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This emotional attachment to the land creates a fundamental economic problem - inelasticity of supply. The uncomfortable reality is that the US is making too mu
by jdietrich 8y ago
This emotional attachment to the land creates a fundamental economic problem - inelasticity of supply. The uncomfortable reality is that the US is making too much food and has too many small farmers. Federal and state governments spend billions of dollars on farming subsidies, they create indirect subsidies through programmes like crop insurance, bioethanol mandates and food aid, but it still isn't enough to keep small farms profitable.
Unless we introduce some kind of guaranteed minimum income for farmers, their long-term prosperity depends, sadly, on farm closures. We simply have more farmers and more small farms than the market can possibly sustain.
- coderintherye 8y agoPartially true, but partially not. If everyone grows the same crops then yes. However, there is quite a market for farmers to switch in to more esoteric crops that fetch a premium. However, this requires exposure to new markets, risk, and learning new things. Case in point is hemp, which I grow, and is quite a profitable crop. Eventually, it won't be, but for right now it's something that a lot of farmers could be switching in to and making better money.
- cageface 8y agoWhat are the commercial uses for the hemp you grow? I notice hemp seeds are becoming a lot more popular as a natural protein & healthy fat source.
- saalweachter 8y agoCall me crazy, but I like supporting a policy of overproducing food.
- pm90 8y agoSo does the US Federal Government, which is the main reason why farm subsidies, although wasteful, are absolutely necessary for National Security. The quickest way for a country/civilization to fall is by interruptions in food supply. The US is a large country with many people. If the food price increase sharply or if there's food scarcity, it will most certainly lead to social unrest of the kind we've never seen before.
- PorterDuff 8y agoIt seems to me that if the point (or at least part of it) of government farm policy is to produce oversupply, you could argue that they set up subsidies to favor small operators. A large quantity of small farms, with slightly different approaches to problems, slightly different crops, different sources of financing, local ownership sounds like it might be more reliable in the long run. Admittedly, the efficiency of the system would suffer a bit.
- saalweachter 8y agoYou're mostly hedging against weather. One region gets flooded or hit by a drought, and then produces essentially nothing. So you want N+M regional redundancy, where you can lose the output of M regions and the remaining N can produce enough for the whole.
- pjc50 8y agoImports? Amartya Sen's work on the huge historical famines argues that they were essentially economic phenomena where there was enough food but not enough money to buy the food. In both the Bengal and Irish famines there were even food exports happening during the crisis.
- 8y ago