The last days of a 350-year-old family farm • Hacker News Board

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#181

Post by mindslight » Wed, May 10, 2023, 2:02 PM UTC

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #116

ghaff wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not even that expensive. I live a town or two further out. One of my neighbors has a small apple tree orchard and the other has a Christmas tree farm. It's pretty accessible to Boston for the day but not really close. My old farmhouse was the original property for about a 75 acre farm. It's been renovated but certainly not a multi-million dollar property. You can actually get out of Boston fairly quickly to…

IMO it's due go higher property taxes, the New England states have some of the highest property taxes and high taxes overall which makes land speculation expensive. CA has extremely low property taxes with a loopholes that push the average even lower Even just a few miles outside NYC, you can get a decent house in NJ for 500K but the property taxes alone will be around 5-10K.

There's also the cost of heating in the winter. People budget monthly and housing prices tend to rise to consume surplus income (at least over the past few decades of ZIRP). So rather than dreading your heating bills in the winter, you should appreciate that it's a bill you don't have to pay in the summer. Whereas warmer climates end up paying a higher mortgage year round.

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#182

Post by pcrh » Wed, May 10, 2023, 2:02 PM UTC

photochemsyn wrote: post #67

This 17-acre farm was enough to keep about eight humans alive if it had been the sole source of agricultural production to feed them. That's the fundamental equation, and it generally assumes a vegan diet as well. Nobody has ever been able to reduce this value, it's related to the solar input and the ability of plants to capture carbon into a human-digestible energy source. It'll be worse on Mars, of course, due to t…

To add to others' comments, having animals increases a farm's productivity, since a lot of plant material is indigestible for humans. So they wouldn't have been vegan. Chickens and pigs are omnivourous and will eat all sorts. Ruminants such as cows or goats can convert inedible grass and other cellulose-rich material into milk and meat.

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#183

Post by chrisrohlf » Wed, May 10, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #169

chrisrohlf wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are landowners who farm as a tax dodge This is exactly what it is here in NJ. They’re called ‘fake farmers’ here, and a quick google search will show you they cost the state tens of millions in lost tax revenue per year. Its all the usual suspects too, you know, the kind of celebrities that lecture you on giving and their politics. Those quaint farm stands are just a ruse to keep their tax bills to a minimum…

I rather like having access to the "quaint farm stand" a couple miles down the road from me in the summer. Not everything needs to be about the quest for efficiency.

Sure. I'm just not sure why their existence depends on cheating the remaining tax payers out of tens of millions of dollars every year.

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#184

Post by Arn_Thor » Wed, May 10, 2023, 2:52 PM UTC

jkepler wrote: post #132

Arn_Thor wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, from an economic standpoint, at least on the surface. But what of the social and ecological benefits of keeping alive small communities and small fields with diverse crops? The problems with large-scale monoculture farming are well known. A counter-argument is that food is too cheap. That obviously doesn't feel correct for someone struggling to pay the bills each month, but still... Workers are being sq…

> Workers are being squeezed on one end and small farmers are being squeezed on the other, and the gains go somewhere else entirely while small communities fall into despair and die out. This seems to have all started when we turned the dollar into a melting iceberg jn 1913 (created the Federal Reserve, which is basicaly a cabal of private banksters with a veneer of government), and it intensified when we decided to…

If you look at the US’s richest (or the world’s for that matter) they’re not usually bankers, which raises a few questions about your hypothesis

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#185

Post by tmtvl » Wed, May 10, 2023, 2:56 PM UTC

sgt wrote: post #163

> The question of what will become of the farm is a very complicated and painful one for Eleanor. They are an academic and a writer, and their family wants them to pursue their passions. Eleanor has no interest in farming themself, but they don’t want to see the farm disappear. They now live in New York State and miss home all the time. The family wants to hold on to the property, if at all possible, so they can live…

While I like rms' suggestion of using person, per, and pers I can live with writers using singular they instead. It solves an issue English has (and many other languages also have) with lack of information.

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#186

Post by jmyeet » Wed, May 10, 2023, 3:11 PM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #179

jmyeet wrote: post #27

Here's what I find funny: many of the people who extoll the virtues of capitalism also bemoan the death of small businesses and family farms. Or at least they pay it lip service. Why is this funny? Because small businesses and family farms are inherently more socialist than capitalist. Why? Because it is closer to owning the means of production and capturing the excess value of labor by those who are, well, laboring.…

> Because it is closer to owning the means of production and capturing the excess value of labor by those who are, well, laboring I would call this distributed capitalism. The farm owners can still run the farm however they like, keep the entire profit of the farm, invest in capital machinery over a long term that they have exclusive ownership of, etc. The outcome is indeed closer to socialism in that it's likely the…

This can best be framed (as Marx did) in terms of feudalism.

Feudalism as an economic system captured the surplus value of labor right up to the monarch. This was done through a number of layers, what you'd call vassal lords. In some places these structures exist today (eg the various duchies in the UK that still derive an income from their holdings to whatever royal or aristocrat is appointed to benefit from them). One might be tempted to call this distributed feudalism because of the existence of intermediate lords but it's one of those distinctions without a difference. The monarch will ultimately seek to extract as much value from his or her vassal lords as is possible. At times this was an explicit goal (eg Louis XIV keeping the nobility poor through Versailles).

"Distributed capitalism" is likewise a distinction without a difference. You can have smaller farms. These will be gobbled up Cargill or whoever, often coercively through predatory pricing of key products. The forces at work always seek to capture that surplus value of labor into a smaller and smaller group at the top.

You see the effects of this everywhere: massive consolidation in every sector. All of the food in the US is produced by like 6 conglomerates.

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#187

Post by bloomingeek » Wed, May 10, 2023, 3:17 PM UTC

youngNed wrote: post #137

jkepler wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If its an open secret (like the open mystery in Ephesians 3:9,10), can you provide some sources to substantiate your claim? Thanks!

An open secret is something which is widely known to be true amongst people, but which is denied officially, for that very reason, providing sources is more usually than not possible for an open secret. I have no idea if an open secret is like the open mystery of Ephesians 3:9,10.

Your definition of an open secret is the best I've ever read, thx.

As a person of faith, the reference listed above was in poor taste. Scripture should never be used in cryptic ways.

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#188

Post by golergka » Wed, May 10, 2023, 3:18 PM UTC

crtified wrote: post #63

okillbite wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And those workers don't want to do those jobs, for that $, anyway. A friend of mine with a farm in Quebec, Canada says even if you can find folks to do the work and pay them well, they often aren't reliable. Better all round to use temporary workers

Only a minority of people have an aptitude for work consisting of an 8-hour hard-focused physical workout every day. In the same way that only a minority of people have an aptitude for work consisting of an 8-hour hard-focused (e.g.) mathematical workout every day. The difference is that the former tends to come with a sub-cultural attitude of "people who can't/won't are Lazy", which is unfortunate and misguided, in…

Only a few generations ago, an overwhelming majority of humans were farmers, having 8-hour hard-focused physical workout every day. Do you think we lost natural ability for it in such a short timespan?

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#189

Post by golergka » Wed, May 10, 2023, 3:19 PM UTC

crtified wrote: post #56

golergka wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fault? The situation with apple producers you just described looks like a win-win situation both for consumers and immigrants. The only ones losing are New Zealand workers, but from all invoked groups, they're the only citizens who could theoretically vote out these politicians.

I acknowledge that win/loss is arguable. It invokes ethical cans of worms that I'm reluctant to open here. In theory, the dominant demographic at HN are from affluent countries, so the maxim that there are endless folk from poorer countries who'd be willing to come and do our work for a lot less - could apply to most of us, in similar fashion. Would we call that 'a win'? Highly subjective, obviously. And dependent up…

> Would we call that 'a win'? Highly subjective, obviously.

Win for whom?

I'm a developer from not an affluent country, working remotely for an american company (although for an american level of pay, my employer is quite awesome). So it's definetly a win for me.

Re: The last days of a 350-year-old family farm

#190

Post by ThorsBane » Wed, May 10, 2023, 3:27 PM UTC

Could investing in more automation keep this legacy going? Also, huge thanks to Smithsonian Mag for writing a quality piece on something this important and beautiful. Very amazing legacy and photos and writing to capture. It causes me to consider a subscription or at least an account. More content like this in general would not be reproducible by AI for a long time yet - not until AI can walk and are indistinguishable from humans. The media organizations that scale into the future and take the existing market share are going to be the ones that invest in deep relationships with communities and bringing quality stories like this to light.