5 ms·

On the one hand, there are a lot of unfair market concentration issues working against them. On the other hand, no one today in any other part of the economy w

On the one hand, there are a lot of unfair market concentration issues working against them. On the other hand, no one today in any other part of the economy would decide they want to start a new business, with small scale, in a commodity market. Software startups rarely go up against Windows, Excel, Google search, or Amazon e-commerce. I grew up in a farming area in the midwest, and even then (several decades ago) there was no realistic prospect of doing well, but most (not all) farmers insisted on growing corn, soy, or one of a very few other commodity crops. I'm not surprised that this doesn't work out well; it doesn't work out in any non-agricultural sector either. Small businesses have to go into niche markets, and that is not a new phenomenon. I recall reading (and hearing) almost exactly these same complaints in the 1980's, straight from the farmers, but the idea of growing other crops just made them irritable. And then, they would cheer the arrival of a big Wal-Mart in town, and go shop there instead of the small store they had been buying from.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
skellington 1y ago
Yeah but at least they're also destroying the soil to grow all that shit Monsanto roundup-ready corn/soy/alfalfa/etc. for no profit and as an added bonus they get to kill all those pesky insects and bees!
- cm2012 1y ago
  Generally round up and similar things require less overall pesticide compared to normal crops
  - ehnto 1y ago
    That's a fact that sounds like a good thing, but could just as well be a bad thing. Why does it take less of it, and does that impact the environment downstream less?
    - ch4s3 1y ago
      It requires less because it’s a broad spectrum herbicide but the crops tolerate it. You don’t need much so not very much runs off. Needing to do multiple applications of multiple types of herbicide is definitely going to cause more runoff and more downstream effects.
    - HankStallone 1y ago
      I'm not a big fan of Roundup (I say send kids through the field cutting weeds with a bean hook like I did growing up; it builds character), but they have a legit argument that spraying post-emergence causes less runoff than tilling weeds under before planting, so you retain more soil and have less chemicals running into waterways.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  No-till agriculture that uses herbicides to keep the weeds under control is better for the soil.
- 9rx 1y ago
  > to grow all that shit Monsanto roundup-ready corn/soy/alfalfa/etc. Corn and soybean seed generally has a viable period of around 2-3 years. Monsanto hasn't been in business for seven years now. Who, exactly, do you think stored their seed for so long and is now planting all that 7+ year old seed which, at this point, has a low chance of germination?
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    Do not underestimate the power of Monsanto Derangement Syndrome. To its faithful, anything is possible.
  - conorcleary 1y ago
    Don't play the fool, Monsanto's ghoulish soul is operating at peak influence under a different name
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      Better burn some witches just to be safe, right?
ameliaquining 1y ago
Software always has much more extreme economies of scale than any physical commodity, and often has network effects on top of that. So it seems like a bad comparison. Do you happen to have any statistics comparing levels of market concentration across different kinds of physical goods?
- runako 1y ago
  Sure, it would be equally difficult to start a new company making non-niche[1] t-shirts or toilet paper or plastic cups or light bulbs today. 1 - "non-niche" a/k/a the undifferentiated "standard-quality" product in the middle of the niche. This is not about someone inventing a longer-lasting light bulb or stain-resistant t-shirt. The best analogue to farmers selling commodity soybeans is something closer to plastic food wrap or aluminum foil. Not a lot of small operators playing in or entering those spaces either.
9rx 1y ago
> I'm not surprised that this doesn't work out well As a small commodity farmer, I don't see why it can't work well. Cash crop farming is quite well suited to small operations as far as I am concerned. The actual hard place to be is the mid-sized farmer trying to manage boatloads of debt. The current crop price situation is not ideal, but we are also just coming off some insanely profitable years. Save during the good times to weather the bad is farming 101. I suspect, given how much equipment prices jumped in the last few years, that some of these guys thought they could get away with going out and buying a bunch of new toys and that's what really has gotten them into trouble.
- sonofhans 1y ago
  My dad told me about _his_ dad painfully learning the same lesson in the 1930s. So it goes.
  - ikiris 1y ago
    Farmers that learned the lesson didn't have their kids go into farming.
- FollowingTheDao 1y ago
  You seriously think these 400+ farmers that attended this meeting got into trouble because they bought “new toys“? There’s a monopoly in farming like there’s a monopoly in tech. And you think you can go into tech with some niche business and somehow become Google before Google buys you up? Well, that’s the goal, to just have a company to have a bigger person buy you up and then you go away with the money and everyone else suffers. There’s an insane separation of wealth and you don’t see that as a/the problem? I’m serious with these questions.
  - 9rx 1y ago
    > You seriously think these 400+ farmers that attended this meeting got into trouble because they bought “new toys“? I'm just not sure how else you go from some of the most profitable years in agriculture history to bankruptcy in the span of a year or two. Vendor prices have not yet come back down in line with reality, nobody is going to question that, but, as they say, the cure for high prices is high prices. These temporary aberrations are par for the course. For what reason is there to believe that this time is different? > There’s a monopoly in farming like there’s a monopoly in tech. Yes, Nvidia looks quite similar in a lot of ways. But the pick and shovel makers have always been best positioned to take advantage of gold rushes. That isn't unusual. > And you think you can go into tech with some niche business and somehow become Google before Google buys you up? I'm not really sure how this applies in any way, but especially because you don't really have to compete for customers in commodities. A commodity implies that you have automatic customers. It is not like you have to try and convince users to use your product over Google's.
rybosome 1y ago
An important point that’s missed in this is that these small farms are a vital part of the US’ food security. So regardless of what an analogous business in another sector may choose to do, we really want small farms to be sustainable all over the country.
- throwawaysleep 1y ago
  What is the basis for the idea that small farms are vital for food security? Farms, sure. Small farms? We need low-productivity small farms for food security?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - jay_kyburz 1y ago
    I'm no expert in the field, but if asked, I would prefer thousands of small farms protecting our food security rather than a handful of companies too big to fail. When you have more diversity, I imagine you would get more resilience, more competition, and market forces work properly. (pun intended)
    - XorNot 1y ago
      Small farms are inefficient though. Farming needs a diverse range of skilled labor but infrequently: the industry as a whole trends towards larger land holders being serviced by specialist labor forces which work seasonally or regionally. And then within that bucket, it's fairly obvious that larger holders are going to be much more resilient to regional problems if they have diversified land holdings where one area can support a downturn in another. This is all Renaissance era knowledge.
      - jay_kyburz 1y ago
        Inefficient from an economic perspective may not be what we need as a society. Perhaps we need more farmers living the the county, spending money in small county towns, with more work for people with those special labor skills. Get people out of the city and more people into primary industries.
Animats 1y ago
Interestingly, California agriculture works differently. Farmers grow many different crops. Fruits and vegetables are not subsidized the way the big field crops are. Vegetable farmers tend to grow more than one crop and often switch based on demand. (Amusingly, some who switched from tomatoes to pot are switching back.) The industry is much more demand driven. The subsidy-driven end of farming views markets for their product as an entitlement. For dairy operators, that's almost a religious belief. World School Milk Day is September 24th. They're desperately fighting against oat milk and almond milk in schools. Then came Trump's tariffs. One of the current messes involves canola oil. Canada exported canola oil to the US, until Trump put on a tariff. So canola oil exporters want to export to China. China, in turn, wants a cut in Canada's 100% tariff on electric cars, which looks like it will happen. This in turn will reduce US car exports to Canada. The current administration is soft on white-collar crime. That's part of the Project 2025 plan, and it's being carried out by refocusing the US Department of Justice on "violent crime". (Which is mostly the business of local cops, since the federal government only has jurisdiction over crimes related to interstate commerce.)
bryanlarsen 1y ago
Commodity production can be massively profitable. Low cost commodity producers make boatloads of cash. Saudi Aramco is exhibit A. The price of a commodity is the cost of the marginal producer. For oil, a marginal producer is Canadian oilsands oil. It costs them $50 - $70 a barrel to produce their oil, and another $10 to ship to market. Thus the price of a barrel of oil is typically $60 - $80. If it drops below that the Canadian oilsands producers shut down, and the next most expensive producer becomes the marginal producer. (example highly over simplified) OTOH it costs Saudi Aramco $10 per barrel to produce their oil. They make insane profits. American farmers are not quite Saudi Aramco levels of profitable, but they are not the marginal cost producers. Large, highly mechanized farms means American farmers have extremely low labor costs compared to the rest of the world. The last 20 or so years have been extremely profitable for American farmers.
- Retric 1y ago
  American farmers aren’t some universal entity here. Of course it’s farm subsidies and tariffs that most heavily influence the economy reality for most American farm land, but the average small farm in the US isn’t particularly profitable. In many cases it’s closer to a hobby project than the sole income for a family. It’s not even just a question of economies of scale, many east coast farmers grow corn just fine without any irrigation systems that’s a lot of capital you can spend on something else. Being able to lease out a tiny fraction of your land for a co-located wind farm alongside agriculture is a huge boon for many. And so it goes across a huge range of different situations. All this variability is why you don’t see 20+% of US farmland under one giant corporation the way you see in many other industries which benefit more from economies of scale.
  - bryanlarsen 1y ago
    The average "small" farm in the US is very large and very mechanized compared to an average farm in Europe, Asia or Africa. But when I say the advantage derives from being large and mechanized, it does imply that American farms that are less large and less mechanized do not do nearly so well.
krainboltgreene 1y ago
> Software startups rarely go up against Windows, Excel, Google search, or Amazon e-commerce. Literally every new startup is a more specific version of Excel, but also direct competitors have also been funded over the last 10 years! Same for Amazon!

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

skellington 1y ago

Yeah but at least they're also destroying the soil to grow all that shit Monsanto roundup-ready corn/soy/alfalfa/etc. for no profit and as an added bonus they get to kill all those pesky insects and bees!

cm2012 1y ago
Generally round up and similar things require less overall pesticide compared to normal crops
- ehnto 1y ago
  That's a fact that sounds like a good thing, but could just as well be a bad thing. Why does it take less of it, and does that impact the environment downstream less?
  - ch4s3 1y ago
    It requires less because it’s a broad spectrum herbicide but the crops tolerate it. You don’t need much so not very much runs off. Needing to do multiple applications of multiple types of herbicide is definitely going to cause more runoff and more downstream effects.
  - HankStallone 1y ago
    I'm not a big fan of Roundup (I say send kids through the field cutting weeds with a bean hook like I did growing up; it builds character), but they have a legit argument that spraying post-emergence causes less runoff than tilling weeds under before planting, so you retain more soil and have less chemicals running into waterways.
pfdietz 1y ago
No-till agriculture that uses herbicides to keep the weeds under control is better for the soil.
9rx 1y ago
> to grow all that shit Monsanto roundup-ready corn/soy/alfalfa/etc. Corn and soybean seed generally has a viable period of around 2-3 years. Monsanto hasn't been in business for seven years now. Who, exactly, do you think stored their seed for so long and is now planting all that 7+ year old seed which, at this point, has a low chance of germination?
- pfdietz 1y ago
  Do not underestimate the power of Monsanto Derangement Syndrome. To its faithful, anything is possible.
- conorcleary 1y ago
  Don't play the fool, Monsanto's ghoulish soul is operating at peak influence under a different name
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    Better burn some witches just to be safe, right?

ameliaquining 1y ago

Software always has much more extreme economies of scale than any physical commodity, and often has network effects on top of that. So it seems like a bad comparison. Do you happen to have any statistics comparing levels of market concentration across different kinds of physical goods?

runako 1y ago
Sure, it would be equally difficult to start a new company making non-niche[1] t-shirts or toilet paper or plastic cups or light bulbs today. 1 - "non-niche" a/k/a the undifferentiated "standard-quality" product in the middle of the niche. This is not about someone inventing a longer-lasting light bulb or stain-resistant t-shirt. The best analogue to farmers selling commodity soybeans is something closer to plastic food wrap or aluminum foil. Not a lot of small operators playing in or entering those spaces either.

9rx 1y ago

> I'm not surprised that this doesn't work out well As a small commodity farmer, I don't see why it can't work well. Cash crop farming is quite well suited to small operations as far as I am concerned. The actual hard place to be is the mid-sized farmer trying to manage boatloads of debt. The current crop price situation is not ideal, but we are also just coming off some insanely profitable years. Save during the good times to weather the bad is farming 101. I suspect, given how much equipment prices jumped in the last few years, that some of these guys thought they could get away with going out and buying a bunch of new toys and that's what really has gotten them into trouble.

sonofhans 1y ago
My dad told me about _his_ dad painfully learning the same lesson in the 1930s. So it goes.
- ikiris 1y ago
  Farmers that learned the lesson didn't have their kids go into farming.
FollowingTheDao 1y ago
You seriously think these 400+ farmers that attended this meeting got into trouble because they bought “new toys“? There’s a monopoly in farming like there’s a monopoly in tech. And you think you can go into tech with some niche business and somehow become Google before Google buys you up? Well, that’s the goal, to just have a company to have a bigger person buy you up and then you go away with the money and everyone else suffers. There’s an insane separation of wealth and you don’t see that as a/the problem? I’m serious with these questions.
- 9rx 1y ago
  > You seriously think these 400+ farmers that attended this meeting got into trouble because they bought “new toys“? I'm just not sure how else you go from some of the most profitable years in agriculture history to bankruptcy in the span of a year or two. Vendor prices have not yet come back down in line with reality, nobody is going to question that, but, as they say, the cure for high prices is high prices. These temporary aberrations are par for the course. For what reason is there to believe that this time is different? > There’s a monopoly in farming like there’s a monopoly in tech. Yes, Nvidia looks quite similar in a lot of ways. But the pick and shovel makers have always been best positioned to take advantage of gold rushes. That isn't unusual. > And you think you can go into tech with some niche business and somehow become Google before Google buys you up? I'm not really sure how this applies in any way, but especially because you don't really have to compete for customers in commodities. A commodity implies that you have automatic customers. It is not like you have to try and convince users to use your product over Google's.

rybosome 1y ago

An important point that’s missed in this is that these small farms are a vital part of the US’ food security. So regardless of what an analogous business in another sector may choose to do, we really want small farms to be sustainable all over the country.

throwawaysleep 1y ago
What is the basis for the idea that small farms are vital for food security? Farms, sure. Small farms? We need low-productivity small farms for food security?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- jay_kyburz 1y ago
  I'm no expert in the field, but if asked, I would prefer thousands of small farms protecting our food security rather than a handful of companies too big to fail. When you have more diversity, I imagine you would get more resilience, more competition, and market forces work properly. (pun intended)
  - XorNot 1y ago
    Small farms are inefficient though. Farming needs a diverse range of skilled labor but infrequently: the industry as a whole trends towards larger land holders being serviced by specialist labor forces which work seasonally or regionally. And then within that bucket, it's fairly obvious that larger holders are going to be much more resilient to regional problems if they have diversified land holdings where one area can support a downturn in another. This is all Renaissance era knowledge.
    - jay_kyburz 1y ago
      Inefficient from an economic perspective may not be what we need as a society. Perhaps we need more farmers living the the county, spending money in small county towns, with more work for people with those special labor skills. Get people out of the city and more people into primary industries.

Animats 1y ago

Interestingly, California agriculture works differently. Farmers grow many different crops. Fruits and vegetables are not subsidized the way the big field crops are. Vegetable farmers tend to grow more than one crop and often switch based on demand. (Amusingly, some who switched from tomatoes to pot are switching back.) The industry is much more demand driven. The subsidy-driven end of farming views markets for their product as an entitlement. For dairy operators, that's almost a religious belief. World School Milk Day is September 24th. They're desperately fighting against oat milk and almond milk in schools. Then came Trump's tariffs. One of the current messes involves canola oil. Canada exported canola oil to the US, until Trump put on a tariff. So canola oil exporters want to export to China. China, in turn, wants a cut in Canada's 100% tariff on electric cars, which looks like it will happen. This in turn will reduce US car exports to Canada. The current administration is soft on white-collar crime. That's part of the Project 2025 plan, and it's being carried out by refocusing the US Department of Justice on "violent crime". (Which is mostly the business of local cops, since the federal government only has jurisdiction over crimes related to interstate commerce.)

bryanlarsen 1y ago

Commodity production can be massively profitable. Low cost commodity producers make boatloads of cash. Saudi Aramco is exhibit A. The price of a commodity is the cost of the marginal producer. For oil, a marginal producer is Canadian oilsands oil. It costs them $50 - $70 a barrel to produce their oil, and another $10 to ship to market. Thus the price of a barrel of oil is typically $60 - $80. If it drops below that the Canadian oilsands producers shut down, and the next most expensive producer becomes the marginal producer. (example highly over simplified) OTOH it costs Saudi Aramco $10 per barrel to produce their oil. They make insane profits. American farmers are not quite Saudi Aramco levels of profitable, but they are not the marginal cost producers. Large, highly mechanized farms means American farmers have extremely low labor costs compared to the rest of the world. The last 20 or so years have been extremely profitable for American farmers.

Retric 1y ago
American farmers aren’t some universal entity here. Of course it’s farm subsidies and tariffs that most heavily influence the economy reality for most American farm land, but the average small farm in the US isn’t particularly profitable. In many cases it’s closer to a hobby project than the sole income for a family. It’s not even just a question of economies of scale, many east coast farmers grow corn just fine without any irrigation systems that’s a lot of capital you can spend on something else. Being able to lease out a tiny fraction of your land for a co-located wind farm alongside agriculture is a huge boon for many. And so it goes across a huge range of different situations. All this variability is why you don’t see 20+% of US farmland under one giant corporation the way you see in many other industries which benefit more from economies of scale.
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  The average "small" farm in the US is very large and very mechanized compared to an average farm in Europe, Asia or Africa. But when I say the advantage derives from being large and mechanized, it does imply that American farms that are less large and less mechanized do not do nearly so well.

krainboltgreene 1y ago

> Software startups rarely go up against Windows, Excel, Google search, or Amazon e-commerce. Literally every new startup is a more specific version of Excel, but also direct competitors have also been funded over the last 10 years! Same for Amazon!