Whats the evidence that suggests that in fact small farms are more productive?
Peter Rosset: Here at the Institute for Food and Development Policy, we’ve reviewed the data from every country for which it’s available, comparing the productivity of smaller farms versus larger farms. By productivity, I mean the total output of agricultural products per unit area — per acre or hectare. For every country for which data is available, smaller farms are anywhere from 200 to 1,000 percent more productive per unit area. The myth of the greater productivity of larger farms stems in part from the confusing use of the term “yield” to measure productivity. Yield is how much of a single crop you can get per unit area — for example, bushels of soy beans per acre. That’s a measure that’s only relevant to monocultures. A monoculture is when a single crop is grown in a field, rather than the kind of mixtures of crops and animals that small farmers have. When you grow one crop all by itself, you may get a lot of that one crop, but you’re not using the ecological space — the land
