6 ms·

I come from a long line of farmers. My father was the last of our family to try to hold onto the farming tradition. He grew up on a farm, along with all my aunt

by titzer 6y ago

I come from a long line of farmers. My father was the last of our family to try to hold onto the farming tradition. He grew up on a farm, along with all my aunts and uncles. His generation was the first go to college. He chose business. He made a ton of money, and hated it. After leaving the business world in the mid 1980s to return to farming, it was not the same, and he soon returned to what was effectively day trading in the early to mid 1990s. The transformation of farming is a direct result of corporatization and globalization, like almost every other sector of the economy. It's just more of the machine eating the world. Small, family farms, the kind that my ancestors toiled on, since unrecorded history, literally centuries, back to central Europe, were chewed up and spit out by the machine. The forests, the land, the local wildlife, now, too, the soil, all chewed up and digested in the pursuit of the one thing that the machine really craves: money. It's the legacy of our entire economic focus on profit, growth, scale. No big conspiracy, no evil bad actors you can hate forever, just the summation of our value system expressed in the invisible hand of the market, jostled or cajoled here and there by policy, or retarded briefly by it, but always pointing in the same direction, eventually to consume all the natural resources, dipping over the threshold of sustainability to the reservoir of resources behind it, extracting and emptying it, until eventually there is nothing left.

deleted 6y ago
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tharkun__ 6y ago
I'm not sure how much this actually scales and makes enough money but it sure is an awesome tale (saw the movie on Netflix - https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81031829 https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81031829): https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/ https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/ Your dad might love it, even if just for the nostalgia. That said, I think some of the lessons in there are awesome. Both the ones about biodiversity but also perseverance in the light of 'disaster' striking and staying strong and going on with the biodiversity path instead of just resigning and saying "yep, alright, Big Farmer is right, this doesn't work".
- stefs 6y ago
  it's a wonderful feel-good movie (i loved it), but i'm not sure whether this is actually a sustainable farming solution. afaik they make the farm profitable tourism, i.e. the guided tours, which wouldn't scale.
  - datavirtue 6y ago
    When I think of sustainable farming I envision the explosion of production coming out of the Amish community in south eastern Ohio (the area I know) right now. Long green houses (high tunnels) bursting with crops, solar panels everywhere, and markets and stores established nearby to make and sell value added goods from that food and to sell it fresh. These people are literally getting rich and they barely use any fossil fuels and they are merely a blip on the food radar.
    - Scoundreller 6y ago
      Probably depends on the exact practices. If they till a lot to work manure into the ground, that loosens the soil allowing it to blow away. Others use tractors, buy fertilizers and other crop treatments like anyone else.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dagss 6y ago
Makes me think of easter island. When our civilization perishes, money will seem as useful as those statues.
- a9h74j 6y ago
  Modified meme caption: Yea, we destroyed the environment, but for a brief moment, we sure mined a lot of Bitcoin.
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > Modified meme caption: Yea, we destroyed the environment, but for a brief moment, we sure mined a lot of Bitcoin. It's hysterical that Bitcoin is the punching bag, because when economies that are prone to hyper inflation give way, its BTC that is used in many of those same countries. Who also, resort back to subsistence or local Ag. And guess what, destroying your land is kind of antithetical to the whole farming thing... Anyhow, regenerative Ag can now be a massive boon if the infrastructure bill gets properly allotted; I'm skeptical but this could really come to define late millennials and gen Z to ensure that the problems they inheritance from the most wasteful generation (boomers) has some chance of being remediated prior to it being depleted and ensuring famine.
    - a9h74j 6y ago
      I agree that Bitcoin is too easy a punching bag, but "we found a lot of hashes with leading zeros" didn't have the same brevity to it. I am open to wondering if CO2 emissions are also too easy a punching bag. Crops can go way nonlinear when lacking mined water, lacking fertilizer, and lacking soil/biomes etc. I was not aware that the infrastructure bill favors regenerative Ag.
      - Melting_Harps 6y ago
        > I was not aware that the infrastructure bill favors regenerative Ag. It's pretty vague, to be honest; but from what I've gathered many of its proponents are using it as a phase-in from the core of the New Green Deal, and is essentially a massive works project. As a former farmer (Biodynamic) myself and a person that did Supply Chain I think that critical infrastructure doesn't just apply to the roads upon which freight travels on, also having a horrible factory farmed centralized food system is what created shortages during COVID and were revealed for all to see. There is no denying it that this model cannot function with just the slight amount of variance, 3PL continued to work and even improved during COVID in some industries, but none of that mattered in the end. This incidentally led to crop losses due to a lack of labour, and many unnecessary deaths of workers like at meat packing plants had a shocking enough effect that made CSA memberships (shares in the Farm that grant you boxes of vegetables) the more viable option and revealed something that I knew from experience in the aforementioned industries (also culinary): the less food travels, the more savings can be passed on to the consumer, but also the higher a premium it has to it's targeted demographic. The reason I highlight this is because critical infrastructure, as in the stuff that is of national security, after COVID has to include manufacturing of things like PPE and medical equipment as well as farming in a far more distributed manner--ventilators were just one of the examples of how far the US had fallen. And the truth is the Department of Ag already has a lot of sound programs to help young, first time farmers: but a concerted effort to incentivize them with low to no interest loans for farming equipment and livestock for 10+ years would be a boon for so many wanting to get into farming and revitalize so many disenfranchised communities that were displaced in the 80s when mega pharmacorps forced their way that led to this big Ag system. Simply removing a lot of subsidies to corn, soy farmers and using that to float the low interest loans would pay for itself in added revenue, moreover many farmers markets are now obligated to accept things like WIC and foodstamp programs to be accepted so we can readily pivot a low income community's diet in a decade, as seen in Detroit. I'd include water/desalination as well, but to be honest I'm not sure that will be explored this go around, but may at a later time.
anonporridge 6y ago
Self sustaining societies will always be out competed and subsumed by extractive ones.
- nine_k 6y ago
  Not always, but as long as the unsustainable extraction lasts. By definition, it has to run out of the stuff it's extracting.
- titzer 6y ago
  Extractive ones will always burn out in the long run as they will run out of resources to extract. They either learn to live in the waste they've produced, i.e. they become recyclers, or they simply die off. It's a question of how much collateral damage they do over their lifetime. No matter how bad they screw up, in the very long run, Earth has a tendency to figure out how to recycle the raw materials. After all, Earth's ecosystems are the result of surviving cataclysm after cataclysm, from volcanism to asteroid strikes to climate change, to invasive species after invasive species. It's got a lot of experience dealing with giant debris piles left over from one shitstorm after another, be that a biological plague or the ash of an impact event.
  - _carbyau_ 6y ago
    Yeah, mother earth is fine. Whether humanity will suffer a catastrophe of our own making is another question.
    - javajosh 6y ago
      "Mother earth is fine." I think this ignores the human status as a thinking animal, and the glaringly obvious responsibility we collectively share for keeping our biosphere in good condition. That is, that we keep the remarkable diversity of life intact, and do not pointlessly throw the most unique and precious part of our universe in a chipper to make more particle board furniture. It is interesting that by incrementally converting the life-support system of our planet into dollar store trash, we could have similar impact on the biosphere as an ELE meteor impact! The tragedy is that, at least theoretically, this particular cause is avoidable. Or was. (Maybe science really is to blame? Wouldn't that be sad.)
rufus_foreman 6y ago
My grandparents were all farmers. They did it for money, not because they loved corn and the smell of pig shit. As soon as they paid off the loans for the land, they rented the farms out to someone else to work and moved to town to get easier jobs. I love the smell of capitalism in the morning. Smells like...better than pig shit.
datavirtue 6y ago
Yeah, a nice goal would have been "100,000 new small farms in the first 100 days." The USDA should be promoting small speciality crop farms. The farmers markets are doing pretty good but if you shift policy to make factory vegetables reflect their true price it would increase profitablity of smaller farmers through more volume. You wouldn't need much to encourage a swell of speciality crop production farms. The impact from reduction to greenhouse gases would be immense if you had thousands of more local farms growing staples like broccoli, lettuce, spinach, green beans, peppers, tomatoes, and onions. "Speciality crops."
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
An observation I’ve made is that the strongest and most tangible criticism of modern farming practices comes from small/family farmers and homesteaders. The two groups have almost no philosophy and practices in common. Different worlds.
Johnny555 6y ago
My dad came from a farming family (dad worked in construction, but 3 of his brothers and 2 sisters had farms). Over time, they all lost or gave up their farms because they couldn't compete against the corporate farms. Two of them continued to farm their own land after selling their farms, but they no longer lived there.
devmunchies 6y ago
> globalization this is it right here. we're extracting all nutrients from a concentrated area and sending the yields far away. There's no replenishment. Even the water shortages in California is not as simple as "farmers are using all the water". It's the demand for food far, far away.
japanuspus 6y ago
One argument in "Sapiens" [0], is that all of human history is a continuous repeat of this trove: We hunted the megafauna to extinction, converted the land to agriculture, and so on not because of evil, but because that for the individuals living at any given time this was the most beneficial course of action. [0]: Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari (2011)
wepple 6y ago
This is wonderfully written, and really hit me in a way this topic hasn’t before.

by titzer 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tharkun__ 6y ago

I'm not sure how much this actually scales and makes enough money but it sure is an awesome tale (saw the movie on Netflix - https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81031829 https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/81031829): https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/ https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/ Your dad might love it, even if just for the nostalgia. That said, I think some of the lessons in there are awesome. Both the ones about biodiversity but also perseverance in the light of 'disaster' striking and staying strong and going on with the biodiversity path instead of just resigning and saying "yep, alright, Big Farmer is right, this doesn't work".

stefs 6y ago
it's a wonderful feel-good movie (i loved it), but i'm not sure whether this is actually a sustainable farming solution. afaik they make the farm profitable tourism, i.e. the guided tours, which wouldn't scale.
- datavirtue 6y ago
  When I think of sustainable farming I envision the explosion of production coming out of the Amish community in south eastern Ohio (the area I know) right now. Long green houses (high tunnels) bursting with crops, solar panels everywhere, and markets and stores established nearby to make and sell value added goods from that food and to sell it fresh. These people are literally getting rich and they barely use any fossil fuels and they are merely a blip on the food radar.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    Probably depends on the exact practices. If they till a lot to work manure into the ground, that loosens the soil allowing it to blow away. Others use tractors, buy fertilizers and other crop treatments like anyone else.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dagss 6y ago

Makes me think of easter island. When our civilization perishes, money will seem as useful as those statues.

a9h74j 6y ago
Modified meme caption: Yea, we destroyed the environment, but for a brief moment, we sure mined a lot of Bitcoin.
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > Modified meme caption: Yea, we destroyed the environment, but for a brief moment, we sure mined a lot of Bitcoin. It's hysterical that Bitcoin is the punching bag, because when economies that are prone to hyper inflation give way, its BTC that is used in many of those same countries. Who also, resort back to subsistence or local Ag. And guess what, destroying your land is kind of antithetical to the whole farming thing... Anyhow, regenerative Ag can now be a massive boon if the infrastructure bill gets properly allotted; I'm skeptical but this could really come to define late millennials and gen Z to ensure that the problems they inheritance from the most wasteful generation (boomers) has some chance of being remediated prior to it being depleted and ensuring famine.
  - a9h74j 6y ago
    I agree that Bitcoin is too easy a punching bag, but "we found a lot of hashes with leading zeros" didn't have the same brevity to it. I am open to wondering if CO2 emissions are also too easy a punching bag. Crops can go way nonlinear when lacking mined water, lacking fertilizer, and lacking soil/biomes etc. I was not aware that the infrastructure bill favors regenerative Ag.
    - Melting_Harps 6y ago
      > I was not aware that the infrastructure bill favors regenerative Ag. It's pretty vague, to be honest; but from what I've gathered many of its proponents are using it as a phase-in from the core of the New Green Deal, and is essentially a massive works project. As a former farmer (Biodynamic) myself and a person that did Supply Chain I think that critical infrastructure doesn't just apply to the roads upon which freight travels on, also having a horrible factory farmed centralized food system is what created shortages during COVID and were revealed for all to see. There is no denying it that this model cannot function with just the slight amount of variance, 3PL continued to work and even improved during COVID in some industries, but none of that mattered in the end. This incidentally led to crop losses due to a lack of labour, and many unnecessary deaths of workers like at meat packing plants had a shocking enough effect that made CSA memberships (shares in the Farm that grant you boxes of vegetables) the more viable option and revealed something that I knew from experience in the aforementioned industries (also culinary): the less food travels, the more savings can be passed on to the consumer, but also the higher a premium it has to it's targeted demographic. The reason I highlight this is because critical infrastructure, as in the stuff that is of national security, after COVID has to include manufacturing of things like PPE and medical equipment as well as farming in a far more distributed manner--ventilators were just one of the examples of how far the US had fallen. And the truth is the Department of Ag already has a lot of sound programs to help young, first time farmers: but a concerted effort to incentivize them with low to no interest loans for farming equipment and livestock for 10+ years would be a boon for so many wanting to get into farming and revitalize so many disenfranchised communities that were displaced in the 80s when mega pharmacorps forced their way that led to this big Ag system. Simply removing a lot of subsidies to corn, soy farmers and using that to float the low interest loans would pay for itself in added revenue, moreover many farmers markets are now obligated to accept things like WIC and foodstamp programs to be accepted so we can readily pivot a low income community's diet in a decade, as seen in Detroit. I'd include water/desalination as well, but to be honest I'm not sure that will be explored this go around, but may at a later time.

anonporridge 6y ago

Self sustaining societies will always be out competed and subsumed by extractive ones.

nine_k 6y ago
Not always, but as long as the unsustainable extraction lasts. By definition, it has to run out of the stuff it's extracting.
titzer 6y ago
Extractive ones will always burn out in the long run as they will run out of resources to extract. They either learn to live in the waste they've produced, i.e. they become recyclers, or they simply die off. It's a question of how much collateral damage they do over their lifetime. No matter how bad they screw up, in the very long run, Earth has a tendency to figure out how to recycle the raw materials. After all, Earth's ecosystems are the result of surviving cataclysm after cataclysm, from volcanism to asteroid strikes to climate change, to invasive species after invasive species. It's got a lot of experience dealing with giant debris piles left over from one shitstorm after another, be that a biological plague or the ash of an impact event.
- _carbyau_ 6y ago
  Yeah, mother earth is fine. Whether humanity will suffer a catastrophe of our own making is another question.
  - javajosh 6y ago
    "Mother earth is fine." I think this ignores the human status as a thinking animal, and the glaringly obvious responsibility we collectively share for keeping our biosphere in good condition. That is, that we keep the remarkable diversity of life intact, and do not pointlessly throw the most unique and precious part of our universe in a chipper to make more particle board furniture. It is interesting that by incrementally converting the life-support system of our planet into dollar store trash, we could have similar impact on the biosphere as an ELE meteor impact! The tragedy is that, at least theoretically, this particular cause is avoidable. Or was. (Maybe science really is to blame? Wouldn't that be sad.)

rufus_foreman 6y ago

My grandparents were all farmers. They did it for money, not because they loved corn and the smell of pig shit. As soon as they paid off the loans for the land, they rented the farms out to someone else to work and moved to town to get easier jobs. I love the smell of capitalism in the morning. Smells like...better than pig shit.

datavirtue 6y ago

Yeah, a nice goal would have been "100,000 new small farms in the first 100 days." The USDA should be promoting small speciality crop farms. The farmers markets are doing pretty good but if you shift policy to make factory vegetables reflect their true price it would increase profitablity of smaller farmers through more volume. You wouldn't need much to encourage a swell of speciality crop production farms. The impact from reduction to greenhouse gases would be immense if you had thousands of more local farms growing staples like broccoli, lettuce, spinach, green beans, peppers, tomatoes, and onions. "Speciality crops."

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

An observation I’ve made is that the strongest and most tangible criticism of modern farming practices comes from small/family farmers and homesteaders. The two groups have almost no philosophy and practices in common. Different worlds.

Johnny555 6y ago

My dad came from a farming family (dad worked in construction, but 3 of his brothers and 2 sisters had farms). Over time, they all lost or gave up their farms because they couldn't compete against the corporate farms. Two of them continued to farm their own land after selling their farms, but they no longer lived there.

devmunchies 6y ago

> globalization this is it right here. we're extracting all nutrients from a concentrated area and sending the yields far away. There's no replenishment. Even the water shortages in California is not as simple as "farmers are using all the water". It's the demand for food far, far away.

japanuspus 6y ago

One argument in "Sapiens" [0], is that all of human history is a continuous repeat of this trove: We hunted the megafauna to extinction, converted the land to agriculture, and so on not because of evil, but because that for the individuals living at any given time this was the most beneficial course of action. [0]: Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari (2011)

wepple 6y ago

This is wonderfully written, and really hit me in a way this topic hasn’t before.