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I buy all this, and I think your analysis is spot on. There's z log of cognitive dissonance going on here. >> One common theme has been that farmers are by nec

I buy all this, and I think your analysis is spot on. There's z log of cognitive dissonance going on here. >> One common theme has been that farmers are by necessity highly independent. I think they like to think of themselves as highly independent. But in truth of course they are highly dependent, on city customers for their product, on foreign countries for exports, on federal govt for subsidies (both direct and indirect), on suppliers for machinery, seed and fertilizer, and in some cases on immigrant labor. Just as we are dependent on farmers. It's all interconnected. Ironically they may tolerate local govt, and had federal govt, but they are most dependent on fed govt policies. They do of course have many legitimate grievances, but I'm not sure that voting for the party that seems to hate them is a winning strategy.

modo_mario 9mo ago
>and in some cases on immigrant labor. Why tho do you feel the need to defend big agri businesses skirting employment law and pressuring wages downward by bringing in illegal people? I find it a bit weird looking at the US how they seem to kneejerk into different camps depending on what the other side does with some old outliers like bernie who retain their line. >Ironically they may tolerate local govt, and had federal govt, but they are most dependent on fed govt policies. I live in a much smaller country but here there's similar pressures at play. I feel like a more nuanced take that farmers either don't voice or don't voice well here is that the federal and EU gov has benefited these big corporate farms they compete with because they're by far the best at siphoning off these various subsidies that farmers supposedly depend on. At the same time gov requirements make it almost impossible to run an smaller independent farm or one that doesn't depend on one of these middlemen to an extreme degree. I worked for a meat conglomerate here in belgium and plenty of the farmers they dealt with didn't own their own cows (and plenty went under). They essentially rented their business to the company which owned the animals on their land, provided the calf feed made by their subsidiary, employed a load of vets, had an international transport company, had me and others writing software that would automate the mindbogglingly stupid forms and rules for transport (which were interpreted comically differently by regional departments of the federal food safety agency so depending on the jurisdiction you had to do radically different things). Just the paperwork to run a competitive farm was/would have been impossible to deal with for many of these people and it was so clearly made up by people who never had to deal with the consequences directly. On the other hand there's also plenty of examples of things like the gov rugpulling with environmental legislation in the netherlands. Things like caping farms at past nitrogen emissions (benefiting the big ones) after first encouraging farmers to take loans and invest insane amounts into equipment to reduce those emissions.
- rob74 9mo ago
  > Why tho do you feel the need to defend big agri businesses skirting employment law and pressuring wages downward by bringing in illegal people? Not sure if they (no matter if big business or small farm) could find enough American citizens to do those jobs, even if they were better paid...
  - Obscurity4340 9mo ago
    Shouldnt they at least have to try? Who else gets to throw up their hands before even trying to raise wages and offer an attractve (as much as is possible) employment offer to domestic labor before they get to skip all that to get to the good stuff where they get to pay even shittier wages, afford less rights or access to judicial review for their workers, and basically totally control them thru deportation threats should they get to uppity on Freedom Land's supply?
    - ben_w 9mo ago
      You can try, but the unemployment levels in the USA have not generally been low enough to find enough workers in total in recent decades. Worse, even the last few % of unemployment is a deliberate policy choice to prevent a rapid cycle of wage inflation as everyone competes for a limited supply of workers: The farmers would have to pay enough for "seasonal work spending all day doing manual labour in the sun without any AC" to compete with "year round work spending all day stacking shelves in supermarket where the temperature is at consistently in the range that doesn't put off the customers". And if the farmers got the former shelf stackers, then the supermarkets need to find more people to do the stacking. Food prices go up, both wholesale (because the farmers have to pay workers more) and retail beyond that (because so do the supermarkets). I keep seeing stories about poorer Americans struggling with food prices even without this kind of cycle; but it doesn't end with just those two examples, it's all the low-pay jobs that are inherently more comfortable than farm labour, and if they find themselves short of labour and raise wages they too have to raise prices to balance their books, and whichever professions they in turn get labour from have the same choices, it ripples across the entire economy. Which may be good or bad for other reasons, but it's a massive impact across the entire economy, not something which is an easy one-liner. Also, despite all those issues, look at this from the point of view of those workers: They've got seasonal work that pays them somewhat more than they'd earn in their home countries, and until very recently that work would not have come with a risk of being deported to a completely different country than they'd come from.

modo_mario 9mo ago

>and in some cases on immigrant labor. Why tho do you feel the need to defend big agri businesses skirting employment law and pressuring wages downward by bringing in illegal people? I find it a bit weird looking at the US how they seem to kneejerk into different camps depending on what the other side does with some old outliers like bernie who retain their line. >Ironically they may tolerate local govt, and had federal govt, but they are most dependent on fed govt policies. I live in a much smaller country but here there's similar pressures at play. I feel like a more nuanced take that farmers either don't voice or don't voice well here is that the federal and EU gov has benefited these big corporate farms they compete with because they're by far the best at siphoning off these various subsidies that farmers supposedly depend on. At the same time gov requirements make it almost impossible to run an smaller independent farm or one that doesn't depend on one of these middlemen to an extreme degree. I worked for a meat conglomerate here in belgium and plenty of the farmers they dealt with didn't own their own cows (and plenty went under). They essentially rented their business to the company which owned the animals on their land, provided the calf feed made by their subsidiary, employed a load of vets, had an international transport company, had me and others writing software that would automate the mindbogglingly stupid forms and rules for transport (which were interpreted comically differently by regional departments of the federal food safety agency so depending on the jurisdiction you had to do radically different things). Just the paperwork to run a competitive farm was/would have been impossible to deal with for many of these people and it was so clearly made up by people who never had to deal with the consequences directly. On the other hand there's also plenty of examples of things like the gov rugpulling with environmental legislation in the netherlands. Things like caping farms at past nitrogen emissions (benefiting the big ones) after first encouraging farmers to take loans and invest insane amounts into equipment to reduce those emissions.

rob74 9mo ago
> Why tho do you feel the need to defend big agri businesses skirting employment law and pressuring wages downward by bringing in illegal people? Not sure if they (no matter if big business or small farm) could find enough American citizens to do those jobs, even if they were better paid...
- Obscurity4340 9mo ago
  Shouldnt they at least have to try? Who else gets to throw up their hands before even trying to raise wages and offer an attractve (as much as is possible) employment offer to domestic labor before they get to skip all that to get to the good stuff where they get to pay even shittier wages, afford less rights or access to judicial review for their workers, and basically totally control them thru deportation threats should they get to uppity on Freedom Land's supply?
  - ben_w 9mo ago
    You can try, but the unemployment levels in the USA have not generally been low enough to find enough workers in total in recent decades. Worse, even the last few % of unemployment is a deliberate policy choice to prevent a rapid cycle of wage inflation as everyone competes for a limited supply of workers: The farmers would have to pay enough for "seasonal work spending all day doing manual labour in the sun without any AC" to compete with "year round work spending all day stacking shelves in supermarket where the temperature is at consistently in the range that doesn't put off the customers". And if the farmers got the former shelf stackers, then the supermarkets need to find more people to do the stacking. Food prices go up, both wholesale (because the farmers have to pay workers more) and retail beyond that (because so do the supermarkets). I keep seeing stories about poorer Americans struggling with food prices even without this kind of cycle; but it doesn't end with just those two examples, it's all the low-pay jobs that are inherently more comfortable than farm labour, and if they find themselves short of labour and raise wages they too have to raise prices to balance their books, and whichever professions they in turn get labour from have the same choices, it ripples across the entire economy. Which may be good or bad for other reasons, but it's a massive impact across the entire economy, not something which is an easy one-liner. Also, despite all those issues, look at this from the point of view of those workers: They've got seasonal work that pays them somewhat more than they'd earn in their home countries, and until very recently that work would not have come with a risk of being deported to a completely different country than they'd come from.