Who is actually feeding the world?

In poking around, I found this website, which I find fascinating: https://grain.org/article/entries/4929-hungry-for-land-small-farmers-feed-the-world-with-less-than-a-quarter-of-all-farmland

This is compiled data on
small vs large farms, how much land they cover, and what they produce, coming to the conclusion that small farms produce the majority of the world’s food, on a small proportion of the total farmland.
This is an interesting conclusion to say the least, and I feel like there is a fair bit to dig into. “Small” has a variable definition depending on the country, but in many places we are talking just over 2 hectares, or 5 acres.
Now, small does not automatically mean “regenerative”. This particular website doesn’t go into methods, and I imagine many small farms use commercial fertilizer and pest control, although obviously it is hard to generalize accross the globe.
However, it often seems that, in discussions on permaculture, we fall into the habit of pitting permaculture against “big ag” - as in, how many calories of corn do you get from a 1000 acre farm in the midwestern USA, and how dies permaculture compare? What this data suggests to me is that this is an irrelevant comparison - if farms of less than 5 acres are producing most of the food worldwide, how do permaculture techniques stack up against standard methods at the 5 acre scale? Or even better “what can permaculture offer to the small farmers who are feeding the world?” Because while permaculture techniques simply don’t translate to large scale ag, they do quite well at the <5 acre scale.
Just food for thought!

I skimmed the article, and indeed it covers the topic well! Your questions are good too.

What really stands out to me, is how different a picture this is of the world food system than the one I had in my head. When imagining permaculture as a system that could feed the world, I was imagining it as needing to replace a system of large farms, mostly machine operated. In other words, facing a farming and distribution system that was mutually exclusive with most permaculture systems.
This data suggests that my understanding was wrong. If most of the worlds food is produced on small farms to begin with, that means there is a network of farming and distribution that permaculture systems should have no trouble fitting into. It means that the small amount of land one permaculturist can work is a significant part of the food system, and that permaculture techniques should be able to successfully compete against the methods that are currently feeding the world.
Am I off base with that feeling?

Fascinating article!  Thank you for posting it  :D

I have two comments on your thoughts

 If most of the worlds food is produced on small farms to begin with, that means there is a network of farming and distribution that permaculture systems should have no trouble fitting into.

I think that really depends on the part of the world you are in. A small community in a rural country that has been producing their own food for generations will have a VERY different system of distribution than a person in a suburban area will encounter. Where the main distribution network is chain grocery stores it can be more creative to market there, as opposed to the town that has a big market twice a week and everyone in the area goes there.
There are some good solutions proposed in this thread started by Paul Wheaton how to get permaculture apples into safeway?

It means that the small amount of land one permaculturist can work is a significant part of the food system, and that permaculture techniques should be able to successfully compete against the methods that are currently feeding the world.

Yes. Absolutely. There are people who are doing so.
:D

Thank you Lina for starting this thread.
There's an ongoing discussion very similar in the cider press section, where only a few can comment.

When thinking about this question, I realized that there are three separate issues: For every farming system, what world population can it support, how many people can one single farmer support, and for how long.
Population support is not only feeding, but housing, caring, dressing, entertaining, learning, anything you name for a worthy life.

Industrial agriculture should be discarded from any discussion since it cannot last. Fossil fuels are going to decline sooner or later and we cannot count on them. The only question from the industrial agriculture that matters is how to make a smooth transition out of it.

So, what remains to study is: traditional farming (tilling + manure), regenerative farming, regenerative gardening, and forestry. And scale: backyard, small farm, large farm. Large scale is usually more efficient, but results in longer shelf time requirements and a more expensive infrastructure to maintain. It also has a higher entry cost, which can explain why the majority of the world food is still produced in small farms.

Probably a mix of techniques is what lies ahead. Forestry is low yielding but very low working, and this decreases the ratio of farmers. Small farming is low cost and works fine for most vegetables and poultry. Gardening is also low cost and very efficient in space and resources, but it's time consuming (it's great as a hobby though).

Abraham Palma wrote:

Probably a mix of techniques is what lies ahead. Forestry is low yielding but very low working, and this decreases the ratio of farmers. Small farming is low cost and works fine for most vegetables and poultry. Gardening is also low cost and very efficient in space and resources, but it's time consuming (it's great as a hobby though).

I like this setup! It sounds like you are putting “market gardening” more into the small farming category, which is reasonable, although the argument can be made either way.
I also wonder about the small farm production of staples: grains, oil crops and legumes. In the US most people don’t think of growing these on small farms because of the processing barrier, especially with grains and oil crops. However, I suspect this is not the case in other parts of the world. So - how is it done in less industrialized nations? Are there communal threshing machines/oil presses/bean cleaners? Or are there small, low tech machines that each farmer has to process their own 5 acres?
This is coming home to me. I have recently started small scale seed farming, and cleaning the seeds before sending them to the company is a real problem. I hand shelled about 10 lbs of southern peas last year, and that took significant time, especially during the busy harvest season!

The case I know about is olive oil. Practically no farmer mills his own olives. Most of them have a share in a co-op(erative). The co-op has milling and packing facilities. Then, co-ops have agreements with olive oil trademarks for selling the stuff to the big supermarket chains. In Jaen, where most cities live of olive oil production, there are two to three mills per city.
I guess you can have your own underused mill, your cheap not so higienical packing stuff and going to the trouble of selling your product where they can pay you more than the corporations, but farmers just want to focus on farming.

I think a century ago wheat was the same. Fields were harvested and processed collectively: threshing, milling, packaging. You needed to own a very large field to justify having your own equipment just for yourself. It might be the same today, just bigger machinery.
A fellow in the forum once told me that all that equipment is only needed when you want flour for baking. Grains can be harvested, roasted and eaten whole, and it's nutritious and healthy

Abraham Palma wrote:A fellow in the forum once told me that all that equipment is only needed when you want flour for baking. Grains can be harvested, roasted and eaten whole, and it's nutritious and healthy

That is certainly true, but milling is actually the easiest part to do at home. There are many small hand crank and electric mills on the market - I have one the size of a blender that more that keeps up with my needs.
Threshing and cleaning is where I run into issues. I haven’t seen any small scale equipment ready made for sale. Market opportunity?

The olive system sounds makes a lit of sense! Of course, that works best when there is a high density of one crop in an area. Generally, it seems like the co-op model is the way to go if you want to grow anything that needs cleaning/processing

This is another topic where G K Chesterton makes some great points.

God made a world of reason as sure as God made little apples (as the beautiful proverb goes); and God did not make little apples larger than large apples. It is not true that a man whose apple-tree is loaded with apples will suffer from a want of apples; though he may indulge in a waste of apples. But if he never looks upon apples as things to eat, but always looks on them as things to sell, he will really get into another sort of complication; which may end in a sort of contradiction. If, instead of producing as many apples as he wants, he produces as many apples as he imagines the whole world wants, with the hope of capturing the trade of the whole world – then he will be either successful or unsuccessful in competing with the man next door who also wants the whole world’s trade to himself. Between them, they will produce so many apples that apples in the market will be about as valuable as pebbles on the beach. Thus each of them will find he has very little money in his pocket, with which to go and buy fresh pears at the fruiterer’s shop. If he had never expected to get fruit at the fruiterer’s shop, but had put up his hand and pulled them off his own tree, his difficulty would never have arisen. It seems simple; but at the root of all apple-trees and apple-growing, it is really as simple as that.

Reflections on a Rotten Apple