http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/05/bill-black-free-markets-mean-zero-economic-profit-or-a-99-pro...
The article is worth a read but mostly on a different topic, worth the read anyway.
But it was the title got me to thinking about Time's assertion that over time renting land is a 0% venture- which intuitively and by experience I believe to be fairly true.
As I've said often, the intellectual foundations of the reigning Chicago school of economic thought are in agriculture and from the periods studied, say, the '30s through '60s, most of the required conditions of a free market did exist there.
But even into the present tense I'm thinking that, like Schutz' work on hogs, this fact tends to prove some of the basic assertions of the nature of markets.
That doesn't mean that somebody doesn't make money renting- you can be better than average (probably not by a lot) and you can be luckier (weather can be highly localized and while your production may be good/bad it doesn't greatly effect either the price received or the rental market). But for everybody that is better than average there is somebody below (that's a mathy thing) and many near the mean.
That's why I regard the current state of things- where policies driven to the terminus of neoliberal economic thought have made the multi-thousand acre rental crop operation the standard, are destined to fail. Or more accurately, can only survive if the participants have enough political power to insure policies will always evolve to provide a safety net that is sufficient to keep a majority in business.
The good news is that in this current alignment the "farmer" has many powerful political allies- primarily their input suppliers, lenders etc., who need their farmer cows well enough tended to keep giving milk.
Until recently we've on a 3X milking schedule with large doses of BSE. But running with that metaphor, in those sort of setups the average productive lifespan of the cows is less than 2 lactations.
