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Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

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Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#301

Post by nehal3m »

ben_w wrote: post #251
nehal3m wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why tho do you feel the need to defend big agri businesses skirting employment law and pressuring wages downward by bringing in illegal people? They said immigrant. Why do you feel the need to equate that term to illegals? They are not the same thing.

> They said immigrant. Why do you feel the need to equate that term to illegals? They are not the same thing. While true, the estimates are that about half of agricultural workers in the USA are undocumented (AKA "illegal").

I understand that. Those are the facts. But I think it's doing harm to innocent people to conflate immigrants with illegals.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#302

Post by spicymaki »

mythical_39 wrote: post #296
ggm wrote: post #7

Ag. can't just be about profit. There's a dimension which is national-strategic interest. Food security, the domestic food economy is important. It is my understanding that a lot of the US ag. sector is making inputs for processing for corn oil, fructose, ethanol, and for exports to markets which in turn target american ag, selling e.g. beef back to the US, fattened on US Soy. It's a complex web. I don't want US farm…

There is also a dimension which is about caring for your fellow man and caring for the land which the food you grow depends on. Which society seems to have lost because we've focused too much on the one metric, "money", over all others.

Agreed, in addition there is the dimension of I don’t want to starve to death, so we should make sure we have a viable regulated agriculture industry.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#303

Post by triceratops »

autoexec wrote: post #95
triceratops wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords Not necessarily. People live where they live because there are jobs. If they don't need jobs because of UBI, or they can take lower-paying jobs, they can move wherever housing is plentiful.

There'll always need to be other constraints on landlords because there's zero reason why they won't just all screw renters over in every area no matter how plentiful housing is.

How would they do that if housing is plentiful?

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#304

Post by b112 »

hervature wrote: post #144
b112 wrote: post #37

Canada has a thing called "Supply Management". It means that for some agricultural industries, we limit how many people can produce, for example, milk. This restriction keeps the price of milk stable, and high enough that farmers can make a profit. It may seem strange to some, but the goal is to ensure that we don't have to bail out our farmers. The alternative is as in the US, where anyone can produce milk, and the…

> The alternative is as in the US, where anyone can produce milk, and the price craters, and farmers need to be constantly bailed out. Do you have references to bailouts specifically for dairy farms? The big bailouts recently were due to reciprocal tariffs. There is the Milk Loss Program but that is limited to 30 days of production per year. I would also classify this more of an insurance program than bailout.

Examples:

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/23/nyregion/us-offers-dairym...

https://www.fsa.usda.gov/Internet/FSA_File/1_2_overview_brow...

The PDF has some data showing how much post-market intervention costs.

It's particularly infuriating how US politicians will stated "we have a free market". whilst intervention happens, and then get upset that Canada does it differently.

Even more bizarre, is Canada has only 1/10th the population of the US. Both countries carve out exclusions, but the US side goes bananas that we don't have completely open markets on the agricultural side. So? We can both exclude each others markets, for agriculture, who cares?

With 1/10th of the population, if you manages to get 10% of the Canadian market, that's one hundredth of the whole US market. It's such a tiny amount.

Everyone here suspects the US just wants to drive all Canadian agriculture to bankruptcy, making us entirely dependent upon the US. No way. Not going to happen. That's madness.

In terms of market intervention, we can't afford to do it the way the US does. We don't have billions to buy up excess milk, or buy out farmers to reduce supply. It's immensely wasteful to the taxpayer.

Which is very strange, because it's often parties on the right in the US, which do buyouts.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#305

Post by nehal3m »

modo_mario wrote: post #237
nehal3m wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why tho do you feel the need to defend big agri businesses skirting employment law and pressuring wages downward by bringing in illegal people? They said immigrant. Why do you feel the need to equate that term to illegals? They are not the same thing.

Because their (in)dependence was questioned on various fronts in the context of the american bipartisan system and more specifically the republican party and it's policies aka "the party that hates them". Wrt the subsidies, consumer market and all that i don't have much to add but wrt the migrant workers the point of contention to my knowledge is mostly illegals (regardless of the actual number deported, the perhaps…

I was a bit tongue in cheek in my response. Yes, you're right that (almost famously) farm work is done by a disproportionate amount of illegals, but conflating those with immigrants as a default does injustice to the hardworking people that followed the rules.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#306

Post by anonymous908213 »

traceroute66 wrote: post #286
unglaublich wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People outside of the US look down on inferior products like HFCS, bleached chicken, hormones used in beef cattle, prevalence of GM crops, the preventive use of antibiotics in poultry, hen battery cages, and permissive-by-default use of additives. If at least all those bad farming practices would lead to very affordable food, then one could make an argument for it... but currently the US just does worst of two worlds…

> look down on inferior products I object to the use of "look down on" in this context. The products listed are inferior products, end of. "Look down" suggests an expression of contempt. But there is no contempt to be had here, it is a simple fact. > bad farming practices would lead to very affordable food, then one could make an argument for it. I ... just... I ....have no words for what I just read there. Its affor…

They didn't say "it's affordable so it's okay". They said "if it made it very affordable, then one could make an argument for it". And they're right. If you could reduce poverty by providing food at 1/2 or 1/5th the price of European-quality food, that would absolutely be worth having an argument over. Of course, this isn't actually the case, which is why they then said it's the worst of both worlds - American food manages to be both unhealthy and expensive rather than only one or the other.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#307

Post by Sammi »

gruez wrote: post #284
duxup wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a NYT article about farmers going to a town hall meeting where they met their federal reps. One farmer mentioned how they've done these meetings for years and nothing changes, maybe they get a handout from the feds, but he says they effectively just go to support the monopolies that they as farmers sell and buy from. Same reps, same meetings every years, nothing happens. Farmer seemed to have all the pieces…

>Same reps, same meetings every years, nothing happens. Farmer seemed to have all the pieces except the idea that he might want to vote for someone else ... I get it's funny to dunk on dumb Republican farmers voting for the same party for over and over again, and not getting what they want, but it's hardly a farmer or Republican issue. How is this any different than say, Democratic voters who want medicare for all (o…

Fix your voting system. This two party system you have if caused by the First Past the Post voting system you have. Basically mostly all the is uniquely broken about US politics is downstream from FPTP. You can't get smart solutions if all your options are dumb and dumber.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#308

Post by conductr »

cik wrote: post #160
Animats wrote: post #157

Much of this is an antitrust problem. The inputs to farming, especially seeds, fertilizer and machinery, are controlled by monopolies and near-monopolies. There have been too many mergers. On the sell side, there's monopsony or near-monopsony, with very few big buyers.[1] Farmers are caught in the middle, with little pricing power on either side. There's not much question about this. There are antitrust cases, but wi…

No, much of this is a political issue. America wants food standards that are different from many trading partners; fair enough. But it makes it impossible to export many farm goods as a result. This is outside of the current political climate, and has been going on for ages. It's just coming it a head now.

Could America meet those standards and export at a higher profit though? If not, it’s not what’s contributing to their poor financial situation

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#309

Post by ben_w »

nehal3m wrote: post #301
ben_w wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They said immigrant. Why do you feel the need to equate that term to illegals? They are not the same thing. While true, the estimates are that about half of agricultural workers in the USA are undocumented (AKA "illegal").

I understand that. Those are the facts. But I think it's doing harm to innocent people to conflate immigrants with illegals.

Indeed; and likewise myself, that's why I try to ensure all my own responses rephrase as "undocumented".

Conversely, at this point Musk is both a well-documented migrant and (as can be demonstrated by all the lawsuits he's lost), not entirely law-abiding.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#310

Post by tbyehl »

reactordev wrote: post #228
mlrtime wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many many meat packers, or you just mean two big ones?

“The U.S. meatpacking industry is dominated by the "Big Four"—Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef—which control 80-85% of the beef market and significant portions of poultry and pork”

It's so much worse for poultry. My state and the bordering states represent more than half of US production and there's exactly one USDA facility available to independent producers. They're quite small and the cost approaches today's retail price for a whole Tyson chicken.

There are USDA exemptions for tiny producers (up to 20K/yr vs 150K+ for a single modern broiler house) to slaughter and package themselves for in-state sales but anyone operating under one of those exemptions won't be able to grow that business large enough to self-finance constructing their own USDA-monitored facility.

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