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Farming is somehow still regarded as being some mom-and-pop heartland thing rather than the highly optimized manufacturing operation it has been for decades. Di
by xnx 1y ago
Farming is somehow still regarded as being some mom-and-pop heartland thing rather than the highly optimized manufacturing operation it has been for decades. Direct farm employment is now just 1.2% of the population. It was 40% in 1900. The special treatments farms and farmers get is an outdated relic kept alive by the electoral college.
- Ericson2314 1y agoYes, cannot emphasize this enough. Farming is an industry, and we have take it seriously as one and stop romanticizing it. Of course, the irony is that now we romanticize industry too.
- _9ptr 1y agoThe workplace is becoming increasingly abstract. I wonder if there'll be a time when cubicles and spreadsheets become an object of nostalgia or romantization.
- roughly 1y agowait people used to have walls separating them from their neighbors? and, like, 40sq feet to themselves? what the fuck?
- franktankbank 1y agoWhat's wrong with holding in esteem the things that truly underpin our security in this country?
- quantummagic 1y agoThe country wouldn't even exist without the electoral college. It was pivotal in uniting the states under a federal government, and is working as intended. Maybe the USA should be abandoned, and all ties between the states renegotiated, but you shouldn't be able to unilaterally change the terms of the deal.
- TulliusCicero 1y agoIt was necessary at the time yes, it's just drastically outlived its usefulness.
- quantummagic 1y agoUseful to who? It's working exactly as intended. You shouldn't get to unilaterally change the terms of a contract. If both parties agree, then sure. But if not, you have to accept the good with the bad, it's a compromise. We've gotten a lot more out of the deal than it has ever cost.
- Alive-in-2025 1y agoThe electoral college was invented in part to increase the ability slave states at the founding of the country keep a certain amount of control - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/electoral-college-slavery-constitution https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/electoral-college-slav.... It set up the critical vulnerability that we have today, that in states where the votes are close at the state level, switching just a handful of votes completely moves the votes in the electoral college. This will be a continuing temptation, and a weakness of the us system. The 200 or 300k votes in swing states that had Biden beating Trump and then Trump beating Harris this time is not a great thing in democracy. So this vulnerability makes it a potential attraction to steal votes. There was the notorious recorded phone call when Trump called up the Secretary of State in Georgia and said he only needed 11,700 votes, please give them to him.
- quantummagic 1y agoHow does any of that change anything I've said? They explicitly negotiated the electoral college to protect their ability to not be overwhelmed by more populous states, and forever maintain their voice in the union. It is working exactly as intended, and is essentially a contract we are all a party to. We don't let one party unilaterally change other contracts, why should we here? It seems you'd have to be a very big hypocrite to support such a thing. You should honour the deal or find a way to renegotiate it that makes everyone happy, not just yourself.
- droopyEyelids 1y agoThe highly optimized manufacturing operation has made farming into a powerful tool of statecraft internationally. Other countries become dependent on our beans and corn to [indirectly] feed their people or for inputs for their own industries. That gives us diplomatic leverage. Once you start thinking about that, a lot of the mystery or 'inefficiency' of farming in the USA makes more sense. For example, the subsidies to grow corn and soy but not kale and squash or whatever was in the article- growing kale and squash isn't a strategic priority.
- teekert 1y agoIt’s worth noting that this industrial scale is only possible with pesticides and herbicides that are very bad for insects and suspected hormone disruptors and carcinogens, etc.
- droopyEyelids 1y agoIm not sure we were on the same page. I'm saying that the importance of these agribusinesses is similar to the importance of the military- so something like insect damage or hormonal disruption, soil erosion, etc don't rank as factors that count.
- OkayPhysicist 1y agoThere is a lot of national security benefit to propping up the domestic agricultural industry. We've probably overstepped that line, but just "leave it to the free market" is a really bad option, too.
- Loughla 1y agoPeople hammer subsidies for farms, but I'd rather not have one bad year cause food shortages the following year when we lose production from shuttered farms. The free market shouldn't control everything.
- BobaFloutist 1y agoSubsidies are one thing, I just wish they weren't excluded from labor laws
- darth_avocado 1y agoIt’s because it’s still mom and pop because 72% of farms are still fully owned by people but they tend to be smaller in size and only account for 30% of the total farm land. And majority of farms are still under a 1000 acre size. The problem is that there are about 27000 farms that are hyper giants of 5000+ acres which are the consolidated operations that account for a huge portion of the US farmland. Also, farming is mom and pop highly optimized operation. Those two don’t need to be separate things. Once you understand that running a farm can be hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions, you can understand the disconnect.
- potato3732842 1y agoWe should be talking in terms of dollars, not land. It won't change things enough to change the point but it'll probably be worth a few percent.
- jghn 1y agoUnfortunately "the farmers" is simply a marketing gimmick along the lines of "the children". It is used to evoke a specific image and implied set of ideals. And because of that we have to deal with all kinds of crap legislation tied to it.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y agoThis is a very online opinion. "The farmers" feed us. Very hard for me to think that's a marketing gimmick.
- jghn 1y agoAt the population scale in the US "The farmers" as in the stereotype of the rugged, individual American by and large does not. That's part of the point of this article. BigAg farms? You're absolutely right.
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- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y agoThe special treatment of farmers is about food security. We generally trust farmers to keep delivering us food and we're willing to allow them a lot of special treatment because of that.
- recipe19 1y ago> an outdated relic kept alive by the electoral college. And yet, farmers are a vocal and critical political bloc in every other EU country, too. Farming is just important. Not as much because it employs a large portion of the population, but because it keeps a large portion of the population alive. It is the original industry that's "too big to fail" - if you let it, you get famine.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 1y agoVery well said. There is no alternative to having a successful farming industry.