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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

#91

Post by hunter-gatherer »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #70
cperciva wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This argument might sound good, but those cattle are fed crops, not just sunshine and the grass they walk on. Most crops grown in the US are used as animal feed. They are dependent on arable land that could be used to grow food for humans directly and much more efficiently. We just like the taste, so we accept the inefficiency.

Eh. The "inefficent calorie conversion" take is sort of lazy and misses the nuances. I just looked it uo, and it seems that only about 55% of yields are for feed, and there is definitely some more nuance there, since a lot of feed meal comes from stalks and parts if the plants humans would not consume. This notion of calorie inefficiency also misses the mark on what would be planted and harvested instead to contain the same bioavailable nutrient profile thay comes from meat. In otber words, using land for feed to convert grains to another type of food is probably more necessary than just "taste".

I don't care to research it further, but I own a small 5 acre farm and can attest that some crops grow in some areas and some don't. So even if you did map it all out on a piece of paper where you'd get all your beans and lentils and whatnots I doubt it would work in real life. Cattle can handle a couple hard freezes. My tomatoes can't.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#92

Post by techdmn »

jmyeet wrote: post #52
toomuchtodo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~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/a…

This is an example of taking the wrong lesson from history. The lesson from the last 20 years is that voters consistently vote to people who speak to their interests and their problems. The biggest electoral landslide in this time is Obama in 2008 and second place isn't even close. Obama ran as a progressive. He didn't govern as one but that's not really the point. Although it's a big part of the reason of why we're…

Completely agree. Trump is selling the wrong solutions, but many people hear a truth when he tells them they are getting screwed. Democrats insist that business as usual is great and simply extort voters: "It votes for a broken healthcare system, a broken electoral system and increasing income inequality or it gets the orange fascist again."

Biden / Harris also essentially offered voters the Trolley Problem. If you don't pull the lever Trump will fund genocide. If you do pull the lever, we will also fund genocide, but maybe less genocide.

If your campaign can be described as an instance of a classic ethical dilemma, maybe the problem isn't the voters? At the very least, if Democrats 2024 campaign rhetoric is to be believed, funding genocide was more important to them than maintaining U.S. democracy.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#93

Post by autoexec »

jmyeet wrote: post #75
toomuchtodo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lesson is not for me, the lesson is for these farmers who will go bankrupt, lose their farms and land, and commit suicide in some quantities of each. Perhaps don't trust someone who only tells you what you want to hear, and yet never delivers. Most unfortunately, the lesson will fall on deaf ears while we all carry on. A cautionary tale, for sure. Sometimes we trust the wrong people. Fool me once, shame on you. F…

No candidate is owed votes. Candidates must earn votes. If voters didn't vote for your candidate, your candidate failed. The voters didn't fail. The candidate did. And what we have in the modern Democratic Party is an intentional choice not to promise or do anything but to expect votes and simply say "Trump bad" (which he is). That's not a policy platform. And people, rightly, rejected it. If that creates problems fo…

> If voters didn't vote for your candidate, your candidate failed. The voters didn't fail. The candidate did.

Voters aren't immune from failure. Voters fail when they stay home and don't bother to vote at all, when they remain ignorant/uneducated, when they vote for a party/team instead of the candidate, etc.

It's tempting to let voters off the hook when candidates lie to their faces but ultimately it falls on voters to be aware of the track record of the candidates, be educated on the issues, and use a little critical thinking. I certainly can't feel too bad for them when they reelect a candidate who already screwed them over once already. Everyone knows the old saying: "Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me... you can't get fooled again."

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#94

Post by [deleted] »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #55
jmyeet wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an example of taking the wrong lesson from history. The lesson from the last 20 years is that voters consistently vote to people who speak to their interests and their problems. The biggest electoral landslide in this time is Obama in 2008 and second place isn't even close. Obama ran as a progressive. He didn't govern as one but that's not really the point. Although it's a big part of the reason of why we're…

The lesson is not for me, the lesson is for these farmers who will go bankrupt, lose their farms and land, and commit suicide in some quantities of each. Perhaps don't trust someone who only tells you what you want to hear, and yet never delivers. Most unfortunately, the lesson will fall on deaf ears while we all carry on. A cautionary tale, for sure. Sometimes we trust the wrong people. Fool me once, shame on you. F…

[deleted]

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#95

Post by autoexec »

triceratops wrote: post #88
kiba wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 overcrowd…

> 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.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#96

Post by Spooky23 »

loeg wrote: post #53
jmyeet wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an example of taking the wrong lesson from history. The lesson from the last 20 years is that voters consistently vote to people who speak to their interests and their problems. The biggest electoral landslide in this time is Obama in 2008 and second place isn't even close. Obama ran as a progressive. He didn't govern as one but that's not really the point. Although it's a big part of the reason of why we're…

Obama did not run as a progressive, lol. Much of the rest of this is equally ahistorical. Living conditions and wages haven't gotten worse over the past 50 years.

Were you in high school or elementary then?

Obama ran on “hope” and “change” very foofy stuff. Ultimately you may be able to support your position by virtue of his saying very little at all.

Wages have in fact fallen for the majority of people in real terms.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#97

Post by miffy900 »

newsclues wrote: post #66
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…

Canada dumps good milk down the drain while people go hungry and suffer high food prices. The supply management system is not perfect.

>Canada dumps good milk down the drain while people go hungry and suffer high food prices

I'm not sure if you realise this, but the exact same thing happens in the US.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#98

Post by Spooky23 »

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.

You have to make it impossible for them to exist. Rentiers are the lowest form of business, and incentives need to make it difficult for them to prosper too much.

These issues are why policy was oriented around individual home ownership for decades.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#99

Post by groundzeros2015 »

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…

Everyone thinks their thing is too special for markets. I’m sure you’ve heard the argument for healthcare, education, energy, water, food, science, infrastructure, etc.

We need to realign on this politically; either we use markets to allocate scarce resources or we don’t.

The answer is probably that the public does not believe in markets. But we haven’t made that explicit, and instead have the worst combinations of policies; with worse service and enabling grifters.

Re: Significant US farm losses persist, despite federal assistance

#100

Post by foofoo55 »

9rx wrote: post #84
b112 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't produce an exact amount of food. It isn't an assembly line, it's farming, it's biological. You need to aim for excess, to ensure enough is produced during drought, animal sickness, and other variability. What Canada does is ensure there is excess, but not crazy amounts. It also ensures the market price is fair to farmers. What you call "high food price" we call "farmers not going bankrupt". And while nothin…

> supply management is far better than the alternatives. Why, then, only dairy, poultry, eggs, and — at least until 2007 when the government bought back the quota — tobacco production? If the farmers growing the foods that are actually deemed important in a healthy diet end up bankrupt, no big deal? > It also ensures the market price is fair to farmers. Well, it creates a two-tier system where the 'blessed' farmers w…

Supply management does have its problems, but given the involvement of imperfect humans nothing will be without problems. Canadian pork, beef, and vegetable farmers that I personally know also complain that they can't enact supply management for their sector. They also envy the appearance of high profits, an easy life, and government subsidies & bailouts (yes, Canadian dairy farmers still receive those) for those in a supply managed sector.

At the end of the day, consumers get stable and somewhat realistic prices and supply, while farmers also get stable income.

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