This is basic supply and demand in action. Farmers that don’t automate and scale up to be competitive will go out of business. The same thing happens in any market unless regulation/rules/monopolisation change the market conditions.
On the death of my family's dairy farm (2019)
301–310 of 341 posts
Re: On the death of my family's dairy farm (2019)
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand that you're probably estimating bare minimum costs, but getting started for half a million dollars is actually way more affordable than I imagined you would describe. That's comparable to what some people pay for a middle class suburban home near a lot of the mid-sized metropolitan areas around the United States.
That’s literally the cost I just paid lol But yes, $500k is about the minimum. Plus ~40 acres. For grass fed beef you can raise probably 20 heads and buy supplementals. You might only make $5-10k up to maybe $30k (buying hay or leasing other land to grow feed) profit initially. BUT it’s not a ton of work, really only feeding the cattle every other day, doing injections on the cattle and cutting / bailing hay 2-3 time…
Best of luck. I think you are about to get a very rude and brutal awakening when your dreams meet reality. Part of my family had the same dream and ideals. It nearly destroyed them.
Re: On the death of my family's dairy farm (2019)
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool. Then yes, I don't view milk as fitting the definition above though I realize many do.
Do you check which farm it is from and give it a sniff? Or do you put it in the cart and pay for it? "Cheap" was an overstatement, but in general, modern industrial methods lead to consistent quality and downward price trajectories.
> Do you check which farm it is from and give it a sniff.
As I mentioned previously..sampling to me means buying a few brands before establishing a preference.
So, in a way yes.
And since you're so incredulous, yes, I have two preferred farms. Alexander and Fresh Breeze.
Re: On the death of my family's dairy farm (2019)
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you check which farm it is from and give it a sniff? Or do you put it in the cart and pay for it? "Cheap" was an overstatement, but in general, modern industrial methods lead to consistent quality and downward price trajectories.
> Do you check which farm it is from and give it a sniff. As I mentioned previously..sampling to me means buying a few brands before establishing a preference. So, in a way yes. And since you're so incredulous, yes, I have two preferred farms. Alexander and Fresh Breeze.
I'm not incredulous, I have no doubt that someone might have specific preferences for milk.
I'm arguing that 'commodity' isn't a bad word, because it means 'consistent' and similar, not 'low quality', as your up thread comment implies.
If you don't investigate every package, you are taking commoditization for granted, there's trust that it will be what it is supposed to be. That's it's done at the level of the individual farm is all the better, they are able to deliver commercial volumes to Whole Foods with consistent (predictable) quality.
Re: On the death of my family's dairy farm (2019)
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there still that weird law that fixes the price of milk based on how far from Wisconsin it is?
Unlikely. The article mentions something that sounds related: > This was in the heart of America’s dairyland by the way, to the point that federal milk pricing used to be based on how many miles away from here you were. This sentence cites a WSJ article from 1997 [1]. BTW, California has had bigger dairy production than Wisconsin for decades [2]. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB880411473424429000 [2] https://www.n…
Hey, you know you may be right - I guess I just assumed about the source of the milk. Try this out: go to Aldi [1] and choose grocery pickup for anywhere in Illinois or Indiana, and you’ll see a gallon of milk for somewhere between $1.95 and $2.50 per gallon (depending on the store location). Click on the milk and you can clearly see the “Real California Milk” label.
Re: On the death of my family's dairy farm (2019)
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
One man's boring is another man's idyllic.
One man's ecological wasteland is another man's ecological wasteland.
Gotta admit, I'm not sure which you'd call the ecological wasteland -- the urban area, or the suburban area. Because I'll tell you what, we have a heck of a lot of biodiversity in this suburban area, far more than downtown.
Re: On the death of my family's dairy farm (2019)
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think we’ve generally agreed that slavery is morally wrong and people should be paid for their work. This is a non sequitur? Slaves are all, without exception, paid for their work. In most cases, though with some exceptions, they're paid at least partially in currency.
> This is a non sequitur? The gp said the problem was the price. > Slaves are all, without exception, paid for their work. My understanding of slavery and “[being] paid” is substantially different than yours. > In most cases, though with some exceptions, they're paid at least partially in currency. I’m not sure this is true either, but contributing food and housing for slaves is not in any sense paying them, but main…
> I’m not sure this is true either, but contributing food and housing for slaves is not in any sense paying them, but maintaining them as property, since food and housing is a necessary expense (they wouldn’t be functional slaves otherwise). Its more akin to maintenance on machines.
I can most fully agree with that last sentence. It's very much like maintenance on machines. But I don't think employers see as much difference between labor wages and machine maintenance as you do.
Certainly food and housing are necessary expenses, but there's a lot of room for interpretation there. You can make a business judgment about how well to feed or house your slaves -- or particular favored slaves -- in much the same way that one company might differ with another company over how much to invest in employee morale.
> I think what you’re getting at is that while their labor is compelled, they are somehow compensated for it.
It's a little more complex. Slaves can be compensated in numerous ways; one very common way in the American South was to allow them to practice sharecropping. That would be labor that was not compelled, but from which the slave was entitled to keep some of the gains, whether for direct consumption or commercial sale. (As opposed to ordinary labor, which definitely was compelled and all of the gains of which went to the landowner.)
This model extended to slaves who could provide skilled labor. Their labor was in general not compelled; they often worked as independent contractors, dealing with customers directly. Like the sharecroppers, they were entitled to keep a portion of their earnings, and the rest went to their owner.
---
An ordinary slave has some money in his pocket. It might not be very much, or it might be quite a lot -- a slave who administrates a complex organization (presumably for his master the owner of the organization) is a person of much higher status and wealth than peasants have, and in Mamluk Turkey the sultan was, technically, a slave. [1] Slavery isn't about wages or lack of wages.
Slaves are generally distinctive in three ways:
- Slaves are not free to leave.
- A slave's owner has the right to compel their labor by various means, even if that right is not exercised. (And as a corollary, an owner has the right to visit certain punishments on a slave for pretty much whatever reason.)
- If a slave commits a crime, the slave's owner is legally responsible for that crime.
Not all three are required; obviously the Chinese emperor would not be responsible for a crime committed by a eunuch. But these characteristics are much more typical of slaves than unpaid labor is. (Someone to whom only the first point applies is, for reasons not entirely clear to me, called "serf" rather than "slave".)
[1] The Mamluks were a caste of steppe nomads captured in slave raids, and constituted the military. To be eligible to be sultan, you had to be one of them, and you had to have been born free on the steppe, captured, and enslaved -- children of Mamluks inherited the caste status, but those born into slavery were not eligible to rule.
Re: On the death of my family's dairy farm (2019)
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is a non sequitur? The gp said the problem was the price. > Slaves are all, without exception, paid for their work. My understanding of slavery and “[being] paid” is substantially different than yours. > In most cases, though with some exceptions, they're paid at least partially in currency. I’m not sure this is true either, but contributing food and housing for slaves is not in any sense paying them, but main…
> I’m not sure this is true either, but contributing food and housing for slaves is not in any sense paying them, but maintaining them as property, since food and housing is a necessary expense (they wouldn’t be functional slaves otherwise). Its more akin to maintenance on machines. I can most fully agree with that last sentence. It's very much like maintenance on machines. But I don't think employers see as much dif…
> But I don't think employers see as much difference between labor wages and machine maintenance as you do.
Of course they do. When labor is voluntary, the wage is agreed upon by all parties to the transaction. When labor is not voluntary then only the compelling party need agree.
> You can make a business judgment about how well to feed or house your slaves -- or particular favored slaves -- in much the same way that one company might differ with another company over how much to invest in employee morale.
This is like saying a rapist can choose to give their victim jewelry just like a husband can choose to give his wife jewelry. It ignores all essential differences in order to make a comparison that doesn’t exist.
> Slaves can be compensated in numerous ways; one very common way in the American South was to allow them to practice sharecropping. That would be labor that was not compelled, but from which the slave was entitled to keep some of the gains, whether for direct consumption or commercial sale. (As opposed to ordinary labor, which definitely was compelled and all of the gains of which went to the landowner.) This model extended to slaves who could provide skilled labor. Their labor was in general not compelled; they often worked as independent contractors, dealing with customers directly. Like the sharecroppers, they were entitled to keep a portion of their earnings, and the rest went to their owner.
I’m aware of sharecropping and manumission but I think you’re contradicting yourself when you assert that the slave’s labor was not compelled. It was always subject to compulsion, meaning it was compelled in fact even if it may have taken the form of noncompulsory labor. The slave was still subject to compulsion. There was no option for the slave to decline the arrangement and be free from consequences imposed by the slave owner. A man steals my TV from my house, he’s a thief and he stole from me. Observing that he did not also steal my toaster is irrelevant.
> But these characteristics are much more typical of slaves than unpaid labor is.
You’re neglecting that “compulsory labor” is unpaid labor. You’re asserting a distinction without a difference.
Re: On the death of my family's dairy farm (2019)
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
One man's ecological wasteland is another man's ecological wasteland.
Gotta admit, I'm not sure which you'd call the ecological wasteland -- the urban area, or the suburban area. Because I'll tell you what, we have a heck of a lot of biodiversity in this suburban area, far more than downtown.
Far less though than if three quarters of that land was left undisturbed or used as pasture and the same number of people lived in a denser urban area.
Re: On the death of my family's dairy farm (2019)
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pollution is a negative externality, I agree. Paying illegal immigrants to work in the U.S. is illegal, but it is not a negative externality. I'm also not convinced that small farms are better about either of these things than big ones are.
Sure it is. The profit goes to the lawbreakers, the loss goes to the citizens of this country who can't do that job at a decent wage. It's a classic negative externality.
> The profit goes to the lawbreakers, the loss goes to the citizens of this country who can't do that job at a decent wage.
By that definition, every transaction where someone accepts a low wage causes a negative externality against someone who would accept a higher one. This does not match my understanding of externalities.