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I work in agtech and I'm not surprised by this at all. The major corn and soy producers have faced downward pressure for the last 4 years. It now costs more to

I work in agtech and I'm not surprised by this at all. The major corn and soy producers have faced downward pressure for the last 4 years. It now costs more to plant the crop than to pick and sell it. And yet, the government pushes and incentivizes farmers to just grow more. Read This Blessed Earth or Omnivore's Dilemma if you want a primer on how messed up this system has become. What farmers need are a way to restore profits in a sustainable fashion. Simply growing more corn/soybeans/rice/wheat isn't going to cut it anymore.

hammock 7y ago
The corn loss this year is due to weather, specifically how wet it was. Planting was super late in many areas, if they were able to plant at all.
pizza 7y ago
“Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.“ Catch-22
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  That is more than 50 years old and still true today. Great quote.
Zelphyr 7y ago
Can replacing these crops with hemp, now that it’s legal, help with this problem?
- acconrad 7y ago
  I haven't studied hemp but there are two primary limitations: 1. Corn saps nitrogen from the soil. Soybeans add nitrogen to the soil. Since both are cash crops you want to rotate them. Since hemp is a weed and not a legume it would still might have to be rotated in with soy. It's simply not a cut and swap operation like a line of code :) 2. The government isn't incentivizing hemp so now every acre you swap with hemp not only isn't discounted, the demand for it is a fraction of that of corn. That and it isn't legal to grow in any of the farm belt. Just because you can grow in CA or CO doesn't mean you can in KS or TN.
  - thatcat 7y ago
    You can in TN now... Farm belt is changing and many tobacco farms have converted.
  - lostapathy 7y ago
    Actually Kansas licenses industrial hemp starting this year.
tryptophan 7y ago
>What farmers need are a way to restore profits in a sustainable fashion. Simply growing more corn/soybeans/rice/wheat isn't going to cut it anymore. The way this is done in other industries, except for farming, is that half of the producers go bankrupt, production is reduced, and the survivors are able to be self-sustaining and profitable. We really do not need this much soy/corn. The market is screaming "stop making it" and perhaps it is time we listen.
- rgbrenner 7y ago
  The market and nature. Groundwater depletion: https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/groundwater-decline-and-depletion?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/scie... And this can't be entirely restored.. since when water is removed, the cavities in the dirt/rock that held the water collapse, and they can't be refilled (for example). Making the midwest more sustainable would be a good thing.
  - iamshs 7y ago
    Punjab is another example of severe groundwater depletion. Experts here say that growing Basmati rice through groundwater is an unwise endeavour, as we are exporting a future valuable for pennies. Now government is recommending Corn to be planted, I guess I will forward them this link.
    - devoply 7y ago
      That's the thing, the developed countries are so arrogant about how much better they do things than the third world, but if you look a bit closer it's the same shit different supposedly developed country.
      - agsilvio 7y ago
        So you're saying that the US is in reality no more developed than a developing ("third world") country?
wpdev_63 7y ago
A 100 years ago it would take a 1000 people to plant, maintain, and pick a farm that would take a just one person and a machine to do today. Obviously we don't need as many farmers as we did back then and a result of that is the collapse of the food prices. Do you really care that with all the spending the government does that farmer subsidies are a problem? I'd rather see more people farming than building bombs, evading my privacy for 'security', and wars fought over ideology.
- rabidrat 7y ago
  To be fair, that machine took N people to manufacture (along with upkeep, which I imagine that one farm person is no longer doing on the complicated farm machinery), and another M people to drill/refine/transport the fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, and other chemicals needed to run such a farm so efficiently. I wonder how big N+M+1 is..
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - numakerg 7y ago
    Probably fewer per calorie of food grown.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  > I'd rather see more people farming than building bombs, evading my privacy for 'security', and wars fought over ideology. Or instead of either kind of wasteful labor we could let people work fewer hours...
- jaredklewis 7y ago
  Being less bad than a bomb is not a very high bar to jump over. I can think of many more productive uses for that money than over-farming, which causes a host of environmental issues.
HillaryBriss 7y ago
> It now costs more to plant the crop than to pick and sell it. not sure -- why is this ratio important?
- willhslade 7y ago
  You produce at a loss? Is this a serious question?
  - will123195 7y ago
    Legit question. Planting, picking and selling are all costs of doing business. Unless "picking and selling" refers to sales revenue which is not my interpretation either.
  - HillaryBriss 7y ago
    It would have been clearer to write something like "planting and picking costs exceed sales revenue."
leakybit 7y ago
Why should profit be the motive to grow food. What extactly have we been doing as a society that we still have people who stuggle to pay for basic necessities needed to live.
- basementcat 7y ago
  Why should profit be the motive to write code?
  - rickycook 7y ago
    for some people it isn’t, but i think he’s referring to the fact that food is pretty damn far toward the base of maslows hierarchy. many people (myself included) believe that a measure of a society is how far up the triangle you can get before needing to do something you don’t want to do to reach higher (eg work in order to improve your hobby skills)
- ajmurmann 7y ago
  It's because the market is an incredibly powerful way to make this effective. However, that's assuming it's a well functioning market and that incentives are actually going towards filling all important needs and we don't fall into some game theoretical dilemma. The latter is where markers need to be directed or supplemented. I'd argue that the free market would be the best way to make sure we get the food the vast majority of consumers want at a good price. However, I'd also agree that the free market will fail at providing safety from famines in a bad year or making farming sustainable in the long run. That some people are starving despite overproduction of food is a symptom of a larger economic problem in the US. It's not that the wrong goods are being produced but that we distribute them in a way that leaves many people below there minimal needs. Solutions to me are obvious: "Traditional" forms of wellfare like we see in Europe or UBI.
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  What have we been doing as a society? Asking politicians and corporations to give us what we don't need, to get rid of what we do need, and to not make us pay for it. We got what we ordered.
tehjoker 7y ago
The government system of subsidizing production is a good thing. The problem is it's not planned enough (or planned to service certain interests). When we didn't have subsidies, we had underproduction of food crops because of the vagaries of market forces. This lead to starvation and displacement. However, I think I could agree that corn and soy in particular are overproduced. I've heard that you can eat less soy by eating soybeans than by eating livestock raised on it.
- sumedh 7y ago
  > The government system of subsidizing production is a good thing. How is that a good thing, shouldnt the free market take care of it? If there is shortage of wheat why cant wheat be imported from other countries to take care of the shortage?
  - username90 7y ago
    > If there is shortage of wheat why cant wheat be imported from other countries to take care of the shortage? What if there was a wheat recession and there was no more wheat anywhere? Or what if there was a trade war and they refuse to trade? At least I think it is a good thing that people no longer starve to death during recessions.
    - sumedh 7y ago
      What is the point of talking about hypotheticals? People in the US die because they cannot afford medical costs, the US is perfectly happy with that.
      - nosianu 7y ago
        It's not a hypothetical at all. This is bound to happen sooner or later. You don't want it to happen even once. Food reserves only go so far - and if you use them for this very foreseeable problem (you just don't know when exactly) you leave yourself more open to the unforeseeable catastrophes. And yes, there is a very good point talking about hypotheticals on such literally vitally important topics. > People in the US die because they cannot afford medical costs, the US is perfectly happy with that. Maybe the difference is that sick people don't riot? If I remember the already mentioned "The Omnivore's Dilemma" correctly the current agricultural policies among other factors mentioned there also were created because of civil unrest due to food shortages, to prevent it from happening again. I can find plenty of sources for food riots, I have not read about anything similar caused by medical costs.
Dowwie 7y ago
Omnivore's Dilemma author, Michael Pollan, wrote an oped in the new york times back when his book, "King Corn" was published. The article and the book are both worthwhile reads about the subject of corn in the US. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/19/opinion/when-a-crop-becomes-king.html http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/19/opinion/when-a-crop-become...
randomdata 7y ago
> And yet, the government pushes and incentivizes farmers to just grow more. I'm a corn farmer (along with soybeans, dry beans, and wheat). What particular incentive is there for me to grow more corn? I am honestly unsure of what you are referring to. There is a natural incentive for me to stay within that group of crops because that is what my existing infrastructure is capable of handling. If I wanted to grow, say, tomatoes, assuming my locale is actually suitable for growing them commercially, I would need to set up an entirely new infrastructure to handle them at great cost. That doesn't make business sense. Accepting a bad year on corn sales to be made up in the good years does. That said, new crop corn was at nearly $6 with the local basis applied a few weeks back. If you cannot plant and harvest corn at a profit at $6, you're doing something horribly, horribly wrong. The real problem this year – and what prompted the jump to $6 – is the wet spring that left us struggling to get the crop in. If you have a crop to harvest this year, and were savvy enough to sell it, you're laughing.
- pmorici 7y ago
  The billions of dollars in subsidies the US Government spends on a handful of crops including corn? Mandates about things like ethanol that support the price of certain crops? They don't have to be in the form of direct payments to influence what a farmer does. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_St...
- jccalhoun 7y ago
  I think your point about the difficulty of switching crops is a good one. There is a lot of specialized equipment that goes into farming and farmers can't instantly switch crops any more than an independent grocery store could switch to selling clothes over night. However, regarding incentives. While there aren't "incentives" aren't there government subsidies? The article talks about $28 billion in new money for farmers to offset tariffs?

hammock 7y ago

The corn loss this year is due to weather, specifically how wet it was. Planting was super late in many areas, if they were able to plant at all.

pizza 7y ago

“Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.“ Catch-22

NotSammyHagar 7y ago
That is more than 50 years old and still true today. Great quote.

Zelphyr 7y ago

Can replacing these crops with hemp, now that it’s legal, help with this problem?

acconrad 7y ago
I haven't studied hemp but there are two primary limitations: 1. Corn saps nitrogen from the soil. Soybeans add nitrogen to the soil. Since both are cash crops you want to rotate them. Since hemp is a weed and not a legume it would still might have to be rotated in with soy. It's simply not a cut and swap operation like a line of code :) 2. The government isn't incentivizing hemp so now every acre you swap with hemp not only isn't discounted, the demand for it is a fraction of that of corn. That and it isn't legal to grow in any of the farm belt. Just because you can grow in CA or CO doesn't mean you can in KS or TN.
- thatcat 7y ago
  You can in TN now... Farm belt is changing and many tobacco farms have converted.
- lostapathy 7y ago
  Actually Kansas licenses industrial hemp starting this year.

tryptophan 7y ago

>What farmers need are a way to restore profits in a sustainable fashion. Simply growing more corn/soybeans/rice/wheat isn't going to cut it anymore. The way this is done in other industries, except for farming, is that half of the producers go bankrupt, production is reduced, and the survivors are able to be self-sustaining and profitable. We really do not need this much soy/corn. The market is screaming "stop making it" and perhaps it is time we listen.

rgbrenner 7y ago
The market and nature. Groundwater depletion: https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/groundwater-decline-and-depletion?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/scie... And this can't be entirely restored.. since when water is removed, the cavities in the dirt/rock that held the water collapse, and they can't be refilled (for example). Making the midwest more sustainable would be a good thing.
- iamshs 7y ago
  Punjab is another example of severe groundwater depletion. Experts here say that growing Basmati rice through groundwater is an unwise endeavour, as we are exporting a future valuable for pennies. Now government is recommending Corn to be planted, I guess I will forward them this link.
  - devoply 7y ago
    That's the thing, the developed countries are so arrogant about how much better they do things than the third world, but if you look a bit closer it's the same shit different supposedly developed country.
    - agsilvio 7y ago
      So you're saying that the US is in reality no more developed than a developing ("third world") country?

wpdev_63 7y ago

A 100 years ago it would take a 1000 people to plant, maintain, and pick a farm that would take a just one person and a machine to do today. Obviously we don't need as many farmers as we did back then and a result of that is the collapse of the food prices. Do you really care that with all the spending the government does that farmer subsidies are a problem? I'd rather see more people farming than building bombs, evading my privacy for 'security', and wars fought over ideology.

rabidrat 7y ago
To be fair, that machine took N people to manufacture (along with upkeep, which I imagine that one farm person is no longer doing on the complicated farm machinery), and another M people to drill/refine/transport the fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, and other chemicals needed to run such a farm so efficiently. I wonder how big N+M+1 is..
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- numakerg 7y ago
  Probably fewer per calorie of food grown.
Dylan16807 7y ago
> I'd rather see more people farming than building bombs, evading my privacy for 'security', and wars fought over ideology. Or instead of either kind of wasteful labor we could let people work fewer hours...
jaredklewis 7y ago
Being less bad than a bomb is not a very high bar to jump over. I can think of many more productive uses for that money than over-farming, which causes a host of environmental issues.

HillaryBriss 7y ago

> It now costs more to plant the crop than to pick and sell it. not sure -- why is this ratio important?

willhslade 7y ago
You produce at a loss? Is this a serious question?
- will123195 7y ago
  Legit question. Planting, picking and selling are all costs of doing business. Unless "picking and selling" refers to sales revenue which is not my interpretation either.
- HillaryBriss 7y ago
  It would have been clearer to write something like "planting and picking costs exceed sales revenue."

leakybit 7y ago

Why should profit be the motive to grow food. What extactly have we been doing as a society that we still have people who stuggle to pay for basic necessities needed to live.

basementcat 7y ago
Why should profit be the motive to write code?
- rickycook 7y ago
  for some people it isn’t, but i think he’s referring to the fact that food is pretty damn far toward the base of maslows hierarchy. many people (myself included) believe that a measure of a society is how far up the triangle you can get before needing to do something you don’t want to do to reach higher (eg work in order to improve your hobby skills)
ajmurmann 7y ago
It's because the market is an incredibly powerful way to make this effective. However, that's assuming it's a well functioning market and that incentives are actually going towards filling all important needs and we don't fall into some game theoretical dilemma. The latter is where markers need to be directed or supplemented. I'd argue that the free market would be the best way to make sure we get the food the vast majority of consumers want at a good price. However, I'd also agree that the free market will fail at providing safety from famines in a bad year or making farming sustainable in the long run. That some people are starving despite overproduction of food is a symptom of a larger economic problem in the US. It's not that the wrong goods are being produced but that we distribute them in a way that leaves many people below there minimal needs. Solutions to me are obvious: "Traditional" forms of wellfare like we see in Europe or UBI.
peterwwillis 7y ago
What have we been doing as a society? Asking politicians and corporations to give us what we don't need, to get rid of what we do need, and to not make us pay for it. We got what we ordered.

tehjoker 7y ago

The government system of subsidizing production is a good thing. The problem is it's not planned enough (or planned to service certain interests). When we didn't have subsidies, we had underproduction of food crops because of the vagaries of market forces. This lead to starvation and displacement. However, I think I could agree that corn and soy in particular are overproduced. I've heard that you can eat less soy by eating soybeans than by eating livestock raised on it.

sumedh 7y ago
> The government system of subsidizing production is a good thing. How is that a good thing, shouldnt the free market take care of it? If there is shortage of wheat why cant wheat be imported from other countries to take care of the shortage?
- username90 7y ago
  > If there is shortage of wheat why cant wheat be imported from other countries to take care of the shortage? What if there was a wheat recession and there was no more wheat anywhere? Or what if there was a trade war and they refuse to trade? At least I think it is a good thing that people no longer starve to death during recessions.
  - sumedh 7y ago
    What is the point of talking about hypotheticals? People in the US die because they cannot afford medical costs, the US is perfectly happy with that.
    - nosianu 7y ago
      It's not a hypothetical at all. This is bound to happen sooner or later. You don't want it to happen even once. Food reserves only go so far - and if you use them for this very foreseeable problem (you just don't know when exactly) you leave yourself more open to the unforeseeable catastrophes. And yes, there is a very good point talking about hypotheticals on such literally vitally important topics. > People in the US die because they cannot afford medical costs, the US is perfectly happy with that. Maybe the difference is that sick people don't riot? If I remember the already mentioned "The Omnivore's Dilemma" correctly the current agricultural policies among other factors mentioned there also were created because of civil unrest due to food shortages, to prevent it from happening again. I can find plenty of sources for food riots, I have not read about anything similar caused by medical costs.

Dowwie 7y ago

Omnivore's Dilemma author, Michael Pollan, wrote an oped in the new york times back when his book, "King Corn" was published. The article and the book are both worthwhile reads about the subject of corn in the US. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/19/opinion/when-a-crop-becomes-king.html http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/19/opinion/when-a-crop-become...

randomdata 7y ago

> And yet, the government pushes and incentivizes farmers to just grow more. I'm a corn farmer (along with soybeans, dry beans, and wheat). What particular incentive is there for me to grow more corn? I am honestly unsure of what you are referring to. There is a natural incentive for me to stay within that group of crops because that is what my existing infrastructure is capable of handling. If I wanted to grow, say, tomatoes, assuming my locale is actually suitable for growing them commercially, I would need to set up an entirely new infrastructure to handle them at great cost. That doesn't make business sense. Accepting a bad year on corn sales to be made up in the good years does. That said, new crop corn was at nearly $6 with the local basis applied a few weeks back. If you cannot plant and harvest corn at a profit at $6, you're doing something horribly, horribly wrong. The real problem this year – and what prompted the jump to $6 – is the wet spring that left us struggling to get the crop in. If you have a crop to harvest this year, and were savvy enough to sell it, you're laughing.

pmorici 7y ago
The billions of dollars in subsidies the US Government spends on a handful of crops including corn? Mandates about things like ethanol that support the price of certain crops? They don't have to be in the form of direct payments to influence what a farmer does. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_St...
jccalhoun 7y ago
I think your point about the difficulty of switching crops is a good one. There is a lot of specialized equipment that goes into farming and farmers can't instantly switch crops any more than an independent grocery store could switch to selling clothes over night. However, regarding incentives. While there aren't "incentives" aren't there government subsidies? The article talks about $28 billion in new money for farmers to offset tariffs?