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unfortunately the cow seems out of the barn for reasons other than legislation being missing. Farmers have not adapted to changes in conditions and they had ti

unfortunately the cow seems out of the barn for reasons other than legislation being missing. Farmers have not adapted to changes in conditions and they had time to do so. The point of a union should not be to collute to raise prices. The point of a union should be to pool market power and resources to break monopolies in creameries, or pollution. Any farmer should have seen the writing on the wall to have 1 creamery being their only customer, and develop options immediately. Their lifelihood depended on it!! Farmers can't be kicked out of a coop they own. Too late for that. Also, farmers should have pooled resources and sued to high hell all the pollutants and reported farms using illegal labor. Petition townsfolk to start class action sue pollutants. Hit where it hurts. The article never talks about that. Only complaints about the law (which incidentally, should have not happened if farmers had been proactive at getting their communities to unite against the pollutants). Instead of putting bad actors out of business, this article seems to state that small farmers were not successful in petitioning - via legislation - to become bad actors themselves. Unfortunate. Legislation seems to have gotten small farmers in trouble, legislation will not come to the rescue now. Legislation is for the big guns. They are not that.

Spooky23 6y ago
Agriculture was the first victim of the red/blue phenomenon. Agricultural and trade policy is all about government supported grain industry. For the dairy farmer, they are stuck between regulatory reform that dramatically increases the supply of milk by creating a national market, while their downstream supply chain partners are allowed to consolidate and form monopolies, because American legal theory is insane. I live in upstate NY from a former dairy producing region. I’m aware of 5 different dairy processors that were within 30-40 miles of my childhood home. Now there is one larger company. It’s only getting worse. The push for meat-substitutes will just lead to even more consolidation, and start introducing supply risks down the road. The aquifers that support Midwest grain are being depleted, and climate change will affect the Southern California miracle in the desert. In the meantime, the well-watered, prime farm I worked on as a teen had most of the topsoil stripped and sold, and there is a subdivision with 40-50 houses on it.
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  Lina Khan may have been appointed just in time then.
- tengbretson 6y ago
  > The aquifers that support Midwest grain are being depleted An overwhelming majority of farm land in the Midwest is not irrigated, with Nebraska being the only significant outlier.
  - mcguire 6y ago
    "The Ogallala Aquifer underlies parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. From wheat and cows to corn and cotton, the regional economy depends almost exclusively on agriculture irrigated by Ogallala groundwater. But according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), producers are extracting water faster than it is being replenished, which means that parts of the Ogallala Aquifer should be considered a nonrenewable resource." In large areas, the water level has dropped more than 50 feet. (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/national-climate-assessment-great-plains%E2%80%99-ogallala-aquifer-drying-out https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/nation...) Each of the circles in these satellite images is an irrigation system. Many are a mile in diameter. * https://goo.gl/maps/5m82TyPRSHnQ2xCx9 https://goo.gl/maps/5m82TyPRSHnQ2xCx9 * https://goo.gl/maps/wveD2BaP8Stp66yw7 https://goo.gl/maps/wveD2BaP8Stp66yw7 * https://goo.gl/maps/yXL2gWEXq9fmz4jj6 https://goo.gl/maps/yXL2gWEXq9fmz4jj6 * https://goo.gl/maps/VbhjEKYgWhaqgEHR6 https://goo.gl/maps/VbhjEKYgWhaqgEHR6 * https://goo.gl/maps/erC76vZx34Rhzt9VA https://goo.gl/maps/erC76vZx34Rhzt9VA
    - HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
      Most of those states are not considered to be in the Midwest.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    McGuire answered this concern. The other one I forgot to mention is the topsoil erosion from brain dead farming practices, which is now in or on its way to the Gulf of Mexico.
thaumasiotes 6y ago
> The point of a union should not be to collu[d]e to raise prices. The point of a union should be to pool market power and resources These are just different words for the same thing.
- gruez 6y ago
  You can have cooperation without price-fixing.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    What would you be cooperating to do?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - alteriority 6y ago
      can't speak for gruez, but a couple off the top of my head: -set standards that all members abide by, potentially bypassing "tragedy of the commons'-style coordination problems -share information which, in a more cutthroat environment, would be considered "trade secrets". Not sure how these would apply to the dairy industry specifically; it just seems overly broad to say that price fixing is the only plausible form of cooperation.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        Look into the effects of your ideas, and you'll see them wind up in rising prices. Your first example, excluding industry members who don't meet a particular standard, is one of the most typical forms of "colluding to raise prices" you could possibly think of, often expressed in the form of professional certification. The only things an economic organization can do are raise prices and lower costs. For a labor union, costs are labor; from the consumer end the workers' "lower costs" mean less work is being done, which shows up as higher prices for consumers.
mindslight 6y ago
You're completely ignoring market inefficiency, as if a distributed desire for something better can simply be summed into creating a viable competitor. The tech equivalent is proclaiming that if you really don't like Google/Apple/Facebook/etc control, go start your own. It completely ignores that doing so takes an extraordinary amount of effort over a long period of time, and any serious competitor is likely to end up bought out by the bigger business before it can affect the market. I'm generally apprehensive any time someone says "there ought to be a law", but the article lays out a well-sourced case. The economy and big business are directly opposed, and having a distributed economy is much more important for us human beings. Perhaps price controls aren't the answer (and would actually further benefit the large farms that are killing the economy), but something needs to be done unless we want to end up with farming monocultures that will some day decide it's more profitable to not supply us food. The right answer is probably antitrust breakup, and a statutory limiting of mergers going forward.
- vram22 6y ago
  >I'm generally apprehensive any time someone says "there ought to be a law", but the article lays out a well-sourced case. The economy and big business are directly opposed, and having a distributed economy is much more important for us human beings. Perhaps price controls aren't the answer (and would actually further benefit the large farms that are killing the economy) Your statements that I quoted above are almost a perfect counter-argument to show why the suggestion in the last sentence of your comment will not work in practice. It will be shot down by vested interests finding loopholes after a few years, if not sooner. IMO a deeper solution is needed. And no, I cannot give one off the top of my head. Nor am I qualified to do so. But even laymen to an area can see potential flaws if they are obvious.
  - mindslight 6y ago
    Possible deeper solutions are to end the centralizing trickle up economics of ZIRP, or to stop time. But either one of these is less likely to happen than targeted anti-trust. I get the idea that the market simply sees regulation as damage and routes around it, but that defeatism is also a large part of our national psyche that lets ourselves be divided over surface issues while capital buys loopholes. We've been sold this unsustainable ratchet strangling humanity as some kind of inevitable progression, and at a certain point we've got to say enough is enough and push back within the paradigm rather than thinking we can escape it.
AshleighBasil 6y ago
>reported farms using illegal labor. I'm from Mexico, but I've always suspected the reason the US Democratic Party supports immigration is precisely because a lot of big corporations want to drive down the price of labor. They piggyback on antiracist and antinationalist activism to advance the interests of big agriculture. If I was a big agro, I'd invest in both parties. The Republicans to remove regulation that helps big agro compete, and the Democrats to implement regulation that prevents small agro from competing. Although tbh this is all I know of American politics from reading internet threads, haha
- dbrower 6y ago
  It's not Democrats, it's business owners needing that labor. The Republicans are equally bad in practice, it's their rhetoric that is tougher.
- mcguire 6y ago
  "If I was a big agro, I'd invest in both parties. The Republicans to remove regulation that helps big agro compete, and the Democrats to implement regulation that prevents small agro from competing." They do. https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/cargill-inc/summary?id=D000000511 https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/cargill-inc/summary?id=D000...
- darkarmani 6y ago
  > is precisely because a lot of big corporations want to drive down the price of labor Doesn't immigration also create industry which then creates jobs?
  - IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
    Yes. But, lowering tariffs also lets cheap chinese assembly line shoes be shipped to the US for 80 cents less than what it costs to manufacture on shore. The 80 cents saved does not matter to the shoemaker who lived to sell shoes all his life, has 2 kids and a mortgage, and suffers early retirement due to unfetted globalization.
    - 6y ago

Spooky23 6y ago

Agriculture was the first victim of the red/blue phenomenon. Agricultural and trade policy is all about government supported grain industry. For the dairy farmer, they are stuck between regulatory reform that dramatically increases the supply of milk by creating a national market, while their downstream supply chain partners are allowed to consolidate and form monopolies, because American legal theory is insane. I live in upstate NY from a former dairy producing region. I’m aware of 5 different dairy processors that were within 30-40 miles of my childhood home. Now there is one larger company. It’s only getting worse. The push for meat-substitutes will just lead to even more consolidation, and start introducing supply risks down the road. The aquifers that support Midwest grain are being depleted, and climate change will affect the Southern California miracle in the desert. In the meantime, the well-watered, prime farm I worked on as a teen had most of the topsoil stripped and sold, and there is a subdivision with 40-50 houses on it.

selimthegrim 6y ago
Lina Khan may have been appointed just in time then.
tengbretson 6y ago
> The aquifers that support Midwest grain are being depleted An overwhelming majority of farm land in the Midwest is not irrigated, with Nebraska being the only significant outlier.
- mcguire 6y ago
  "The Ogallala Aquifer underlies parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. From wheat and cows to corn and cotton, the regional economy depends almost exclusively on agriculture irrigated by Ogallala groundwater. But according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), producers are extracting water faster than it is being replenished, which means that parts of the Ogallala Aquifer should be considered a nonrenewable resource." In large areas, the water level has dropped more than 50 feet. (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/national-climate-assessment-great-plains%E2%80%99-ogallala-aquifer-drying-out https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/nation...) Each of the circles in these satellite images is an irrigation system. Many are a mile in diameter. * https://goo.gl/maps/5m82TyPRSHnQ2xCx9 https://goo.gl/maps/5m82TyPRSHnQ2xCx9 * https://goo.gl/maps/wveD2BaP8Stp66yw7 https://goo.gl/maps/wveD2BaP8Stp66yw7 * https://goo.gl/maps/yXL2gWEXq9fmz4jj6 https://goo.gl/maps/yXL2gWEXq9fmz4jj6 * https://goo.gl/maps/VbhjEKYgWhaqgEHR6 https://goo.gl/maps/VbhjEKYgWhaqgEHR6 * https://goo.gl/maps/erC76vZx34Rhzt9VA https://goo.gl/maps/erC76vZx34Rhzt9VA
  - HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
    Most of those states are not considered to be in the Midwest.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  McGuire answered this concern. The other one I forgot to mention is the topsoil erosion from brain dead farming practices, which is now in or on its way to the Gulf of Mexico.

thaumasiotes 6y ago

> The point of a union should not be to collu[d]e to raise prices. The point of a union should be to pool market power and resources These are just different words for the same thing.

gruez 6y ago
You can have cooperation without price-fixing.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  What would you be cooperating to do?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - alteriority 6y ago
    can't speak for gruez, but a couple off the top of my head: -set standards that all members abide by, potentially bypassing "tragedy of the commons'-style coordination problems -share information which, in a more cutthroat environment, would be considered "trade secrets". Not sure how these would apply to the dairy industry specifically; it just seems overly broad to say that price fixing is the only plausible form of cooperation.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      Look into the effects of your ideas, and you'll see them wind up in rising prices. Your first example, excluding industry members who don't meet a particular standard, is one of the most typical forms of "colluding to raise prices" you could possibly think of, often expressed in the form of professional certification. The only things an economic organization can do are raise prices and lower costs. For a labor union, costs are labor; from the consumer end the workers' "lower costs" mean less work is being done, which shows up as higher prices for consumers.

mindslight 6y ago

You're completely ignoring market inefficiency, as if a distributed desire for something better can simply be summed into creating a viable competitor. The tech equivalent is proclaiming that if you really don't like Google/Apple/Facebook/etc control, go start your own. It completely ignores that doing so takes an extraordinary amount of effort over a long period of time, and any serious competitor is likely to end up bought out by the bigger business before it can affect the market. I'm generally apprehensive any time someone says "there ought to be a law", but the article lays out a well-sourced case. The economy and big business are directly opposed, and having a distributed economy is much more important for us human beings. Perhaps price controls aren't the answer (and would actually further benefit the large farms that are killing the economy), but something needs to be done unless we want to end up with farming monocultures that will some day decide it's more profitable to not supply us food. The right answer is probably antitrust breakup, and a statutory limiting of mergers going forward.

vram22 6y ago
>I'm generally apprehensive any time someone says "there ought to be a law", but the article lays out a well-sourced case. The economy and big business are directly opposed, and having a distributed economy is much more important for us human beings. Perhaps price controls aren't the answer (and would actually further benefit the large farms that are killing the economy) Your statements that I quoted above are almost a perfect counter-argument to show why the suggestion in the last sentence of your comment will not work in practice. It will be shot down by vested interests finding loopholes after a few years, if not sooner. IMO a deeper solution is needed. And no, I cannot give one off the top of my head. Nor am I qualified to do so. But even laymen to an area can see potential flaws if they are obvious.
- mindslight 6y ago
  Possible deeper solutions are to end the centralizing trickle up economics of ZIRP, or to stop time. But either one of these is less likely to happen than targeted anti-trust. I get the idea that the market simply sees regulation as damage and routes around it, but that defeatism is also a large part of our national psyche that lets ourselves be divided over surface issues while capital buys loopholes. We've been sold this unsustainable ratchet strangling humanity as some kind of inevitable progression, and at a certain point we've got to say enough is enough and push back within the paradigm rather than thinking we can escape it.

AshleighBasil 6y ago

>reported farms using illegal labor. I'm from Mexico, but I've always suspected the reason the US Democratic Party supports immigration is precisely because a lot of big corporations want to drive down the price of labor. They piggyback on antiracist and antinationalist activism to advance the interests of big agriculture. If I was a big agro, I'd invest in both parties. The Republicans to remove regulation that helps big agro compete, and the Democrats to implement regulation that prevents small agro from competing. Although tbh this is all I know of American politics from reading internet threads, haha

dbrower 6y ago
It's not Democrats, it's business owners needing that labor. The Republicans are equally bad in practice, it's their rhetoric that is tougher.
mcguire 6y ago
"If I was a big agro, I'd invest in both parties. The Republicans to remove regulation that helps big agro compete, and the Democrats to implement regulation that prevents small agro from competing." They do. https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/cargill-inc/summary?id=D000000511 https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/cargill-inc/summary?id=D000...
darkarmani 6y ago
> is precisely because a lot of big corporations want to drive down the price of labor Doesn't immigration also create industry which then creates jobs?
- IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
  Yes. But, lowering tariffs also lets cheap chinese assembly line shoes be shipped to the US for 80 cents less than what it costs to manufacture on shore. The 80 cents saved does not matter to the shoemaker who lived to sell shoes all his life, has 2 kids and a mortgage, and suffers early retirement due to unfetted globalization.
  - 6y ago