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If cotton is an inferior crop, why would we want to keep planting so much of it? In this scenario where hemp & marijuana are legal, cotton farmers could start
by a_c_s 12y ago
If cotton is an inferior crop, why would we want to keep planting so much of it?
In this scenario where hemp & marijuana are legal, cotton farmers could start growing hemp too if that is more profitable.
- dllthomas 12y agoThere is a lot of different infrastructure for large scale cotton farming versus large scale hemp farming. Those heavily invested in the former have obvious incentive to keep it profitable rather than having to retool. That isn't to say that it's economically most efficient, but that it can certainly motivate propaganda and eventually legislation (and my understanding is that there's some historical evidence that this is what happened, but that it's not completely conclusive).
- delecti 12y agoThere are absurd amounts of cotton subsidies in this country, to the extent that it's cheaper to ship American grown cotton to factories where it's made into shirts. Typically the opposite happens, where we import crops (cocoa beans, etc) and make the products here to save money.