6 ms·

I loathe farmer subsidies. I have no idea why our government gives farmers so much money and so many advantages - nobody in our society really benefits from tho

by Kenji 10y ago

I loathe farmer subsidies. I have no idea why our government gives farmers so much money and so many advantages - nobody in our society really benefits from those incredible spendings and it's a significant fraction of our state budget.

oxryly1 10y ago
Some (likely outdated) idea to do with treating farming capacity as a strategic reserve.
- Kenji 10y ago
  Look, in war times, we can plant potatoes in all our gardens and take our spare meadows. We don't need these farmers in peace time; we really don't. They are leeches.
  - rtkwe 10y ago
    Tiny little farms like that wouldn't be a huge amount of food. It's vastly inefficient compared to a huge factory farm and you can just summon up the tractors and watering infrastructure to properly run a farm.
    - sverige 10y ago
      Tell that to those who lived under the Soviet collective laws. They were allowed something like 1/2 acre to grow food for their families. Those little patches produced a significant amount of the food that wasn't grown on the collective farms. Of course, a lot of that had to do with incentives....
      - colechristensen 10y ago
        Oh you can totally feed your family with a half acre. If you're good at it you can feed several families. If you only grow and eat potatoes, you can feed 7 people 2000 Calorie/day diets all year. That's the figure if you grow potatoes like big potato farmers. If you nurture the land and integrate other species taking advantage of differing growing seasons and do all you can to make perfect soil conditions, you can get a lot more out of it than potatoes every day for 7.
  - ittekimasu 10y ago
    Great idea! Maybe this could help Venezuala. Oh wait...
  - vidarh 10y ago
    Some places can - if you have huge gardens and areas you're free to make use of. Many can't. Norwegian farming policy is focused on maintaining near-independence in the food supply because the British embargo during the Napoleonic wars in the early 1800's is still seared in the collective consciousness. E.g. every Norwegian primary school child will go through the very long, very tedious poem "Terje Vigen" about a man who tried to evade the British embargo by taking a small boat to Denmark to get food to feed his starving family. Starvation happened despite farming most of the available land. The concern of local food production rose to prominence again during World War II, when German occupation meant strict rationing, which led to "fun" food innovation such as flour substitute made from bark, as growing vegetables etc. in your back garden simply doesn't produce enough for most people to sustain a family.
    - trapperkeeper79 10y ago
      Terje Vigen is a fascinating tale .. thanks for pointing it out. Does it end in a cliff hanger or does he exact revenge on his captor???
      - vidarh 10y ago
        There's a full English translation here [1] with details on Ibsens likely sources of inspiration, if you want to read it. It feels a lot longer when you're 9-10 years old... But here's a summary of the end: He is released from prison at the end of the Napoleonic wars, and comes home to find his wife and child died while he was in prison, and were buried in a paupers grave. Years later he comes across a ship in distress and it is the captain of the British ship that caught him, with his family. He threatens revenge, but on picking up the child changes his mind and saves all of them. [1] http://www.oftebro.com/Terje_Vigen_english.pdf http://www.oftebro.com/Terje_Vigen_english.pdf
    - kwhitefoot 10y ago
      That's not the only reason for Norwegian farming policy. Another is to ensure that non-industrial areas and areas where it is simply difficult to live do not become entirely depopulated. I live and work and pay tax in Norway and I am quite happy with the basic principle that the country should produce most of its own food; it helps to reduce the tendency to race to the bottom of the market and, if done well, promotes pride in quality. Of course it is not easy to export the Norwegian experience to a much larger country like the US with a different political system and much higher concentration of ownership of the farms and also difficult to export it to a smaller much more densely populated country like the UK. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be worth trying to learn from it. Don't mistake me, I'm not claiming that Norwegian farming policy is perfect, merely that it does seem to work at the moment.
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  There's some rogue political wing in Japan that wants to have 100% capacity for domestic food production to meet domestic consumption needs. They've been pushing for subsidies for years to achieve "food independence", whatever that means. I imagine their true goal is to just pad their pockets.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    It really seems to more of a sacrifice to some god of the Apocalypse to me. Although given the history of Japan since the Meiji period, nothing should surprise me. Medieval Japanese culture is just so achingly beautiful it does not surprise me that people have such love fr it.
- cheez 10y ago
  Why would it be outdated?
  - oxryly1 10y ago
    The days of sieges and naval blockades are behind us now. Probably.
    - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
      Then there are those "aircraft carriers made of sand" in the South China Seas.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
It's a way of bandlimiting (lowpass filtering?) price change through mild overproduction. It works because overproducing food costs less than the risk of market shortage transients. It's one of those Catch-22 moments where you feel in awe of the genius of it. I am very sorry it is a significant fraction of your state budget. Given the nature of the risk profile your state should not be underwriting this risk.
- kyllo 10y ago
  In manufacturing terms it is a way of encouraging the use of inventory to buffer against demand volatility and reduce the probability of shortage events.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
colechristensen 10y ago
If you don't subsidize farming in rich countries, all your food will come from poor countries. Poor countries without standards for food safety, scruples about burning down rainforest for a few years of fertility, or worker rights or fair wages. You starve poor countries by selling off all of their food to rich countries and making what's left very expensive. What farming is left in rich countries can only possibly be made economical doing so at the largest most industrial scales. When shit hits the fan external sources get much leverage on rich countries because they don't own their own food supply and don't have the economy in place to make their own when the suppliers get disagreeable. And folks at the grocery store aren't going to like the prices if they want their unsubsidized groceries to be grown by their own countrymen earning middle-class wages. Subsidies right now are certainly not where they need to be. The whole thing needs to be reformed but there are basically two classes of people: rich powerful special interests that profit from the status quo, and ignorant citizens that don't understand the very basics of why anything is being done. Ignorance and greed underly most of our problems. Which one are you guilty of?
- jfoutz 10y ago
  There are also some echoes of the world wars. If your country can't feed itself, you can't support an industrial base to fight. Kinda like the highway system.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  You might like to know more about Australia's experience with unsubsidizing farmers. Or, heck, you might not like it. But I think you should know more about it anyway.
  - kleiba 10y ago
    Why, what experience is it?
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      From memory: Food production (amount of food) rises, while falling as a share of GDP. Agricultural productivity (food output production per unit input) shoots up. A lot of land is repurposed from sheep to other products. And of course, subsidy spending goes way down.
icantdrive55 10y ago
I wouldn't mind subsidizing smaller farmers. Larger farmers shouldn't be subsidized. The government would need to prevent large companies from splitting up, and suddenly overnight you have 20 different small companies. They could beef up legal penalties for any blatant, repeated shinagigans. (Will never happen? The money their lobbyists sending congress is staggering?) It's a shame how taxpayer money is wasted by administrators/politicians. In the Bay Area, we have a lot of civil engineering jobs. (Those street repair/pipe jobs that never end, and tie up traffic for years). For years, it seemed like one company got all the work-- Billotti Brothers. (Didn't use their real name, out of fear.) Even though every project required three bids, by three different companies, it seemed like Billotti got all the work. I used to wonder why. They must be one efficent company? The Internet arrived, and people had some honest questions, basically, the main one was, "Is this the only company?" I then noticed news papers started to list the construction companies that lost out on the bids. I looked into these companies. They all seemingly were founded by a Billotti? It looks like they sent their kids to Sacramento to get their contractors licenses? (Very easy to get). These companies then all bid on projects. The lowest bid won! "Hold up a glass of red wine!" And of course, they didn't plan this wacky coincidence, commingle assets("I don't need that grader brother."), share workers, work on eachother's projects--never. And I actually don't have a clue to what they did, but it just doesn't look right. And it all could be legal--I just don't know? Or maybe, all the kids/grandkids just followed in dad's footsteps, and got into construction aspect of civil engineering? (Edit: If I recall, the whole save the American farmer thing was started when I was a child. It sounded great, but farmers bought up all the small farmers, and the subsidies never stopped. Sorry about going off topic with the Billotti Brothers. I've become so dissalusioned with our society.)
valvar 10y ago
Farmers do! And farmers also vote. And that's the reason for why they are subsidised. Farmers have a special interest in receiving subsidies, and politicians gain far more by pandering to them than by saving a little bit of money for everyone else.
- kwhitefoot 10y ago
  I presume you are thinking mostly of the west here. Farmers voting has little or no impact on policy. In most developed countries total employment in farming is less than 5% of the population.
  - valvar 10y ago
    You'd be surprised how much a vocal minority (which is a lot more than 5% in agricultural states) can push senators around. Still, even 5% of the population constitutes a very powerful special interest.
sfifs 10y ago
In general, the reason to have farm subsidies is to maintain sufficient farming capability to provide food to the population in case a major disruption (blockade, war etc) that makes it difficult to import food. If not present, this dependency on outside for food can be used as leverage by others and not providing population with food is recipe for civil unrest at the weakest moment. If you don't provide farming subsidies, farming will move to countries with cheap labor and people with knowledge and capability for farming will become too few to ramp up quickly in case of emergency.

by Kenji 10y ago

oxryly1 10y ago

Some (likely outdated) idea to do with treating farming capacity as a strategic reserve.

Kenji 10y ago
Look, in war times, we can plant potatoes in all our gardens and take our spare meadows. We don't need these farmers in peace time; we really don't. They are leeches.
- rtkwe 10y ago
  Tiny little farms like that wouldn't be a huge amount of food. It's vastly inefficient compared to a huge factory farm and you can just summon up the tractors and watering infrastructure to properly run a farm.
  - sverige 10y ago
    Tell that to those who lived under the Soviet collective laws. They were allowed something like 1/2 acre to grow food for their families. Those little patches produced a significant amount of the food that wasn't grown on the collective farms. Of course, a lot of that had to do with incentives....
    - colechristensen 10y ago
      Oh you can totally feed your family with a half acre. If you're good at it you can feed several families. If you only grow and eat potatoes, you can feed 7 people 2000 Calorie/day diets all year. That's the figure if you grow potatoes like big potato farmers. If you nurture the land and integrate other species taking advantage of differing growing seasons and do all you can to make perfect soil conditions, you can get a lot more out of it than potatoes every day for 7.
- ittekimasu 10y ago
  Great idea! Maybe this could help Venezuala. Oh wait...
- vidarh 10y ago
  Some places can - if you have huge gardens and areas you're free to make use of. Many can't. Norwegian farming policy is focused on maintaining near-independence in the food supply because the British embargo during the Napoleonic wars in the early 1800's is still seared in the collective consciousness. E.g. every Norwegian primary school child will go through the very long, very tedious poem "Terje Vigen" about a man who tried to evade the British embargo by taking a small boat to Denmark to get food to feed his starving family. Starvation happened despite farming most of the available land. The concern of local food production rose to prominence again during World War II, when German occupation meant strict rationing, which led to "fun" food innovation such as flour substitute made from bark, as growing vegetables etc. in your back garden simply doesn't produce enough for most people to sustain a family.
  - trapperkeeper79 10y ago
    Terje Vigen is a fascinating tale .. thanks for pointing it out. Does it end in a cliff hanger or does he exact revenge on his captor???
    - vidarh 10y ago
      There's a full English translation here [1] with details on Ibsens likely sources of inspiration, if you want to read it. It feels a lot longer when you're 9-10 years old... But here's a summary of the end: He is released from prison at the end of the Napoleonic wars, and comes home to find his wife and child died while he was in prison, and were buried in a paupers grave. Years later he comes across a ship in distress and it is the captain of the British ship that caught him, with his family. He threatens revenge, but on picking up the child changes his mind and saves all of them. [1] http://www.oftebro.com/Terje_Vigen_english.pdf http://www.oftebro.com/Terje_Vigen_english.pdf
  - kwhitefoot 10y ago
    That's not the only reason for Norwegian farming policy. Another is to ensure that non-industrial areas and areas where it is simply difficult to live do not become entirely depopulated. I live and work and pay tax in Norway and I am quite happy with the basic principle that the country should produce most of its own food; it helps to reduce the tendency to race to the bottom of the market and, if done well, promotes pride in quality. Of course it is not easy to export the Norwegian experience to a much larger country like the US with a different political system and much higher concentration of ownership of the farms and also difficult to export it to a smaller much more densely populated country like the UK. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be worth trying to learn from it. Don't mistake me, I'm not claiming that Norwegian farming policy is perfect, merely that it does seem to work at the moment.
hkmurakami 10y ago
There's some rogue political wing in Japan that wants to have 100% capacity for domestic food production to meet domestic consumption needs. They've been pushing for subsidies for years to achieve "food independence", whatever that means. I imagine their true goal is to just pad their pockets.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  It really seems to more of a sacrifice to some god of the Apocalypse to me. Although given the history of Japan since the Meiji period, nothing should surprise me. Medieval Japanese culture is just so achingly beautiful it does not surprise me that people have such love fr it.
cheez 10y ago
Why would it be outdated?
- oxryly1 10y ago
  The days of sieges and naval blockades are behind us now. Probably.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    Then there are those "aircraft carriers made of sand" in the South China Seas.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

It's a way of bandlimiting (lowpass filtering?) price change through mild overproduction. It works because overproducing food costs less than the risk of market shortage transients. It's one of those Catch-22 moments where you feel in awe of the genius of it. I am very sorry it is a significant fraction of your state budget. Given the nature of the risk profile your state should not be underwriting this risk.

kyllo 10y ago
In manufacturing terms it is a way of encouraging the use of inventory to buffer against demand volatility and reduce the probability of shortage events.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

colechristensen 10y ago

If you don't subsidize farming in rich countries, all your food will come from poor countries. Poor countries without standards for food safety, scruples about burning down rainforest for a few years of fertility, or worker rights or fair wages. You starve poor countries by selling off all of their food to rich countries and making what's left very expensive. What farming is left in rich countries can only possibly be made economical doing so at the largest most industrial scales. When shit hits the fan external sources get much leverage on rich countries because they don't own their own food supply and don't have the economy in place to make their own when the suppliers get disagreeable. And folks at the grocery store aren't going to like the prices if they want their unsubsidized groceries to be grown by their own countrymen earning middle-class wages. Subsidies right now are certainly not where they need to be. The whole thing needs to be reformed but there are basically two classes of people: rich powerful special interests that profit from the status quo, and ignorant citizens that don't understand the very basics of why anything is being done. Ignorance and greed underly most of our problems. Which one are you guilty of?

jfoutz 10y ago
There are also some echoes of the world wars. If your country can't feed itself, you can't support an industrial base to fight. Kinda like the highway system.
thaumasiotes 10y ago
You might like to know more about Australia's experience with unsubsidizing farmers. Or, heck, you might not like it. But I think you should know more about it anyway.
- kleiba 10y ago
  Why, what experience is it?
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    From memory: Food production (amount of food) rises, while falling as a share of GDP. Agricultural productivity (food output production per unit input) shoots up. A lot of land is repurposed from sheep to other products. And of course, subsidy spending goes way down.

icantdrive55 10y ago

I wouldn't mind subsidizing smaller farmers. Larger farmers shouldn't be subsidized. The government would need to prevent large companies from splitting up, and suddenly overnight you have 20 different small companies. They could beef up legal penalties for any blatant, repeated shinagigans. (Will never happen? The money their lobbyists sending congress is staggering?) It's a shame how taxpayer money is wasted by administrators/politicians. In the Bay Area, we have a lot of civil engineering jobs. (Those street repair/pipe jobs that never end, and tie up traffic for years). For years, it seemed like one company got all the work-- Billotti Brothers. (Didn't use their real name, out of fear.) Even though every project required three bids, by three different companies, it seemed like Billotti got all the work. I used to wonder why. They must be one efficent company? The Internet arrived, and people had some honest questions, basically, the main one was, "Is this the only company?" I then noticed news papers started to list the construction companies that lost out on the bids. I looked into these companies. They all seemingly were founded by a Billotti? It looks like they sent their kids to Sacramento to get their contractors licenses? (Very easy to get). These companies then all bid on projects. The lowest bid won! "Hold up a glass of red wine!" And of course, they didn't plan this wacky coincidence, commingle assets("I don't need that grader brother."), share workers, work on eachother's projects--never. And I actually don't have a clue to what they did, but it just doesn't look right. And it all could be legal--I just don't know? Or maybe, all the kids/grandkids just followed in dad's footsteps, and got into construction aspect of civil engineering? (Edit: If I recall, the whole save the American farmer thing was started when I was a child. It sounded great, but farmers bought up all the small farmers, and the subsidies never stopped. Sorry about going off topic with the Billotti Brothers. I've become so dissalusioned with our society.)

valvar 10y ago

Farmers do! And farmers also vote. And that's the reason for why they are subsidised. Farmers have a special interest in receiving subsidies, and politicians gain far more by pandering to them than by saving a little bit of money for everyone else.

kwhitefoot 10y ago
I presume you are thinking mostly of the west here. Farmers voting has little or no impact on policy. In most developed countries total employment in farming is less than 5% of the population.
- valvar 10y ago
  You'd be surprised how much a vocal minority (which is a lot more than 5% in agricultural states) can push senators around. Still, even 5% of the population constitutes a very powerful special interest.

sfifs 10y ago

In general, the reason to have farm subsidies is to maintain sufficient farming capability to provide food to the population in case a major disruption (blockade, war etc) that makes it difficult to import food. If not present, this dependency on outside for food can be used as leverage by others and not providing population with food is recipe for civil unrest at the weakest moment. If you don't provide farming subsidies, farming will move to countries with cheap labor and people with knowledge and capability for farming will become too few to ramp up quickly in case of emergency.