd of farmland, also see the National Trust, the Ministry of Defense), they're all capital investments and some of them are land that has been amassed relatively recently - marx's theories in action. The biggest one I can think of has only tenant farms and owns three whole villages. The middle one is all farmed “in house” by proletarians with no tenants rights. The small one has 1 or 2 tenants and the rest is contracted out – the landowner pays a capitalist farmer a set price to farm the land and then takes the grain etc. to sell itself. Dotted in between are a few landowner-capitalist farmer farms and the odd “family farm”
Thinking through all this I can really see Marx's three way conflict between landowners – capitalist farmers and proletarianised farm workers and writing this has been really useful to me and probably full of mistakes and very boring to anyone else but i thought id post it anyway.
capital vol 3, chap 37 posted:That Mr. Lavergne is not only familiar with the economic achievements of English agriculture, but also subscribes to the prejudices of the English tenants and landlords, is shown on page 48:
"One great drawback attends cereals generally ... they exhaust the soil which bears them."
Not only does Mr. Lavergne believe that other plants do not do so, but also believes that fodder crops and root crops enrich the soil:
"Forage plants derive from the atmosphere the principal elements of their growth, while they give to the soil more than they take from it; thus both directly and by their conversion into animal manure contributing in two ways to repair the mischief done by cereals and exhausting crops generally; one principle, therefore, is that they should at least alternate with these crops; in this consists the Norfolk rotation" (pp. 50, 51).
No wonder that Mr. Lavergne, who believes these English rustic fairy-tales, also believes that the wages of English farm labourers have lost their former abnormality since the duties on corn have been lifted.
Of course farmers, those believers in “rustic fairy-tales” have known for hundreds of years that rotating in leguminous crop like clover increases the soil fertility through their symbiotic relationship with nirtrogen fixing bacteria so take that Marx learn some shit about crops, owned.
Edited by tears ()
They were quite excited about pope Francis's edict which says that nature is sacred.
As i was my thoughts were 'rose weird would like this'
Here is the blog of the guy leading it, very knowledgeable
https://lichenfoxie.wordpress.com
http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html
roseweird posted:the next day i got this: subject line: Evil; body: Do you think humans are inherently good or evil? Sorry, random question. i didn't realize who it was and thinking it was spam i googled the sender's email address and found a youtube channel with every 'tourettes guy' video at the top of the favorites list.
Edited by tears ()