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Sure. The rise of civilization has always had a fairly direct correlation with how efficiently we could extract food from the land. When we all lived as hunter-

Sure. The rise of civilization has always had a fairly direct correlation with how efficiently we could extract food from the land. When we all lived as hunter-gatherers, we didn't get much done other than some cave art. With the rise of farming came the priestly class, and Ur, the first city. Plows, granaries, preservation, crop rotation, selective breeding, refrigeration, and so on, further increased the number of people a single farmer could feed. As fewer people were engaged in the act of feeding everyone, more craftsmen, artists, administrators, and so on, could push civilization forward. As a nearby comment notes, over the history of the US, we have increased the efficiency of our farms by a factor of ten, and a tiny fraction of people are actually needed to work the land. That said, farming is still a brutal business. For being an industry that determines whether hundreds of millions will live or die, farmers are typically faced with enormous debt burdens, long work days, and second jobs. It's a pretty screwed up situation.

pas 9y ago
But nobody is forcing farmers to continue farming. If it's that brutal, drop the shovel, sell the tractor, fuck the cows, let's go trucking! And yes, for some reason society/civilization has a "market based" approach to food security. Why? Because it works better than the planned economy version. Maybe because it forces people to optimize, to make the hard choices of what do you really want, do what you're good at or do what you love. That said, markets are not in a vacuum, so we can and we ought to help people. Not just farmers. Because every time we try to help them we end up helping "Big Agribusiness". And if some people want to do farming, but it doesn't make them enough, okay, we can think about that, but I don't see what that has to do with food security, which comes from big industrialized farms, environmental protection, land management, food safety regulations, distribution chain tracking and inspections and so on. (To help small farms, you need scale. You need to pack them densely, have them share equipment - usually the combine that used only at harvest is owned by a 3rd party, and so on. They need insurance for climate events like against flood, hailstorm, tornadoes/hurricanes, spring frostbite and so on. So you end up running a farmer-K12.)
- OtterCoder 9y ago
  But you're still viewing farming in a vacuum. Whether you're punching the clock for Monsanto or scrabbling to run a private farm, you still need a grocer, a post office, a restaurant, a barber, and so on. A farming community is a whole ecosystem, and rural America makes up about 18% of the country. One of the reasons America was organized the way it is, as a republic, and not a democracy, was to prevent a tyranny of the majority. And no racial, ideological, or religious minority is as necessary to protect as the minority that feeds all of us. You're right, farmers can quit any time they like, and many have, and are. It's one of the forces driving the automation of agriculture. But we're not at a point where we can take the farmhand out of the equation safely, so let's give them some incentive to stay. While I agree that planned economies are dumb, because of the simple fact of information density, the government is also a market force, and we need to prevent government from working against the people who feed all of us.

pas 9y ago

But nobody is forcing farmers to continue farming. If it's that brutal, drop the shovel, sell the tractor, fuck the cows, let's go trucking! And yes, for some reason society/civilization has a "market based" approach to food security. Why? Because it works better than the planned economy version. Maybe because it forces people to optimize, to make the hard choices of what do you really want, do what you're good at or do what you love. That said, markets are not in a vacuum, so we can and we ought to help people. Not just farmers. Because every time we try to help them we end up helping "Big Agribusiness". And if some people want to do farming, but it doesn't make them enough, okay, we can think about that, but I don't see what that has to do with food security, which comes from big industrialized farms, environmental protection, land management, food safety regulations, distribution chain tracking and inspections and so on. (To help small farms, you need scale. You need to pack them densely, have them share equipment - usually the combine that used only at harvest is owned by a 3rd party, and so on. They need insurance for climate events like against flood, hailstorm, tornadoes/hurricanes, spring frostbite and so on. So you end up running a farmer-K12.)

OtterCoder 9y ago
But you're still viewing farming in a vacuum. Whether you're punching the clock for Monsanto or scrabbling to run a private farm, you still need a grocer, a post office, a restaurant, a barber, and so on. A farming community is a whole ecosystem, and rural America makes up about 18% of the country. One of the reasons America was organized the way it is, as a republic, and not a democracy, was to prevent a tyranny of the majority. And no racial, ideological, or religious minority is as necessary to protect as the minority that feeds all of us. You're right, farmers can quit any time they like, and many have, and are. It's one of the forces driving the automation of agriculture. But we're not at a point where we can take the farmhand out of the equation safely, so let's give them some incentive to stay. While I agree that planned economies are dumb, because of the simple fact of information density, the government is also a market force, and we need to prevent government from working against the people who feed all of us.