Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

salon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 102 posts

Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#51

Post by digler999 »

briandear wrote: post #47
cmurf wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google: 'sugar subsidies''corn subsidies''milk subsidies' In particular, sugar should be taxed like tobacco, with a sin tax, rather than subsidized. But that's not what we do.

Why should sugar be taxed? Why not just eliminate sin taxes altogether? You people that want to tax everything that you feel isn't "good" is just obnoxious. There's something called freedom. Ridiculous nanny state proponents that want to use taxes to discourage behaviors that they consider 'bad' yet like to consider themselves 'pro choice' or interested in 'diversity.' --except when they disagree with those choices.…

> Everything should either be taxed equally or by at all.

So cigarettes and alcohol should be taxed equally with baby formula ?

Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#52

Post by [deleted] »

asuffield wrote: post #30
TulliusCicero wrote: post #4

Duh. Do these people just forget about the principle of economies of scale? How do they think they can possibly compete against huge factory farms? I can understand if you're doing a small farm 'for fun', but don't understand how an otherwise intelligent person can think they can (or should be able to) make good money from it. > As the average age of the American farmer neared 65, I knew young farmers were badly need…

> How do they think they can possibly compete against huge factory farms? As with so many of these things, there's this idea floating around that the factory farms must be "bad" because they are big and wealthy, and that smaller, less efficient farms must be "good" because they are small and poor. Much like with all the other cases, this idea is somewhere between confused and blatant denial of reality. Money is the u…

[deleted]

Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#53

Post by TeMPOraL »

briandear wrote: post #47
cmurf wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google: 'sugar subsidies''corn subsidies''milk subsidies' In particular, sugar should be taxed like tobacco, with a sin tax, rather than subsidized. But that's not what we do.

Why should sugar be taxed? Why not just eliminate sin taxes altogether? You people that want to tax everything that you feel isn't "good" is just obnoxious. There's something called freedom. Ridiculous nanny state proponents that want to use taxes to discourage behaviors that they consider 'bad' yet like to consider themselves 'pro choice' or interested in 'diversity.' --except when they disagree with those choices.…

> There's something called freedom.

There's also something called short-sightedness, which involves people exercising their freedom to predictably do stupid things to themselves and those around them. There's also this concept of "coordination problems", which explains how people choosing out of self-interest what looks like the best for them, when aggregated, end up creating misery for everyone, including themselves.

Then finally there's this realization that life is a PvP game, not PvE. There are countless of professionals who earn their living by convincing you to exercise your freedom in a way that hurts you. Many have near-infinite budgets and apply state-of-the-art technology and research into psychology and neuroscience to achieve their malicious goals. (Surprisingly, this is not only legal, but also considered a respectable career path.)

Given all that, it's naïve to expect that a civilization, especially as complex as ours, will run itself well if you just leave everyone to do anything and everything they want.

I'm not saying that sugar tax in particular is a good idea. But there are many benefits in taxing specific things, and we're all better off because of them.

Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#54

Post by knughit »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #21
SwellJoe wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the danger in our agricultural policy is that large farms are favored (through subsidies, tax breaks, regulation, etc.) to an extent that small farms can't exist profitably, even charging higher prices at market. While there is a minimum viable farm size (given the need for modern machinery to automate the process), most likely, it probably isn't nearly as large as what our current set of incentives enforces.…

I don't think that small-scale farming can regain its position of a significant contributor to the food production. And even if it could, I'm not sure that it should. Food production scales up nicely, and it has many other potential benefits than just being cheaper. Say we fixed incentives that promote low-quality food (we have to do it either way, since small farmers are as much incentivized to sell crap as big ones…

Why do you assume a random DuPont agriculturalist, who pushes papers all day, understands food better than a professional farmer our their in the empirical field?

Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#55

Post by crdoconnor »

asuffield wrote: post #30
TulliusCicero wrote: post #4

Duh. Do these people just forget about the principle of economies of scale? How do they think they can possibly compete against huge factory farms? I can understand if you're doing a small farm 'for fun', but don't understand how an otherwise intelligent person can think they can (or should be able to) make good money from it. > As the average age of the American farmer neared 65, I knew young farmers were badly need…

> How do they think they can possibly compete against huge factory farms? As with so many of these things, there's this idea floating around that the factory farms must be "bad" because they are big and wealthy, and that smaller, less efficient farms must be "good" because they are small and poor. Much like with all the other cases, this idea is somewhere between confused and blatant denial of reality. Money is the u…

>If people really cared about their food coming from small, inefficient, "organic" farms then they would pay for what it really costs to produce food in that manner. The fact that people aren't willing to pay for it tells us that they don't actually care as much as they claimed. This is normal: most people will tell you they care deeply about something up until the point when you ask them to open their wallet, and then they remember that they don't care all that much.

Logically speaking either this is bullshit or everybody who has ever said that they are struggling to give up smoking is lying.

Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#56

Post by crdoconnor »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #4

Duh. Do these people just forget about the principle of economies of scale? How do they think they can possibly compete against huge factory farms? I can understand if you're doing a small farm 'for fun', but don't understand how an otherwise intelligent person can think they can (or should be able to) make good money from it. > As the average age of the American farmer neared 65, I knew young farmers were badly need…

>If they're truly in demand, one would expect wages or profits to signal that.

Unless tax breaks lobbied for by the large agricultural conglomerates distorted the market.

Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#57

Post by knughit »

mysterypie wrote: post #41

The typical family farmer in the U.S. is a millionaire because of assets . They have poor earnings and they whine a lot, but they are sitting on top of land, tractors, and buildings worth millions. The average U.S. farmer could cash out, buy a house in Miami, and never work a day again in their lives. But they don't do so. They apparently like the country lifestyle and continue their struggle even though they don't h…

Is that true? They don't have mortgages?

Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#58

Post by marshray »

analog31 wrote: post #16

...we gained no equity because we didn’t own the land... Farming on rented land seems like the original Uber. You're workers, with no guarantee of even minimum wage. A couple of friends in the restaurant business have told me: Never open a restaurant if you don't own the building.

I remember a great sandwich shop (Sadlack's in Chapel Hill if anyone remembers).

The building owners kicked them out and opened a similarly-themed restaurant with a very very similar menu. Even the names of the sandwiches were heavily derivative.

Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#59

Post by mysterypie »

knughit wrote: post #57
mysterypie wrote: post #41

The typical family farmer in the U.S. is a millionaire because of assets . They have poor earnings and they whine a lot, but they are sitting on top of land, tractors, and buildings worth millions. The average U.S. farmer could cash out, buy a house in Miami, and never work a day again in their lives. But they don't do so. They apparently like the country lifestyle and continue their struggle even though they don't h…

Is that true? They don't have mortgages?

The average farm family has owned it for generations. The Salon couple is atypical in that they got into the business rather than inheriting it.

Re: What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

#60

Post by knughit »

tejohnso wrote: post #32

Six thousand pounds of food on a tenth of an acre bringing in $20,000/yr. How's that for scaling down? http://urbanhomestead.org/urban-homestead

Ate you saying that $20k/year is a good living? For how many people? You can't even get family health insurance for that.
Post reply on HN