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Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

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Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#141

Post by TulliusCicero »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #140
TulliusCicero wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The economies of scale in agriculture have become so strong that there's no way to compete on price any other way. And people understandably don't want to double their grocery bills just to buy local. Doesn't sound like much of a problem to me. Those economies of scale mean cheaper food. > They mainly want to grow exactly the same small number of crops, to keep supply chains simple. Is there any evidence that varie…

“Is there any evidence that variety of, say, produce in markets/grocery stores is less now than a hundred years ago?” Not in markets, because a hundred years ago most people didn't get their produce from a market. They got it from their own gardens or the local farm. The issue here is that back then, there were lots and lots of different varieties of a given crop, all of them grown regionally. There are thousands and…

Right, and what's the problem there? The old type of banana that was popular got wiped out, and we adapted. The current popular type is, IIRC, slowly getting wiped out as we speak. That sucks, but we'll adapt again. As long as the plants/seeds for other varieties exist somewhere, we'll find a way to adapt.

Heck, if anything, we're probably more flexible now since it's now possible to directly genetically engineer new varieties and we have massive seedbanks around with modern infrastructure for distribution.

> Not in markets, because a hundred years ago most people didn't get their produce from a market. They got it from their own gardens or the local farm.

For people in rural areas, sure, but in more urban areas I'm sure they had markets of some sort.

Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#142

Post by GlenTheMachine »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #141
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Is there any evidence that variety of, say, produce in markets/grocery stores is less now than a hundred years ago?” Not in markets, because a hundred years ago most people didn't get their produce from a market. They got it from their own gardens or the local farm. The issue here is that back then, there were lots and lots of different varieties of a given crop, all of them grown regionally. There are thousands and…

Right, and what's the problem there? The old type of banana that was popular got wiped out, and we adapted. The current popular type is, IIRC, slowly getting wiped out as we speak. That sucks, but we'll adapt again. As long as the plants/seeds for other varieties exist somewhere, we'll find a way to adapt. Heck, if anything, we're probably more flexible now since it's now possible to directly genetically engineer new…

This is a complex question, and probably beyond my expertise to fully answer. So let me point you to a couple of decent overview articles.

TLDR; among other issues, a lot of the seeds for varieties we used to grow actually don't exist anywhere any more.

https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/07/19/loss-of-gen...

https://www.croptrust.org/our-mission/crop-diversity-why-it-...

Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#143

Post by gnulinux »

downrightmike wrote: post #34
ewams wrote: post #2

"A gallon of milk costs a farmer approximately $1.90 to produce, but in the last year, farmers have been receiving as little as $1.35 per gallon." If it cost more to make it than they are getting, why are milk prices not higher?

A gallon in the stores costs $4-5

I lived in both the Bay Area and Boston, two of most expensive areas in the US, a gallon of milk costs me less than $3. Trader Joe's is your friend. You can even get organic milk or non-dairy milk (soy, almond, coconut) for less than $6 a gallon.

Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#144

Post by gnulinux »

HIPisTheAnswer wrote: post #56

Not quite; the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced is upon us. Trickles down into farming, and everything else. We are just getting started.

This sort non-evidence-based apocalypse talking, fear mongering isn't my favorite part of HN. I wish you could base your claims to some links, or books.

Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#145

Post by tptacek »

ceejayoz wrote: post #75
harryh wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the US goes to war with China, if we're literally shooting at each other and dropping bombs, I don't think it's going to be all that big of a step to expropriate some farms on our own soil that they happen to own.

If they're prepared in advance for such an action, that expropriation might be a bunch of bricked farm equipment.

This is pretty silly. If China ever enters a shooting war with the US, their larger concern will probably be how to feed themselves, since they account for something like a quarter of all our food exports (80% of all US soybeans go to China!), and they import a comparable amount of food from our allies.

Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#146

Post by bordercases »

HIPisTheAnswer wrote: post #62
shoo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting, thank you for sharing. Is the main problem simply the reduced price of output (due to competition with large scale industrial agriculture), rather than other factors (such as potential increased costs of inputs, degraded soil quality, access to water). > We've wrung all of the redundancy, both financial and biodiversity, out of the system. I have similar concerns, not just about farming but other…

> I wouldn't worry about this one -- unless foreign investors have a means to enforce physical security of their ownership claims, there's always the option of the government with control over the physical assets to expropriate them That isn't a good scenario. Foreign? There were no white men in america, no black men either, so everyone is a foreigner, and the natives should expropriate them all? Dangerous ideas. Tha…

I believe it isn't a good scenario for precisely the opposite reasons.

Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#147

Post by jodrellblank »

PostOnce wrote: post #79
DoreenMichele wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, some folks sincerely believe that grains need to be consumed as sprouts or (some other mitigating form) because the phytic acid or whatever is hard on the digestive tract. I wouldn't go so far as to say they're not edible, but criticism of grains doesn't seem like outright crazy talk either.

"Some folks" sincerely believe vaccines cause autism. "Some folks" believe the earth is flat. I don't care what "some folks" beliefs are, I care about the ground truth. It doesn't take a lot of equipment to deduce that billions of people eating grains consistently over the course of millenia means that people are in fact well equipped to eat grains.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4809873/

"Bread and Other Edible Agents of Mental Disease

how cereal grains—the world’s most abundant food source—can affect human behavior and mental health. We present the implications for the psychological sciences of the findings that, in all of us, bread (1) makes the gut more permeable and can thus encourage the migration of food particles to sites where they are not expected, prompting the immune system to attack both these particles and brain-relevant substances that resemble them, and (2) releases opioid-like compounds, capable of causing mental derangement if they make it to the brain. A grain-free diet, although difficult to maintain (especially for those that need it the most), could improve the mental health of many and be a complete cure for others."

Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#148

Post by bryanlarsen »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #55
shoo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting, thank you for sharing. Is the main problem simply the reduced price of output (due to competition with large scale industrial agriculture), rather than other factors (such as potential increased costs of inputs, degraded soil quality, access to water). > We've wrung all of the redundancy, both financial and biodiversity, out of the system. I have similar concerns, not just about farming but other…

“Is the main problem simply the reduced price of output (due to competition with large scale industrial agriculture), rather than other factors (such as potential increased costs of inputs, degraded soil quality, access to water).” It's mostly the market price of outputs. As was stated in the OP, producing a gallon of milk costs $1.90 or thereabouts. The cost in the grocery store is $2.59 in my area this week. This p…

Farmers can make a very good living at much less than $5 per gallon of milk. Here in Canada with our supply management quota system that Trump rails against, milk retails for $4.29 CAD for four litres; $3.06 USD per US gallon. And it's so insanely profitable that farmers are willing to pay $20000 to $50000 for a single cow quota.

Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#149

Post by jodrellblank »

HIPisTheAnswer wrote: post #59
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #42

“We’re heading to a place where we don’t have farmers; we just have food production.” This. I don't know what the solution to this is. I have a small farm, and raise meat sheep. But it's very much a hobby. The problem is, though, that almost all of the other farmers in my area, the ones I meet at the feed store or the livestock auction, they're also hobby farmers. There is exactly one “real” farmer (meaning that it's…

All of the massive 'at scale' operations are going to turn into dust bowls. 'Small operations' will mean those people do not starve to death. Vegetable prices will make gold look cheap. Grow food anywhere you can, we all have to become farmers now to avoid a very bad situation, where the only thing to eat is other people.

Grow food anywhere you can

I have been wondering why there isn't a mandate that every tree on public land must be food-producing. In a day I must pass hundreds if not thousands of non-edible trees and shrubs just lining pavements, dotted about on business parks, on little bits of nowhere-ville grassland.

If they can grow so readily, why couldn't food producing plants grow like that, in their millions all over the country?

Re: Is the Second Farm Crisis Upon Us?

#150

Post by vladTheInhaler »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #64
escherplex wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what happens if we encounter this generation's version of potato blight on corn or wheat Out of curiosity, how would you rate the quality of the soil in today's agribusiness farmlands? Seems food production now involves clones fed on ammonium nitrate derived from natural gas and mined potash. This suggests the crops of today are being raised on junk food.

On the one hand, I can't really comment specifically on the soil quality. I don't have first hand scientific knowledge. On the other hand, it's certainly true that these producers are not implementing anything like a closed-loop nutrient plan. They're absolutely trucking in fertilizer from somewhere else to keep yields high. And they're producing monocultures, enforced with chemical pesticides and herbicides, to keep…

Wendell Berry said it best:

"Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm — which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems."

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