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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

#41

Post by toomuchtodo »

vkou wrote: post #33
smallmancontrov wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and the man who broke the system, who installed the loophole that allowed decades of mergers and trust-building, was even named Robert Bork! He was a Nixon/Reagan flunky, naturally, but the Dems ignored the issue for a long time. It was exciting to finally see the first real pushback in the last administration under Lina Khan. So many upset businessmen on TV! Unfortunately, elections have consequences, and the w…

> It was exciting to finally see the first real pushback in the last administration under Lina Khan. So many upset businessmen on TV! Unfortunately, elections have consequences, and the work did not continue. Perhaps one of the consequences of her actually pushing back on this was one of the many reasons the owner class overwhelmingly backed Trump.

~78% of farmers voted for him. They are directly responsible for their own outcome in this regard.

Canada supplies 75-80% of US potash imports, and potash is a non-substitutable input in agriculture; without it, crop yields drop significantly. China no longer buy soybeans from US farmers, and instead now sources from South America; they have made a token 12M ton purchase, as they promised.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/farmers-bailout-tr...

> Ragland, for example, supported Trump dating back to 2016, making him just one of many in rural America. Trump won a majority of USDA “farming-dependent” counties ahead of his first term, and within a year of assuming office, his trade wars drove American farm exports to China down from $19.5 billion to $9 billion. Ultimately, farmers saw a decline of $27 billion in agricultural exports, nearly 71 percent of that attributable to soybean profit losses. Ragland, a soybean farmer, still turned right back around and voted for Trump again in both 2020 and 2024. Here again, he was just one of many. Farmers increased their support for Trump by 5 percent in 2020, hitting 76 percent support, and then added another 2 percent in 2024, reaching 78 percent support. In 100 of the country’s 444 “farming-dependent” counties, according to Investigate Midwest, Trump won a whopping 80 percent of the vote.

> “So they voted for this guy three times—all these white farmers did. And now this president has turned agriculture in this country to the worst [shape it’s been in] since the ’80s. Farm bankruptcies. Farm foreclosures. Farm suicide [My note: farmer suicides are 3.5x-4x the general population]. Input costs—all these things,” Boyd told me.

https://investigatemidwest.org/2024/11/13/trump-election-far...

> Not only did Trump increase his support among farming-dependent counties, but more than 100 of those counties supported him with at least 80% of their vote.

This is entirely self inflicted, which to me, is wild and a case study for history. This was a collective choice, intentionally made.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#42

Post by cperciva »

mapt wrote: post #32
itake wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't eat private insurance. The consequences of not being able to produce enough calories is severe. It is much better to overproduce and everyone gets fed than producing just enough and a climate event erases out 20% of our calorie production.

Your buffer here is meat. Cattle are tremendously inefficient consumers of grain. Eat your burgers in the bountiful years, then slaughter 75% of the herd in a hardship year, eat well for six months, then spend the next three, four, five years eating more grains while the herds recover. Ethanol is another one. That's the sensible way to do it. Somehow I doubt that it's the way we do it... But maybe the variability is…

Cattle are inefficient consumers of grain, but highly efficient consumers of grass. Most land used for pasture can't effectively be used for anything else.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#43

Post by kiba »

jwcooper wrote: post #27

The problem isn't with the farmers. The problem is the monopolies that surround the farmers. They buy their seeds from massive corporations that have patents on seeds. They sell their produce to global multi-national corporations that set the prices they'll purchase at. They buy their machinery from John Deere or Case IH at extremely high prices. They have no negotiating power and are squeezed between these massive c…

Subsides tend to get absorbed by monopolists of all kind.

This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords. This is why you need to break up monopolies or tax them. The problem is societal endorsement of monopoly rights all kind to the point of invisibility. Witness any conversations about IP rights and lands.

But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market rather than specializing in profitable but more labor intensive crops.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#45

Post by toomuchtodo »

kiba wrote: post #23
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…

Growing excess amount of food is part of food security, but farmers are going bankrupt because they focused on labor efficient agricultural commodity products to the exclusion of everything else. For many farmers, it's not even a full time job I rather we focus on increasing food security in other way. Maybe we shouldn't be turning corns into cows as that reduce the amount of energy we are able to access. But how do…

~60 million acres of corn and soybean in the US, the size of Oregon, is grown exclusively for biofuels. This is unnecessary as you mention, as are the subsidies to farmers for these row crops.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#46

Post by bigbuppo »

jwcooper wrote: post #27

The problem isn't with the farmers. The problem is the monopolies that surround the farmers. They buy their seeds from massive corporations that have patents on seeds. They sell their produce to global multi-national corporations that set the prices they'll purchase at. They buy their machinery from John Deere or Case IH at extremely high prices. They have no negotiating power and are squeezed between these massive c…

The New York Drought is real.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#47

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bawolff wrote: post #12
jadenPete wrote: post #6

This question may be naive, but why is the agricultural industry so subsidized? I understand the moral argument, but why, economically, does subsidizing farms result in a more efficient allocation of resources? I've heard that it's because farming as a business is full of unpredictability, but if that were the case, wouldn't there be a significant market for private insurance, and wouldn't the cost of that insurance…

Not everything is about economics. As the romans said - you need bread and circuses to stay in power. Keeping food cheap serves an important political function. It also serves an important security function to keep food domestic because if you are at war with where your food is grown, you are not going to win that war.

> As the romans said - you need bread and circuses to stay in power

“One thing, however, that I will note that Juvenal does not say is that the panem et circenses are either how the Roman people lost their power or how they are held under the control of emperors. Instead first the people lose their votes (no longer ‘selling’ them), then give up their cares and as a result only wish for panem et circenses, no longer taking an interest in public affairs” [1].

[1] https://acoup.blog/2024/12/20/collections-on-bread-and-circu...

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#48

Post by WarmWash »

jwcooper wrote: post #27

The problem isn't with the farmers. The problem is the monopolies that surround the farmers. They buy their seeds from massive corporations that have patents on seeds. They sell their produce to global multi-national corporations that set the prices they'll purchase at. They buy their machinery from John Deere or Case IH at extremely high prices. They have no negotiating power and are squeezed between these massive c…

The fix is more expensive food.

Everyone loves the mom and pop businesses but shops at walmart for those rock bottom prices.

We can have our fresh family farms back, but you're paying double for your food. We have the system we have because people value cheap/affordable over everything, regardless of what they upvote on the internet.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#49

Post by throwawaysleep »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #39
vkou wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was exciting to finally see the first real pushback in the last administration under Lina Khan. So many upset businessmen on TV! Unfortunately, elections have consequences, and the work did not continue. Perhaps one of the consequences of her actually pushing back on this was one of the many reasons the owner class overwhelmingly backed Trump.

Do you propose continuing to not push back instead? That'll show 'em! Populism is in the air, and for good reason. Lina Khan's FTC was not all they feared, but if it had been, our mistake would have been one of not going far enough.

Make a deal with big ag to cap food price growth in exchange for allowing ANYTHING they do to farmers. They can squeeze as hard and in as monopolistic a manner as they please on that end.

Kill two birds with one stone.

Farmers have a lot of equity that corporates could be given in exchange for lower food prices.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#50

Post by bluGill »

It is the ecconomy. Harvest have been above average around the world the past few years. In turn supply and demand puts prices low. one bad year and harvests will be down and prices way up.

i've been working for John Deere for 15 years - I have seen this cycle several times already. people blame various politics when it happens, but the fundamentals are enough to explain nearly all of this. Anyone in farming knows this and plans for it (not always successfully)

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