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>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 t

>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?
      - throwaway-hn123 7y ago
        So you're saying that you can't parse English very well and that you also like to misconstrue what other people are saying.
- petre 7y ago
  Also topsoil depletion. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/30/topsoil-farming-agriculture-food-toxic-america https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/201...
EdwardDiego 7y ago
Yep, NZ used to protect its farmers with tariffs and subsidise them. When the tariffs and subsidies were removed, a lot of farmers went bust, it was a painful period. But now our agricultural sector is competitive on the world stage against subsidised and protected competitors. There's still a ways to go though, we've seen a massive movement towards dairy conversions which is predicated on free water, cheap electricity and the government not pricing externalities like lowland river pollution.
- kwhitefoot 7y ago
  Norway also protects farmers with tariffs and subsidies but it doesn't have the same bad effects here because it is targeted at maintaining agriculture and human presence in otherwise unpopular locations (high in the mountains, in the north, along difficult coastlines). Where there is a farm there is a need for a mechanic, a doctor, a dentist, all of these people need a petrol station, someone to maintain and build houses, and so on, so it keeps a community alive and makes the country more resilient against external changes. It also counters, to some extent, the drift to the big cities that all countries seem to experience. And one welcome result is that a very large proportion of the food I eat here is produced in Norway. There is certainly room for improvement but while I would like it to be cheaper I don't want the country flooded with the kind of race to the bottom crap that depresses wages in other countries. It probably works here because we have few very large farms and strict, and strictly enforced, environmental legislation.
  - tyfon 7y ago
    > And one welcome result is that a very large proportion of the food I eat here is produced in Norway. This is only the last step. Most of the animal feed is bought outside of Norway and from the wheat we do produce only 15% is of high enough quality to be used for humans [1], the rest is animal feed. The wheat that is used for humans have to be treated since it's too moist. Norway is _far_ from self sufficient and will never be. The farmers (5% of the population) have received subsidies that are equivalent to the deposits to the sovereign wealth fund since the fund was started, that is to say if we didn't subsidise them we could have had a fund that was twice the size. The general quality of the food in the stores is also very bad compared to other countries with the exception of pork and sheep meat. There is nothing to gain as a nation from subsidising our farms the way we do except for the 5% that actually receive all this money. It would be much better for the society to let countries that have areas that can produce food properly do that and just buy it from them instead. All in all I wish we went the NZ route, let the farms go bankrupt if they can't produce something that people want at the price they will pay it and restore the land to the nature. [1] https://brodogkorn.no/fakta/matkorn/ https://brodogkorn.no/fakta/matkorn/
xster 7y ago
Another part of the story that's extremely hard to find in the corporate news. We've been wiping out Latin American farmers by dumping subsidized agricultural products for the past half-decade and yet we call everyone else a dumper. And when others fight back, such as India winning the WTO case against US being anti-competitive on solar cells [1], Trump threatens to leave the WTO [2]. [1] https://www.livemint.com/news/india/india-wins-solar-case-against-us-at-wto-1561634893762.html https://www.livemint.com/news/india/india-wins-solar-case-ag... [2] https://www.news18.com/news/world/will-leave-if-we-have-to-in-fresh-attack-donald-trump-threatens-to-pull-us-from-wto-2269829.html https://www.news18.com/news/world/will-leave-if-we-have-to-i...
- jacobolus 7y ago
  > wiping out Latin American farmers by dumping subsidized agricultural products for the past half-decade At least since NAFTA: 25 years now.
- stephen_g 7y ago
  That’s quite by design, some believe. Same with how development loans work - they basically mean that the country has to export a large proportion of the their output (to get the foreign currency required to pay back the loan - foreign denominated debt really is a poisoned chalice for any country). So they encourage development of resource extraction and farming of crops valuable for export (fruit, etc. but generally not good staples because of the huge amount of subsidised US product on the market). So they eventually dependant on importing staples, which makes the US very influential (sanctions, for example are much more effective if a country can’t feed itself).
vkou 7y ago
Do that in farming, and you'll be dealing with bread riots. Avoiding bread riots is why every single developed nation on Earth heavily subsidizes its farmers, even when they produce at a loss. The ones that didn't got regime changed by hungry, angry people. Optimized systems tend to become non-resilient - fragile to external shocks. The last thing I want is a fragile system of food production and distribution. It's better to pay extra into an inefficient system than deal with famines.
- EdwardDiego 7y ago
  NZ stopped protecting its farmers and we're a large exporter of food and the 3rd most obese nation - all those damn famines huh?
  - vkou 7y ago
    1. NZ has 3 times more arable land/person than, say, the United States. It could probably use the same farming methods as China did in the famine of Great Leap Forward, and still have enough food to go around. 2. Driving without a seatbelt, or car insurance works, until it doesn't. 3. You'd probably be producing even more food/person, and be more resilient to market failure/drought/crop failures/etc were it subsidized.
    - EdwardDiego 7y ago
      3. Nope. We were producing less food when our farmers were subsidized. 1. According to my googling, the USA has 0.38 hectares of arable land per person, NZ has 0.14 per person. You're aware only 2% of our land is arable compared to the USA's 16% right? Lots of mountains and hill country here.
      - abraae 7y ago
        Arable's a blunt classification though. In NZ we have no mountain lions preying on our sheep, which makes better use of that land. Not to mention favourable growing conditions.
thereisnospork 7y ago
The problem is that these natural market corrections, when they occur with farming, have historically resulted in famine. Natural, self-correcting famine maybe, but all the same allowing it to occur is understandably undesirable.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  The decline of famine in the developed world long predates the massive farm subsidies that exist in the United States. The last time there was a major famine in England, for example, was in the 1650s. There has never been a major famine in the USA, yet the subsidies we now think of as the Farm Bill only really started in the 1920s.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    > The last time there was a major famine in England, for example, was in the 1650's. That's an interesting way to cherry-pick a statistic and ignore a genocide (I'll give you a hint: 1840's). If Ireland had closed her ports, I wonder how much England would have felt the tighter food supply.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
      England would probably have been fine, considering they were mostly getting inefficient calories like beef butter, milk, and beef from Ireland. Although your citation of the outflows of food is actually a great way to prove my point. There was plenty of food to feed everyone even in the darkest of days, with farming techniques far less efficient than the ones we have now. But shitty economic policy (too small plots of land for tenant farmers, the whole landlord tenant system, colonialism, etc.) and failure to subsidize food consumption for the poor led to really terrible outcomes. Yet there was plenty of food production even when there were no subsidies.
      - hinkley 7y ago
        The argument goes that starvation is usually a logistics/corruption problem as much as anything. Technically you can consider the math of supply without it, but practically it matters more than most other things. Is the current situation unusual, or is it SNAFU?
acconrad 7y ago
This doesn't work in farming because it isn't a free market. Most farms are owned by Cargill or Monsanto. And they are all propped up by the federal government.
- seattle_spring 7y ago
  Those companies breed seeds, they don't farm them.
- protomyth 7y ago
  Most farms are owned by Cargill or Monsanto Can you supply some citations for that statement? [edit] Wikipedia would indicate Non-family corporate farms account for 1.36 percent of US farmland area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_farming#North_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_farming#North_Americ... [/edit]
  - ggm 7y ago
    Beef grazing would need to be accounted for. Land under agistment, set aside and out of production too, but for rate purposes assessed as agriculture? I think you need to focus on cultivated/cropping.
  - kurthr 7y ago
    Well, technically Cargil's are family farms since it is a privately held corporation (150k employees on $115B revenue) owned by a family which owns and operates the farms. Most (unbiased) estimates are closer to 70% family farms although those have also grown extraordinarily large in the last few decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill https://newfoodeconomy.org/who-really-owns-american-farmland/ https://newfoodeconomy.org/who-really-owns-american-farmland...
    - protomyth 7y ago
      Uhm... I've worked at Cargill. You are quoting the whole value of a corporation not the total dealing with farmers. In fact, Cargill's grain division doesn't own any farms. Pork does, but that's not the type of farm we are talking about. Nothing owned by Cargill is listed as a family farm. The article actually says United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that at least 30 percent of American farmland is owned by non-operators who lease it out to farmers. Yeah, that is a common arrangement that's been with us for decades. Also, in some states, such as North Dakota, corporate farms are illegal http://inthesetimes.com/rural-america/entry/19224/north-dakota-votes-no-on-measure-1-corporate-farm-ban http://inthesetimes.com/rural-america/entry/19224/north-dako...
Aperocky 7y ago
Technically they could sell all of that to China for animal feed, the meat consumption of China per capita is nearing Europe and has a huge demand of feed. Too bad trade war screwed all of that and now it looks like a lot of food will be wasted.
- petre 7y ago
  Donate it to starving African children.
  - babayega2 7y ago
    Not necessarily starving children... but I have seen in the 1990's the USA distributing corn oil, and other surplus of the farming industry through the UN/USAID in Africa. A way of buying influence... (P.S. I work for one UN food organization especially funded for that purpose :D)
Spooky23 7y ago
Except grain farming. Our policy makers will happily drive any other type of farmer out of business. US policy is driving the small producers out of business. We will see prices go up in a few years as farming gets bigger and manufactured product controlled by a few big companies replaces the real thing.
ksec 7y ago
Yes, but when production is reduced we will have a huge spike of food price. We may need more consolidation in these food production. As in by nature of business cycles.

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?
    - throwaway-hn123 7y ago
      So you're saying that you can't parse English very well and that you also like to misconstrue what other people are saying.
petre 7y ago
Also topsoil depletion. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/30/topsoil-farming-agriculture-food-toxic-america https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/201...

EdwardDiego 7y ago

Yep, NZ used to protect its farmers with tariffs and subsidise them. When the tariffs and subsidies were removed, a lot of farmers went bust, it was a painful period. But now our agricultural sector is competitive on the world stage against subsidised and protected competitors. There's still a ways to go though, we've seen a massive movement towards dairy conversions which is predicated on free water, cheap electricity and the government not pricing externalities like lowland river pollution.

kwhitefoot 7y ago
Norway also protects farmers with tariffs and subsidies but it doesn't have the same bad effects here because it is targeted at maintaining agriculture and human presence in otherwise unpopular locations (high in the mountains, in the north, along difficult coastlines). Where there is a farm there is a need for a mechanic, a doctor, a dentist, all of these people need a petrol station, someone to maintain and build houses, and so on, so it keeps a community alive and makes the country more resilient against external changes. It also counters, to some extent, the drift to the big cities that all countries seem to experience. And one welcome result is that a very large proportion of the food I eat here is produced in Norway. There is certainly room for improvement but while I would like it to be cheaper I don't want the country flooded with the kind of race to the bottom crap that depresses wages in other countries. It probably works here because we have few very large farms and strict, and strictly enforced, environmental legislation.
- tyfon 7y ago
  > And one welcome result is that a very large proportion of the food I eat here is produced in Norway. This is only the last step. Most of the animal feed is bought outside of Norway and from the wheat we do produce only 15% is of high enough quality to be used for humans [1], the rest is animal feed. The wheat that is used for humans have to be treated since it's too moist. Norway is _far_ from self sufficient and will never be. The farmers (5% of the population) have received subsidies that are equivalent to the deposits to the sovereign wealth fund since the fund was started, that is to say if we didn't subsidise them we could have had a fund that was twice the size. The general quality of the food in the stores is also very bad compared to other countries with the exception of pork and sheep meat. There is nothing to gain as a nation from subsidising our farms the way we do except for the 5% that actually receive all this money. It would be much better for the society to let countries that have areas that can produce food properly do that and just buy it from them instead. All in all I wish we went the NZ route, let the farms go bankrupt if they can't produce something that people want at the price they will pay it and restore the land to the nature. [1] https://brodogkorn.no/fakta/matkorn/ https://brodogkorn.no/fakta/matkorn/

xster 7y ago

Another part of the story that's extremely hard to find in the corporate news. We've been wiping out Latin American farmers by dumping subsidized agricultural products for the past half-decade and yet we call everyone else a dumper. And when others fight back, such as India winning the WTO case against US being anti-competitive on solar cells [1], Trump threatens to leave the WTO [2]. [1] https://www.livemint.com/news/india/india-wins-solar-case-against-us-at-wto-1561634893762.html https://www.livemint.com/news/india/india-wins-solar-case-ag... [2] https://www.news18.com/news/world/will-leave-if-we-have-to-in-fresh-attack-donald-trump-threatens-to-pull-us-from-wto-2269829.html https://www.news18.com/news/world/will-leave-if-we-have-to-i...

jacobolus 7y ago
> wiping out Latin American farmers by dumping subsidized agricultural products for the past half-decade At least since NAFTA: 25 years now.
stephen_g 7y ago
That’s quite by design, some believe. Same with how development loans work - they basically mean that the country has to export a large proportion of the their output (to get the foreign currency required to pay back the loan - foreign denominated debt really is a poisoned chalice for any country). So they encourage development of resource extraction and farming of crops valuable for export (fruit, etc. but generally not good staples because of the huge amount of subsidised US product on the market). So they eventually dependant on importing staples, which makes the US very influential (sanctions, for example are much more effective if a country can’t feed itself).

vkou 7y ago

Do that in farming, and you'll be dealing with bread riots. Avoiding bread riots is why every single developed nation on Earth heavily subsidizes its farmers, even when they produce at a loss. The ones that didn't got regime changed by hungry, angry people. Optimized systems tend to become non-resilient - fragile to external shocks. The last thing I want is a fragile system of food production and distribution. It's better to pay extra into an inefficient system than deal with famines.

EdwardDiego 7y ago
NZ stopped protecting its farmers and we're a large exporter of food and the 3rd most obese nation - all those damn famines huh?
- vkou 7y ago
  1. NZ has 3 times more arable land/person than, say, the United States. It could probably use the same farming methods as China did in the famine of Great Leap Forward, and still have enough food to go around. 2. Driving without a seatbelt, or car insurance works, until it doesn't. 3. You'd probably be producing even more food/person, and be more resilient to market failure/drought/crop failures/etc were it subsidized.
  - EdwardDiego 7y ago
    3. Nope. We were producing less food when our farmers were subsidized. 1. According to my googling, the USA has 0.38 hectares of arable land per person, NZ has 0.14 per person. You're aware only 2% of our land is arable compared to the USA's 16% right? Lots of mountains and hill country here.
    - abraae 7y ago
      Arable's a blunt classification though. In NZ we have no mountain lions preying on our sheep, which makes better use of that land. Not to mention favourable growing conditions.

thereisnospork 7y ago

The problem is that these natural market corrections, when they occur with farming, have historically resulted in famine. Natural, self-correcting famine maybe, but all the same allowing it to occur is understandably undesirable.

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
The decline of famine in the developed world long predates the massive farm subsidies that exist in the United States. The last time there was a major famine in England, for example, was in the 1650s. There has never been a major famine in the USA, yet the subsidies we now think of as the Farm Bill only really started in the 1920s.
- hinkley 7y ago
  > The last time there was a major famine in England, for example, was in the 1650's. That's an interesting way to cherry-pick a statistic and ignore a genocide (I'll give you a hint: 1840's). If Ireland had closed her ports, I wonder how much England would have felt the tighter food supply.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    England would probably have been fine, considering they were mostly getting inefficient calories like beef butter, milk, and beef from Ireland. Although your citation of the outflows of food is actually a great way to prove my point. There was plenty of food to feed everyone even in the darkest of days, with farming techniques far less efficient than the ones we have now. But shitty economic policy (too small plots of land for tenant farmers, the whole landlord tenant system, colonialism, etc.) and failure to subsidize food consumption for the poor led to really terrible outcomes. Yet there was plenty of food production even when there were no subsidies.
    - hinkley 7y ago
      The argument goes that starvation is usually a logistics/corruption problem as much as anything. Technically you can consider the math of supply without it, but practically it matters more than most other things. Is the current situation unusual, or is it SNAFU?

acconrad 7y ago

This doesn't work in farming because it isn't a free market. Most farms are owned by Cargill or Monsanto. And they are all propped up by the federal government.

seattle_spring 7y ago
Those companies breed seeds, they don't farm them.
protomyth 7y ago
Most farms are owned by Cargill or Monsanto Can you supply some citations for that statement? [edit] Wikipedia would indicate Non-family corporate farms account for 1.36 percent of US farmland area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_farming#North_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_farming#North_Americ... [/edit]
- ggm 7y ago
  Beef grazing would need to be accounted for. Land under agistment, set aside and out of production too, but for rate purposes assessed as agriculture? I think you need to focus on cultivated/cropping.
- kurthr 7y ago
  Well, technically Cargil's are family farms since it is a privately held corporation (150k employees on $115B revenue) owned by a family which owns and operates the farms. Most (unbiased) estimates are closer to 70% family farms although those have also grown extraordinarily large in the last few decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill https://newfoodeconomy.org/who-really-owns-american-farmland/ https://newfoodeconomy.org/who-really-owns-american-farmland...
  - protomyth 7y ago
    Uhm... I've worked at Cargill. You are quoting the whole value of a corporation not the total dealing with farmers. In fact, Cargill's grain division doesn't own any farms. Pork does, but that's not the type of farm we are talking about. Nothing owned by Cargill is listed as a family farm. The article actually says United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that at least 30 percent of American farmland is owned by non-operators who lease it out to farmers. Yeah, that is a common arrangement that's been with us for decades. Also, in some states, such as North Dakota, corporate farms are illegal http://inthesetimes.com/rural-america/entry/19224/north-dakota-votes-no-on-measure-1-corporate-farm-ban http://inthesetimes.com/rural-america/entry/19224/north-dako...

Aperocky 7y ago

Technically they could sell all of that to China for animal feed, the meat consumption of China per capita is nearing Europe and has a huge demand of feed. Too bad trade war screwed all of that and now it looks like a lot of food will be wasted.

petre 7y ago
Donate it to starving African children.
- babayega2 7y ago
  Not necessarily starving children... but I have seen in the 1990's the USA distributing corn oil, and other surplus of the farming industry through the UN/USAID in Africa. A way of buying influence... (P.S. I work for one UN food organization especially funded for that purpose :D)

Spooky23 7y ago

Except grain farming. Our policy makers will happily drive any other type of farmer out of business. US policy is driving the small producers out of business. We will see prices go up in a few years as farming gets bigger and manufactured product controlled by a few big companies replaces the real thing.

ksec 7y ago

Yes, but when production is reduced we will have a huge spike of food price. We may need more consolidation in these food production. As in by nature of business cycles.