What are some of the pros and cons of cash crops?

Question

What are some of the pros and cons of cash crops?

Answer 1

As opposed to? At what scale? To whom? You are asking the wrong question.

Most farmers have no choice but to go at least partly the cash crop route.

In this day and age, and for most of history, no farmer anywhere could live without any money whatsoever, so no farmer can live strictly on subsistence agriculture - there must be a source of cash.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_crop

Simple cash crops is one approach. It has the advantage of being the easiest but is generally the least remunerative if there are other options:

A. Because it depends on the weather, the same way subsistence crops do, the harvest is likely to be low just when it is needed most.

B. And, because of its reliance on the markets, if the crop can be raised elsewhere, it is generally not a steady source of income.

Nonetheless, cotton and tobacco were major cash crops in the early days of the U.S. and the results were exported all over the world.

The next step up is to add value to the harvest. It used to be, in the early days of the U.S. that getting corn to market was very hard - horse drawn wagons over dirt roads don't go all that fast. And the prices for corn were not all that good.

So the farmers made whiskey out of the corn and sold that instead. Three wagon-loads of corn made for one wagon-load of whiskey, but that one wagon-load was easier to transport and fetched a far higher price than the the equivalent corn. This approach is to not sell cash crops directly but to go the "value-added" route. When you can do it, it is much better.

(Of course, now that they had this money, the small farmers became a target for taxation which led to the Whiskey Rebellion (the large distillers, being rich urban folk, had more power in the government so their taxes were lower.):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Reb...

Other examples are selling not milk, which doesn't keep well, but cheese which does; not oranges, but orange juice concentrate; etc.

But all of these require capital investment and skills that are generally not available to most farmers today. So while this was a common way to get cash, it is much less so now.

Another approach is seasonal work. Particularly in the Northeast, with its shorter growing season, farmers would find other work - not related to farming- to do during the off-season. In New Hampshire and Vermont, this was sugaring (drawing the sap and making maple sugar for sale throughout the colonies). Further south it was lumbering and making forest products - lumber, furniture, etc.

In the old days, farmers were not dense on the ground and there was always plenty of work to do (the U.S. has had a major labor shortage for most of its history) so it was not hard to find seasonal work. Today, in the densely settled parts of the world, there clearly aren't enough jobs for those who want them.

On the other hand, large scale cash crops have major societal consequences and are generally not good for the individual farmer either.

The tendency is to go to a mono-culture which is not good for the land

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculture

and, from the farmers perspective, puts all his eggs in one fragile basket.

And there is the tendency to think in terms of monetary payoffs, return on investment and similar patterns. This is what broke the American family farm more than once.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_farm

and what is destroying our health.

As for the rest of us, who don't want to, or can't, spend our lives farming for our own food, we need cash crops so we can buy our food.

So while everyone recognizes that cash crops are necessary, the question is what kind of cash cropping makes sense. Lumping large-scale monoculture farming and diverse cash-crops together, by asking for the pros and cons of the "cash crops" misses all the important issues.