From Gene Logsdon at the Land Institute:
Gene Logsdon, of the Prairie Writers' Circle
After 70 years spent in agriculture, doing everything from milking a hundred cows when a hundred cows was a really big herd, to being a staff editor for The Farm Journal when The Farm Journal was a really big magazine, I have concluded that farming can’t make any real money. If we would only admit it, we might find a way to solve the farm problem.
If you don’t believe that farming is intrinsically unprofitable, try it. Rent or buy some farm land, rent or buy some equipment, rent or buy someone at a living wage to do the work, then put out a crop of corn, soybeans, cotton or any other major market commodityexcept, maybe, marijuana. I defy you at year’s end to show me one penny of real profit. There’s more profit in making bread wrappers than in growing wheat to put in them. If you decide to do the farming work yourself, you may make a slight return on your labor, but that is not what a good capitalist calls profit.
What appears to be profit from farming is financial gain from the increase in the value of land or other investments. Owning land or stocks usually pays off at least for your heirs. Farming is not a moneymaking proposition in an industrial economy. Never was, never will be.
That’s why governments of industrial countriesunder conservative or liberal parties, under capitalistic or socialistic systemssubsidize agriculture one way or another. Even marijuana is subsidized indirectly. Make it legal and pot will become as unprofitable as corn. Cotton was profitable when slaves did the work. Dairying and tobacco appear profitable sometimes because these enterprises demand long, skilled, “overtime” hours (a farmer never gets paid overtime) which the farmer does not value properly and does not count into his labor costs. For reasons that not even psychiatry can figure out, some of us will often farm for free just for the pleasure of working ourselves to death. We all really should be seeing shrinks, but we can’t afford to.
Why is farming by its very nature unprofitable? The answer is easy, but no one will accept the implications. The way money grows is not the way plants, animals and humans grow. Corn or sheep grow at their own sweet rate, whether interest rates are 3 percent or 15 percent. That’s why in pastoral societies all interest on money was considered usurious and sinful. The demands of exponential money growth are lethal to a pastoral economy.
The way manufacturing produces goods is not the way nature produces goods. A farmer can’t “gear up” or “gear down” a corn field, or change it to a wheat field half way through the production year to meet new shifts in the market economy. Nor does unpredictable weather have a direct, day-to-day crucial influence on factory production as it does on farm production. Likewise, a factory can heedlessly extract product out of raw material knowing it will be years, even centuries, before the raw material runs out. In farming what you extract from the soil you better replace, and quickly, or yields decline. Because you must return to the soil what you take from it, where, in a capitalistic sense, is the profit going to come from?…”
The Bovine 
What if we all went back to living the way our ancestors did where we just farm for ourselves to be as self sufficient as possible. I know this is not practical at this time in our culture, but I have started buying food from a man who was in the agri-business and now grow non hybrid foods for restaurants and people who pay a certain amount for 13 weeks or the entire year and have a weekly pick-up. I think interplanting of a variety of foods is much better than growing one crop over and over. Sue
You realize Mr. Logsdon likely wrote this to generate all the comments about how it can be profitable. Go read “10 Acres Enough” from the 19th century (available for free from Google books, btw). Why were farmers in NJ profitable then and no one is today? Government policy & regulations. That is the bottom line. And all that policy & regulation makes it impossible to get into farming without debt, or at all (try selling cheese, bread, or jam made in your kitchen….or lemonade for that matter!!) due to the ridiculous regulations.
Of course, most people are adverse to or incapable of doing work these days.
I understand the Amish have figured out how to make farming work economically speaking. And among biodynamic circles, one common strategy, as popularized in America by Trauger Groh, is to incorporate more post processing into the product and to sell it direct to consumers. One could argue that it’s the post processing and the marketing that are making the money, not so much the farming, however.
Agree. But it is the post processing that is heavily regulated. It is how farmers often made extra money in centuries past.
We have an “Amish” community near here (actually, they are just “plain” people, not Amish). But people flock from miles around to buy their products. Great marketing. They have a bakery & cannery as well. Their monthly monetary & capital requirements are small compared to “modern” people and so they can live on lower incomes than many. They don’t drive cars, don’t wire or plumb their homes, etc. Their homes are inexpensive to build as a consequence. And they have not electric bills, water bills, etc. They can survive well on an annual income of $15K and are relatively wealthy when they double or triple that.