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

But I think many readers would have an intuitive sense that if you're going to try to go into business selling products whose prices are set not by local buyers like restaurants but rather giant exchanges --- and for commodity crops, that's been the case for much of the last century! --- you're going to need all the economies of scale you can get, because your only axis of competition in those markets is "price".

It's for similar reasons that we tend not to be as concerned with the plight of small family oil well operators.

This article isn't lamenting the fate of small family cotton farmers, or even small alfalfa farmers. They're outraged that it's impossible for small vegetable farmers to make a living.

What moved me to comment is that I think they're wrong about that, and, in the fashion of many Salon-featured essays, are substituting the experiences of "mid-20s-to-early-30s" dilettantes for those of family farmers for whom this is a life-defining vocation.

From the time that my grandfather homesteaded in 1911, productivity of all farms, large and small, increased by almost two orders of magnitude over the next 50 years. Increases in technology, including mechanical, chemical, and electrical drove the price of wheat and other crops down.

So it is simply a matter of scale. It should surprise no one on hn. For me, my parents saw the writing on the wall and sent me off to engineering school. There is some romance associated with "going back to the land" but you know we haven't been there all that long.

What I wonder, in the sense of sustainability, if the ecology of the earth will be able to withstand the savage damage caused by agriculture.

I agree that their agendas are often problematic, but then again people can't exactly be trusted to decide what's good for them either. Regulating food may be too much, but check out things like e.g. vaccines, effectiveness of which depends on everyone who can taking them, whether they like it or not. For the most prominent examples of people who absolutely should not be let to decide what they can or cannot do, see drivers. The flippant attitude to traffic laws is what causes lots of unnecessary deaths and injuries, as well as economic losses in unnecessary traffic jams.

> If it costs 'society' more, then charge people for the actual cost at the time the cost is incurred.

It's complicated. Sometimes charging at the point of purchase is exactly the right way. For instance, taxing fuel is a good idea, because it's directly related to the environmental damage it causes. A CO₂ emission tax would be a great way to internalize the cost of externalities, have the price reflect the true costs for everyone.

Other times, it may be a choice between what's "most free" and what's most effective. You're right that as a responsible person you should not be punished for irresponsible actions of the few. It seems fair to put the cost of e.g. alcoholism on the people who actually suffer from it. But I'd argue that in practice, it's too late. The goal should not be to wait for the irresponsible people to get in trouble, but to prevent them from it in the first place. Prevention is more effective than a cure; not to mention that there's no point in charging an alcoholic extra for treating liver failure - they won't be able to pay it anyway.

By the way, how is the society supposed to know that you are the responsible person and you won't become an alcoholic? It can't. Some people become alcoholics every year and others don't, but we can't tell beforehand who will be in which group. So the simple approach will be probabilistic - assuming that everyone has the expected-number-of-alcoholics/total-alcohol-consumers probability of becoming one, and taxing this fraction of the costs out of everyone. Where to best put that tax? On alcohol purchase directly; that way you fairly exclude people who don't drink at all, and thus will never cause costs to other people because of an alcohol problem. Could we make it "more fair"? Probably, by means of making it more complicated. But complicated means overhead and inefficiency, which is something you want to limit too.

Finally, I disagree with the idea that the government has no business telling you what you can or cannot do. I get that it has to be limited as much as possible for citizens to be happy, but in the end, bossing people around is the sole and only reason we have a government. It's their raison d'être. Solving coordination problems and seeking globally optimal outcomes involves infringing on peoples' individual freedoms - or to turn it around, living in a society involves giving up some of individual freedoms. It's the so-called social contract.