Economy of scale is a myth, nice video but all I see is high costs and high deprecation
Not saying your wrong because I've never been a big farmer but as I see it their costs and breakages are massive with lower attention to detail compared the the smaller owner operator/family farms...says the small farmer
What you don't see in the video is how many tens of thousands of acres they cut each year with that lot. High costs spread over a massive area = lower cost per acre.
It might be lower cost , it might not be, do you know for certain?...says the small farmer
What you don't see in the video is how many tens of thousands of acres they cut each year with that lot. High costs spread over a massive area = lower cost per acre.
It might be lower cost , it might not be, do you know for certain?
Interesting to speculate how they would have fared if any or all of those acres were hit by that snowfall just before harvest. That's when economy of scale falls down.
Not saying your wrong because I've never been a big farmer but as I see it their costs and breakages are massive with lower attention to detail compared the the smaller owner operator/family farms
I don't know if they publish their accounts. But from what I've seen farms running one big combine on around 2000 acres seem to be very efficientLoss of attention to detail is the main pitfall. To get the benefits of scale you have to keep things simple and big. Block cropping, efficient field shapes etc. There's an optimum size for max sustainable profit per acre and it's not measured in many thousands. From what I've seen it's the 800-1800 acre arable units where you have the best of both worlds.
The only big farming operation I can think of in your part of the world is Brixworth. Do they publish their figures? How do they compare to yours per acre?
I have a feeling (though I don't know for certain) that the reason why these big farms are put together into gigantic farms (by our standards) is more sophisticated then pure cheapest cost per acre.Do you?
Yes, you can have diseconomies of scale, usually when you've got a lot of overcapacity, too many layers of management and a lack of attention to detail.
How do you suppose silage contractors work? Why can't you justify your own silage making kit? Because a self propelled chopper or big forage wagon doing many many farms/year can do it cheaper. Explain to me why the food retail sector is dominated by a few big players? Asda, Sainsburys, Tesco, Waitrose, Aldi & Lidl control 80% of that market.
You'd either be lucky enough that it was all gathered in before the snow or none of it at all. Do I feel lucky?