Of all the guns that rural Americans love, the humble foot-gun is the most beloved.
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Someone else can argue the morality, ethics, economics, and politics of it all, but VERY simply, US Federal Government Agencies are machines for redistributing wealth from cities to rural areas.
Rural America voted quite heavily to stop those subsidies. That's what efficiency means.
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Maturity means suspending judgement and listening to people you disagree with, but I feel that's very out of style these days.
This question may be naive, but why is the agricultural industry so subsidized? I understand the moral argument, but why, economically, does subsidizing farms result in a more efficient allocation of resources? I've heard that it's because farming as a business is full of unpredictability, but if that were the case, wouldn't there be a significant market for private insurance, and wouldn't the cost of that insurance be priced into the cost of food?
1. Farmers vote. And, Farmers live in states where the value-per-vote is high under both state-vote balancing, and gerrymander. Farming is politically useful.
2. Food is part of national security. It's sensible to keep the sector working.
3. Consumers hate variability in food pricing. So, general sentiment at the shop is not in favour of a strong linkage of cost of production to price, and under imports, there's almost always a source of cheaper product, at the socialised cost of losing domestic food security: Buy the cheese from Brazil, along with the beef, and let them buy soy beans from China and Australia to make the beef fatter. -And then, you can sell food for peanuts (sorry) but you won't like the longer term political consequences, if you do this. See 1) and 2).
America has a surplus of soy beans, it’s China that needs to import from us or Brazil. The mess farmers are in now is that China has decided Brazil is a better source for them given the current trade war going on.
China actually imports a lot of food from us, they seem to be the biggest consumer of chicken and pork feet, for example, which we don’t seem to have much use for. The current subsidies are because that export trade, which farmers have depended on and invested in, has basically disappeared now.
I agree with you that the food supply chain is vital to (any country’s) national security, but I don’t think anyone with any real power takes this seriously.
You have to realize the vast majority of farmland is in states suceptable to floods, droughts, hurricanes, pests, frosts, etc. You can read stories of an off year where locusts were so bad they darkened the skies, for example.
Compounding this, farm equipment is freaking expensive. It's not abnormal for a large farm to have hundreds of thousands in payments on machinery. In a good year they make hundreds of thousands. In a bad year they're on the hook for hundreds of thousands. It can take only one bad year to wreck a farm, which is why their suicide rate is so high.
It's hard to imagine as a dev. But imagine you make 200k. Then next year, because of ransomware your boss installed, they tell you you owe 200k through no fault of your own. What would that do to your finances?
Insurance is a parasite. I'm usually against subsidies, but for as something as important as food, it seems reasonable.
Not everything is about economics. As the romans said - you need bread and circuses to stay in power. Keeping food cheap serves an important political function. It also serves an important security function to keep food domestic because if you are at war with where your food is grown, you are not going to win that war.
> As the romans said - you need bread and circuses to stay in power
“One thing, however, that I will note that Juvenal does not say is that the panem et circenses are either how the Roman people lost their power or how they are held under the control of emperors. Instead first the people lose their votes (no longer ‘selling’ them), then give up their cares and as a result only wish for panem et circenses, no longer taking an interest in public affairs” [1].
[1] https://acoup.blog/2024/12/20/collections-on-bread-and-circu...
The romans got their grain cheap from egypt.
Egypt and the north african provinces were a part of the Roman empire fairly early on. They were also some of the wealthiest and most important provinces in the Empire.
> so subsidized
Emphasis on "so", i.e. past obvious strategic rationale like food "security", there's reason to believe US ag has excessive subsidies. IMO answer is like every other "strategic" sector, farmland political economy has been captured by wealth (i.e. Bill Gates largest farmland owner). There's a fuckload of tax haven / loop holes tied to farmland that defers capital gains tax, estate/inheritance tax, property tax. Farmland is stable investment (because land) used to park wealth - it's an asset class, hence if held as asset, wealthy will double down / double dip to make sure it doesn't go idle, so they lobby all the "easy" crops to get massive subsidies and now something like 80% of subsidies goes to top 10% of recipients. US doesn't need to produce that much surplus corn/soy, but it's relatively easy to grow so big agri with capital sunk on those crops will lobby for continued subsidy of said crops, build up even more wasteful sectors like agri to energy (30-50% of corn goes to ethanol), and next thing you know a very inefficient ground water to subsidized agri commodity to gdp generator takes on it's own logic. TLDR, people good at at spread sheets rigged US agri like they rigged everything else.
You can't eat private insurance.
The consequences of not being able to produce enough calories is severe. It is much better to overproduce and everyone gets fed than producing just enough and a climate event erases out 20% of our calorie production.
The US produces an unbelievably enormous calorie surplus way beyond what is needed for the health of the country and in fact its detrimental.
The biggest is not even used as food, over half of corn acreage is used for ethanol. That's an amount of land that's truly beyond comprehension. Its a horrible program as well, corn ethanol is worse than the gasoline it replaces in terms of carbon footprint when taking land use into account. And it raises the price of food. And we even subsidize it multiple times, we subsidize the crop as corn and then we subsidize it as ethanol. Biodiesel and renewable diesel (different products) have spiked in recent years as well, most of that is made from soy, canola, or corn oil. They have similar problems though aren't as bad as corn ethanol.
Another huge negative surplus is the amount of liquid calories, mainly soda, that are consumed. Most nutrition science that I've read points to the enormous amount of liquid calories as the part of the US diet that is driving obesity epidemic. There are of course other aspects to the obesity as well.
Finally, substituting some of the US consumption of beef with chicken and some of the chicken with beans.
To recap US overproduces calories to the point that it hurts the country. It damages the land, the ocean with dead zones, the climate with carbon. We pay for it multiple times in subsidies and with higher food prices. It hurts our health which we pay for in suffering, shortened lives and health costs.
> over half of corn acreage is used for ethanol.
That doesn't mean much without more details. Corn is used as a tool in the crop rotation to enable growing foods for humans to eat. As we learned before ethanol's time in the sun, farmers are going to grow it anyway to support their rotations. The only question is if it is better to recapture that into usable energy or to let it rot out in the field.
> ... when taking land use into account
But if not taken into account? The harsh reality is that ethanol plants are unable to pay cost-of-production-level prices for corn. It now typically costs $5+ to produce a bushel of corn, while ethanol plants generally start to lose money as the price rises above $4.50 per bushel. You're not growing corn for ethanol. You accept selling corn to ethanol buyers when you can't find a better home for it.
Corn especially is a tough one to predict. A couple of years ago yields around here were nearly 100 bushels per acre higher than normal! Even if we put in the mightiest effort to grow exactly the right amount of corn for reasonable food uses, that 100 bushel surprise means a good 1/3 of your crop has no predetermined home right there. Of course, it can go the other way too. If you end up 100 bushels per acre short of what you expected...
Between needing to grow extra to protect against unexpected low yields, combined with unexpected high yields, half to the corn crop having no home (and therefore ending up as ethanol) isn't that far outside of what cannot be reasonably controlled for.
> To recap US overproduces calories to the point that it hurts the country.
That's fair. We don't have the technology to do better, unfortunately. Maybe once LLMs free up software developers once and for all they can turn their focus towards solving this problem?
corn->ethanol is government subsidized robbery. I paid for those nutrients let them rot. Now consumers have to buy more and eat more calories to get the same nutrition. All so we can have net negative ROEI ethanol?
Your buffer here is meat. Cattle are tremendously inefficient consumers of grain. Eat your burgers in the bountiful years, then slaughter 75% of the herd in a hardship year, eat well for six months, then spend the next three, four, five years eating more grains while the herds recover.
Ethanol is another one.
That's the sensible way to do it.
Somehow I doubt that it's the way we do it... But maybe the variability is coming from world trade and developing nations.
Cattle are inefficient consumers of grain, but highly efficient consumers of grass. Most land used for pasture can't effectively be used for anything else.
Eh. The "inefficent calorie conversion" take is sort of lazy and misses the nuances. I just looked it uo, and it seems that only about 55% of yields are for feed, and there is definitely some more nuance there, since a lot of feed meal comes from stalks and parts if the plants humans would not consume. This notion of calorie inefficiency also misses the mark on what would be planted and harvested instead to contain the same bioavailable nutrient profile thay comes from meat. In otber words, using land for feed to convert grains to another type of food is probably more necessary than just "taste".
I don't care to research it further, but I own a small 5 acre farm and can attest that some crops grow in some areas and some don't. So even if you did map it all out on a piece of paper where you'd get all your beans and lentils and whatnots I doubt it would work in real life. Cattle can handle a couple hard freezes. My tomatoes can't.
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We feed the average cow >10lbs of grain and also some alfalfa for every pound of meat we get out right now.
Part of the cull would likely be shifting towards more grass fed production. Another part would simply be prioritizing chicken or pork for a while.
Some of them date back to 'westward expansion', where they were incentives to encourage settler immigration (e.g. Texas tax exemption from 1839). They've stayed on the books because nobody wants the trouble of suggesting their removal.
More generally, however, it's a cost that is paid to support massive efficiency gains in other sectors. Like roads, aviation or the military. The freight system particularly would be unreliable if food prices floated according to only supply and demand, due to freights vulnerability to political upheavals, militias, etc.
Because agriculture is hard industry. The producer prices that is what the farmer gets are often laughable cut from final product. And this is due to farmers having little or no power in the system. Their products are made at certain time. And then they start declining in quality and finally rotting away. Most of the value ends up in other parts of the chain.
You could increase prices relatively little and farmers would earn lot more. But no one else is willing to allow that to happen. As such directly subsidizing them is more efficient.
Pricing anything into the cost of food would be political poison. Paying farmers to grow nothing is considered preferable to that
It's not always about price. Paying farmers to grow nothing ensures they stay open if we need them to grow something.
When I farmed we had set aside land paid for by the government. When there were predicted shortages on food in the future, we were allowed to farm that ground.
You don't want farmers going under. It just takes one bad year that way and we're all fucked. I've never lived through a proper famine, but Grandpa talked about the dust bowl and depression. It sounded fucking awful.
That’s what foreign aid is for:
1. Keep strategic production capacity alive.
2. Spread American soft power.
3. Get warm fuzzy feelings because you prevented millions of people from dying of starvation.
This exactly.
The fuss made about agricultural subsidies by non-farmers is misguided. Dropping subsidies doesn't make food cheaper, it makes it go away.
Consumers are addicted to cheap food, so they pay taxes instead to make up the difference. Given a progressive tax system this actually is a very efficient approach to take. And overall, as a % of the total budget, these subsidies are insignificant.
What is hurting farmers are reduced markets. USAid used to buy up a lot of surplus production (effectively a back-door subsidy), lots got exported to China et al. Given the economic antagonism towards the US (thanks to things like tarifs and insults) demand for US food exports either dropped naturally (eg Canada) or with reciprocal tarifs (eg China).
Politicians like to say "we don't make things here anymore" ignoring the most fundamental production of all (farming). They destabilize foreign trade, and (if we look at more labor intensive crops) target farm workers for deportation.
To be fair, agriculture states are also red states, so it's fair to say they voted for this.
Not surprisingly most countries want to be self sufficient with food production, so tarifs on food imports makes sense.
Unfortunately though I don't think US tarifs are the solution here. Leaving aside that antagonizing the end-consumer seems unproductive (eg canada) there's also a perception in Europe that US food products (especially meat) are of low quality.
Whether that perception US true or not US immaterial. (My own visits to the US and experience of US food would suggest the US optimizes for quantity not quality, but anecdotes are not data.)
Much of the barrier with exporting beef are the higher food standards, and documentation, required in Europe. Lowering the standards doesn't seem to be politically acceptable either.
most of the subsidies are insurance not direct payments.
At least in Europe they have inproportionally big lobby and food is considered a security issue. If it would not be subsidized it would probably be beaten by much more cheaper imports. You can see they ignored security issue with energy and it backfired pretty bad.
… but why, economically, does subsidizing farms result in a more efficient allocation of resources?
It’s doesn’t.
Agricultural subsidies in the US, and I presume most states but I’m not as well read on their policies, are a mixture of realpolitik, war preparedness, and graft.
If you are trying to square the circle, you can’t, because economic efficiency was not an input for the decisions on these subsidies.
because the energy states of inputs are so massively beyond ordinary bounds that distortions of unexpected kinds develop and persist in markets that otherwise appear to be straightforward? And, this is not new, but more energetic and more far-reaching than ever before. (more comments would have to chose a lens through which to postulate e.g. economic, legal, energy exchange, human nature ... etc.. ?)
Ag. can't just be about profit. There's a dimension which is national-strategic interest. Food security, the domestic food economy is important.
It is my understanding that a lot of the US ag. sector is making inputs for processing for corn oil, fructose, ethanol, and for exports to markets which in turn target american ag, selling e.g. beef back to the US, fattened on US Soy.
It's a complex web. I don't want US farmers going broke, any more than I want Australian farmers going broke (where I live)
So getting this right, fixing farming sector security, is important.
I recommend checking history of deregulation of agricultural industry in New Zealand. It didn't lose the industry. Actually the opposite happened.
Persistent government subsidies are almost never a good idea long term. I understand that some temporary support might make sense in some cases, but not permanent one. It prevents innovation and optimization. And in the long run it usually makes more damage.
Having been in the NZ ag tech industry for the last 25+ years, US subsidies and tarrifs drove a lot of innovation in NZ (also Europe) and then US manufacturers in the spaces I've been in have pretty much collapsed when faced with better tech as farmers switched to using our ( or the European) tech.
Curious what sort of tech? Like better tractors and such?
Please provide examples
It would appear that to remain competitive they had massive consolidation, and with that an increase in animal density leading to major issues with water pollution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CraFarms
So I guess yay deregulation, now with more capitalist privatized profits with socialized costs!
Downvoting without engaging in a discussion kind of directly violates both the spirit and rules around here.
I've posted pretty solid evidence that dregulation, did not, in fact improve the agricultural situation for New Zealand. It absolutely made a subset of corporations and mega-farmers extremely rich at the expense of the natural resources the rest of the country shares. Would LOVE to hear the arguments about how that's a good thing for the people of New Zealand or our planet as a whole.
But then again, that would require thoughtful discourse...
Growing excess amount of food is part of food security, but farmers are going bankrupt because they focused on labor efficient agricultural commodity products to the exclusion of everything else. For many farmers, it's not even a full time job
I rather we focus on increasing food security in other way.
Maybe we shouldn't be turning corns into cows as that reduce the amount of energy we are able to access. But how do we keep access to farmlands that we don't use now that we aren't turning corns into cows? I suppose we could just use these lands as pasture.
~60 million acres of corn and soybean in the US, the size of Oregon, is grown exclusively for biofuels. This is unnecessary as you mention, as are the subsidies to farmers for these row crops.
Do those crops contribute to the negative numbers reported since most people don't buy biofuel? Or does it contribute something positive to the numbers with government subsidies guaranteeing returns?
I haven't studied the economics of the biofuel farming.
Corn is turned into ethanol, and is then blended with gasoline. The US consumes ~14B gallons of ethanol per year. It’s a net negative because it’s carbon and water intensive and farmers advocate for more ethanol than is necessary as a subsidy via government mandate.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/03/environm...
https://ethanolrfa.org/media-and-news/category/news-releases...
"Ag. can't just be about profit."
Somewhere off in the distance I hear billionaires laughing.
This is only important if you care about the future of humans. At least in America, attention spans have shortened, empathy has decreased, and individualism has increased. Billionaires don't care about the future beyond their own life. And unfortunately, one of the worst of them is now the head of the country.
Subsidies also lead to surpluses that can help buffer price shocks during supply crises; here is a recent example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01638-7
Everyone thinks their thing is too special for markets. I’m sure you’ve heard the argument for healthcare, education, energy, water, food, science, infrastructure, etc.
We need to realign on this politically; either we use markets to allocate scarce resources or we don’t.
The answer is probably that the public does not believe in markets. But we haven’t made that explicit, and instead have the worst combinations of policies; with worse service and enabling grifters.
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It is the ecconomy. Harvest have been above average around the world the past few years. In turn supply and demand puts prices low. one bad year and harvests will be down and prices way up.
i've been working for John Deere for 15 years - I have seen this cycle several times already. people blame various politics when it happens, but the fundamentals are enough to explain nearly all of this. Anyone in farming knows this and plans for it (not always successfully)
Canada has a thing called "Supply Management". It means that for some agricultural industries, we limit how many people can produce, for example, milk.
This restriction keeps the price of milk stable, and high enough that farmers can make a profit. It may seem strange to some, but the goal is to ensure that we don't have to bail out our farmers.
The alternative is as in the US, where anyone can produce milk, and the price craters, and farmers need to be constantly bailed out.
Canadians watch crazy things like for example the US Federal government buying millions and millions of gallons of milk, making cheese, and storing it for decades. All to reduce supply/create demand, and keep the price artificially high. I suppose one bonus is the US government gives some of this cheese to the poor.
The other crazy part is the US federal government has repeatedly bought dairy farms out, to reduce supply. Literally bought entire farms, and closed them down.
Canada wants a stable supply of milk. We don't want to rely upon a foreign power for basic food-stuffs. And we don't want to spend untold billions. Thus, supply management.
Meanwhile, the US runs around saying we're crazy commies because we have price and supply control, says free market is perfect, then spends endless billions over decades to pretend the market works.
Oh and also, the US screams about how our market isn't "open", how we unfairly manipulate the market, then... wants to inject super cheap, underpriced milk, all of the result of US federal tax dollars spending billions.
Finally, it is illegal to use growth hormones in Canada on cattle. Not so in the US. With the excess supply issues in dairy in the US, maybe the US should do the same?
> The alternative is as in the US, where anyone can produce milk, and the price craters, and farmers need to be constantly bailed out.
Do you have references to bailouts specifically for dairy farms? The big bailouts recently were due to reciprocal tariffs. There is the Milk Loss Program but that is limited to 30 days of production per year. I would also classify this more of an insurance program than bailout.
Canada dumps good milk down the drain while people go hungry and suffer high food prices. The supply management system is not perfect.
You can't produce an exact amount of food. It isn't an assembly line, it's farming, it's biological.
You need to aim for excess, to ensure enough is produced during drought, animal sickness, and other variability.
What Canada does is ensure there is excess, but not crazy amounts. It also ensures the market price is fair to farmers.
What you call "high food price" we call "farmers not going bankrupt".
And while nothing is perfect, supply management is far better than the alternatives.
> supply management is far better than the alternatives.
Why, then, only dairy, poultry, eggs, and — at least until 2007 when the government bought back the quota — tobacco production? If the farmers growing the foods that are actually deemed important in a healthy diet end up bankrupt, no big deal?
> It also ensures the market price is fair to farmers.
Well, it creates a two-tier system where the 'blessed' farmers who are born into it (or born into a European farm that can be sold at a high enough price to buy a farmer in Canada out) have artificially high incomes to spend on land, equipment, etc. at inflated prices. It is hard to think that is fair to all the other farmers who have to compete against the farmers of the world when selling their product but have to pay supply managed farmer prices for inputs.
I suppose everything is in the eye of the beholder. I'll grant you that all the other farmers' retirement plan is to sell off their land to a supply managed farmer who will pay way more than it is worth. That keeps the peace. Bit sad to see everything go to those producers who get special treatment, though.
> consumers get stable and somewhat realistic prices [...] while farmers also get stable income.
Which? You can't have both. Input costs are subject to the whims of non-supply managed markets. When, say, input costs rise either the farmer has to absorb that cost (unstable income), or the cost has to be passed on to the customer (unstable consumer price).
> and supply
Oh? https://www.ctvnews.ca/atlantic/article/some-maritime-grocer..., https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/cana..., https://farmersforum.com/cracks-in-supply-management/
>Canada dumps good milk down the drain while people go hungry and suffer high food prices
I'm not sure if you realise this, but the exact same thing happens in the US.
This video is very liberal but does a good job of explaining which companies and industries pay for breaks and which don't. And uses soy bean farmers as a prominent example of a group who haven't been giving Trump bribes https://youtu.be/RPzcGeiNYvk?si=bfy_5KEo_ZUxOBHu
Sarah Taber for the lowdown all things US Farming https://www.youtube.com/@FarmToTaber
The problem isn't with the farmers. The problem is the monopolies that surround the farmers.
They buy their seeds from massive corporations that have patents on seeds. They sell their produce to global multi-national corporations that set the prices they'll purchase at. They buy their machinery from John Deere or Case IH at extremely high prices.
They have no negotiating power and are squeezed between these massive corporations. This ends up leading to farmers having to sell land to corporations that will then farm it and extract subsidies from the government.
When a farmer receives a subsidy, it usually just ends up in the pockets of Cargill or Monsanto, with whom they already owe money to.
The whole system is broken from top to bottom.
Yes, and the man who broke the system, who installed the loophole that allowed decades of mergers and trust-building, was even named Robert Bork!
He was a Nixon/Reagan flunky, naturally, but the Dems ignored the issue for a long time. It was exciting to finally see the first real pushback in the last administration under Lina Khan. So many upset businessmen on TV! Unfortunately, elections have consequences, and the work did not continue.
> It was exciting to finally see the first real pushback in the last administration under Lina Khan. So many upset businessmen on TV! Unfortunately, elections have consequences, and the work did not continue.
Perhaps one of the consequences of her actually pushing back on this was one of the many reasons the owner class overwhelmingly backed Trump.
Do you propose continuing to not push back instead? That'll show 'em!
Populism is in the air, and for good reason. Lina Khan's FTC was not all they feared, but if it had been, our mistake would have been one of not going far enough.
Prices aren't everything. Excessive pesticides can make cheap produce have negative health effects and thus a worse value. Poor soil chemistry can make cheap produce less nutritious and thus a worse value.
~78% of farmers voted for him. They are directly responsible for their own outcome in this regard.
Canada supplies 75-80% of US potash imports, and potash is a non-substitutable input in agriculture; without it, crop yields drop significantly. China no longer buy soybeans from US farmers, and instead now sources from South America; they have made a token 12M ton purchase, as they promised.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/farmers-bailout-tr...
> Ragland, for example, supported Trump dating back to 2016, making him just one of many in rural America. Trump won a majority of USDA “farming-dependent” counties ahead of his first term, and within a year of assuming office, his trade wars drove American farm exports to China down from $19.5 billion to $9 billion. Ultimately, farmers saw a decline of $27 billion in agricultural exports, nearly 71 percent of that attributable to soybean profit losses. Ragland, a soybean farmer, still turned right back around and voted for Trump again in both 2020 and 2024. Here again, he was just one of many. Farmers increased their support for Trump by 5 percent in 2020, hitting 76 percent support, and then added another 2 percent in 2024, reaching 78 percent support. In 100 of the country’s 444 “farming-dependent” counties, according to Investigate Midwest, Trump won a whopping 80 percent of the vote.
> “So they voted for this guy three times—all these white farmers did. And now this president has turned agriculture in this country to the worst [shape it’s been in] since the ’80s. Farm bankruptcies. Farm foreclosures. Farm suicide [My note: farmer suicides are 3.5x-4x the general population]. Input costs—all these things,” Boyd told me.
https://investigatemidwest.org/2024/11/13/trump-election-far...
> Not only did Trump increase his support among farming-dependent counties, but more than 100 of those counties supported him with at least 80% of their vote.
This is entirely self inflicted, which to me, is wild and a case study for history. This was a collective choice, intentionally made.
Farmers like Ragland are overrepresented.
Why do these rural states (several of which have a total population less than that of major metro areas on the coasts) have two senators?
The senate is an antidemocratic institution. The compromise that every state gets two senators made sense when we were a weak, newborn and vulnerable nation, with a total population of less than 3 million people. Not anymore. The founders likely didn't want people like Ragland to have the vote anyway. They were not salt of the earth farmers they were largely plantation and merchant and legal elites. Ragland is the dumb mob rule they feared.
Maybe the 17th amendment was a mistake. At the very least, why stop there? The constitution is not sacred, as established and as written, the founders would have given Ragland less representation.
Perhaps in the spirit of actual democracy and modern reform, it is time to revisit the idea that every state gets two senators. Given what is really going on here is these states vote against their own interests and then rob blue states to cover up the shortfall. Why are blue states tolerating it?
It would be one thing if it was just about money, but it's not. These populations are being deputized in a culture war that tells them to hate you while they take your money. They need a reality check.
> The lesson from the last 20 years is that voters consistently vote to people who speak to their interests and their problems
This is false. Trump did not spoken to their problems.
He spoken to their hate, to they wish to harm other people. He is a crook and that appealed to them - they want to steal like him.
They voted for Trump, because they like seeing abuse. That was super clear, if you actually listen to what they say.
Obama did not run as a progressive, lol.
Much of the rest of this is equally ahistorical. Living conditions and wages haven't gotten worse over the past 50 years.
Completely agree. Trump is selling the wrong solutions, but many people hear a truth when he tells them they are getting screwed. Democrats insist that business as usual is great and simply extort voters: "It votes for a broken healthcare system, a broken electoral system and increasing income inequality or it gets the orange fascist again."
Biden / Harris also essentially offered voters the Trolley Problem. If you don't pull the lever Trump will fund genocide. If you do pull the lever, we will also fund genocide, but maybe less genocide.
If your campaign can be described as an instance of a classic ethical dilemma, maybe the problem isn't the voters? At the very least, if Democrats 2024 campaign rhetoric is to be believed, funding genocide was more important to them than maintaining U.S. democracy.
The lesson is not for me, the lesson is for these farmers who will go bankrupt, lose their farms and land, and commit suicide in some quantities of each. Perhaps don't trust someone who only tells you what you want to hear, and yet never delivers. Most unfortunately, the lesson will fall on deaf ears while we all carry on. A cautionary tale, for sure. Sometimes we trust the wrong people. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
> So you can say "you made your bed now lie in it" to the farmers but does that help you? Does that help the country?
If there are less voters like this over time, yes, I put forth that will help the country (~2M 55+ voters age out every year, ~5k per day). Whether the country is worth saving, we can save for another thread. If someone won't change their mind, nor their vote, you've arrived at an impasse. You can only wait for time to work. Again, very unfortunate.
> The Democratic Party is complicit in everything that's happened by their intentional inaction and choice to lose.
"They made me do it." is not an argument. You vote for the chainsaw, you get the chainsaw. My understanding was that conservatives held personal responsibility as a core belief. Am I mistaken? Better luck next election cycle.
I take no pleasure in discovering that this is reality. It brings me great sadness. "We must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be." -- Maurice
Subsides tend to get absorbed by monopolists of all kind.
This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords. This is why you need to break up monopolies or tax them. The problem is societal endorsement of monopoly rights all kind to the point of invisibility. Witness any conversations about IP rights and lands.
But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market rather than specializing in profitable but more labor intensive crops.
> This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords
Not necessarily. People live where they live because there are jobs. If they don't need jobs because of UBI, or they can take lower-paying jobs, they can move wherever housing is plentiful.
There'll always need to be other constraints on landlords because there's zero reason why they won't just all screw renters over in every area no matter how plentiful housing is.
You have to make it impossible for them to exist. Rentiers are the lowest form of business, and incentives need to make it difficult for them to prosper too much.
These issues are why policy was oriented around individual home ownership for decades.
Commodity markets are necessary for survival. If we cannot make them work as a society something is deeply wrong.
Someone needs to be farming the food we all eat... If every farmer decided to just plant saffron who would farm the wheat and rice and vegetables that it is used to season?
Other countries? Asia seems to be able to make a living off of rice farming, and their secret is not going into debt investing in $1M harvesters.
> But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market
Hard to predict the future. It was only a few years ago when crop prices were at record highs and some countries were on the brink of starvation because we weren't producing enough community crops.
The cure for high prices is high prices. But also, the cure for low prices is low prices. The older farmers are used to it. It seems the problem right now is that a lot of the younger guys went through an unusually long stretch of good times and have never felt the bad times before.
The fix is more expensive food.
Everyone loves the mom and pop businesses but shops at walmart for those rock bottom prices.
We can have our fresh family farms back, but you're paying double for your food. We have the system we have because people value cheap/affordable over everything, regardless of what they upvote on the internet.
Europe has a very robust, high quality and cheap food system.
Food is extremely high quality, environment is managed and wealth is distributed with support for small farmers.
High quality food is a fraction in Europe of what you pay in the US.
There is additional cost to taxpayers of Europe but US taxpayers are paying a ton for the US system too but just getting worse outcomes.
This can be done.
This is like the education or gun debates, or basically any quality of life message you might have. It's almost impossible to get your message heard. There will always be some non-reason why everything is oh-so-different in the US. It's very frustrating to live here with all the matter-of-fact head-in-the-sand know-it-all bloviating.
Meanwhile our teachers are suffering enormously, our education is terrible, our roads are terrible, we are poisoning ourselves with substandard food, we have extremely expensive but relatively poor healthcare to deal with the problems that creates, we have no time off and are labor slaves where maximum effort for minimum pay is the norm, and half the country has become violently oppressive to the point of absolutely thriving off the suffering they perceive inflicted on others. And still, we know better - of course - because we are Americans.
There are some very wealthy people who have spent massive amounts of time and money making things they way they are. They've got things set up in a way that benefits them. They go to great lengths to keep Americans convinced that the way things are can't be changed and it's an uphill battle trying to convince Americans otherwise. Even if most Americans wise up they'll still use the resources they have to stop the changes we want from happening. I don't know what the solution is, but I do know it won't be easy.
Europeans don't have to eat 1700 calories in a meal to feel full.
That’s not really true, but we’ve incentivized mass scale farming. I know farmers who can sell produce at competitive prices growing in Upstate NY, but they only get a couple of harvests of most crops, even with advanced techniques that let many crops get planted in March.
The government spent lots of money to turn the California and Arizona deserts into the garden of America. New Jersey planted subdivisions.
> Everyone loves the mom and pop businesses but shops at walmart for those rock bottom prices.
People shop where they can afford to shop. Walmart is famous for not paying people enough to shop anywhere except walmart. The fix is to make sure that people earn a living wage and to actually enforce the Robinson–Patman Act and aggressively go after price fixing. Suddenly walmart's prices won't undercut the mom and pop places and they won't have to charge as much to just barely survive. Opening a store that isn't part of some massive chain would stand a chance at being profitable and affordable. More competition leads to more innovation and more opportunities.
A better way to do this to remove the transportation subsidy for big businesses. Trucks do most of the damage to roads (4th power of weight) but consumers bear the brunt of road maintenance. If big vehicles paid their fair share of oil taxes for roads, it will even the playing field for local farmers and businesses.
This is true to a degree, but, if big ag subsidies were phased out, small local farms would have a better chance of being viable.
I guess you could say this raises prices, but on the flip side, small farm prices could start to come down if they were more viable.
> if big ag subsidies were phased out, small local farms would have a better chance of being viable.
Maybe. The subsidies that we always hear about is a portion of insurance premiums paid by the government. Presumably if the government pulled out of the subsidy, the risk/reward of insurance would tilt towards not having it. Many farmers already forego having insurance even with the reduced price.
Which would mean nothing until something bad happens. But when something does happen, that means some big farms could collapse. But it would also mean small farms are just as likely to collapse right beside.
I expect you are ultimately right: That once the collapses occur, it would be hard to rebuild a large farm before it ends up collapsing once more, leaving farms unable to ever grow beyond being small again. But is that what you imagine for small farms?
Of course, that's all theoretical. In the real world, the government wouldn't let the food supply fall apart like that. If farms didn't have insurance, it would simply come in and bail them out when destructive events occur. It is a lot simpler, and no doubt cheaper (the subsidy is offered on the condition of being willing to give production data back in return), to implement a solution ahead of time rather than panicking later.
Paying double for food is a great idea until you realize that now we need to subsidize everyone else just so they can eat.
Dang. What are the good options here (without throwing people under the bus)? IMHO, the patents on seeds has been an immense pain to the midwest and should be made void with a phase out plan that starts with the most common seeds (which are causing legal havoc by mixing into neighboring farms via wind).
Can you elaborate on the "immense pain"? I don't disagree that monopolies in big AG are a huge problem, but last time I saw someone make this point, I looked into it, and there were relatively few cases of big AG suing small farmers over stuff like this. My understanding of one of the main cases that gets referenced in these discussions was where a farmer bought roundup ready seed, promised not to use it to breed, per standard EULA, then bred with it, and intentionally selected offspring to breed further which showed the roundup ready trait. Am I missing something?
Which patents in particular are you concerned about?
It's not just that; being a very small undifferentiated supplier in a volatile commodities market with very high fixed capital costs, unpredictable/uncontrollable production capacity and long production lead times is a very difficult business, regardless of the industry.
> it usually just ends up in the pockets of […] Monsanto
Who? Monsanto closed up shop and sold off its assets to Bayer and BASF many years ago.
Oh yup, you're right on that. I guess my point still stands as Bayer and BASF kind of fit the bill as well.
The New York Drought is real.
There’s only two meat packers… two. Where are the cattle farmers to go? It’s like this across the industry thanks to monopolies like ConAgra, Tyson’s, etc.
Breaking up monopolies and giving farm workers strong unions would go a long way to improving the situation.
Strangely no mention of the climate crisis.
Oddly enough the way to help is to removing the subsidies. Exploiting famers, using them as a middleman to the American taxpayer, is extremely lucrative.
Some subsidies are useful. Some aren't. The trick is to stop the ones that aren't helping without collapsing our food supply.
Of course, I'm sure a temporary one might be useful once a decade or century.
My point is this exactly mirrors the situation in health insurance, university degree prices, and many other industries we permanent subsidize. Companies create machines to use people to access the nearly unlimited pool of money available.
would this actually be enough such that farmers have to sell their land and new small family farmers cam get started?
or only a new set of bankruptcies and the same farmers stay on?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xon9A5_4tQw&pp=ygUKZmFybSB0YWJ... was very illuminating
It’s likely the land would be far more valuable as something else.
Small family farms, while romanticized, have all the problems of any small business competing with larger professionalized businesses; consistency in operations, consistency in output quality, access to resources - including people and machines.
Additionally, for their own operational simplicity big buyers prefer interacting with as few suppliers as possible - so, market forces have been driving consolidation for decades.
I am told that farms are optimized for labor efficiency rather than profits. These farmers often have a second job when they're not out there farming.
With a low tax on land, we may not actually be encouraging the most efficient use of farmlands.
Given that people are loathed to sell their land for any reason, this makes it impossible for farmers to start new farm, leading to a gradual depopulation and collapse of rural economies.
Small farmers are not good policy despite the romance. A large farmer can afford soil investments that small ones cannot
They described a lot of data. Then, toward the end, they say:
"These loss estimates reflect national averages; actual costs of production and returns vary by region, management decisions and ownership structure. For example, producers who own their farmland may face lower total costs by avoiding cash rental expenses, resulting in higher returns."
So, can we trust this to say what it appears to be saying? Or might it be meaningless like many broad averages, and we should use more specific data that includes supplier behaviors?
Quite surprised there wasn't mention of the Trump tariffs on China causing the collapse of China imports of US soybeans, which by the way, has persisted even though the original tariffs were reduced, causing lasting damage to farmers.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenroberts/2026/01/17/china-pur...
Almost 78% of farmers voted for Trump [1]. These are the guys that got Trump elected. Polls show that support for President Trump among farmers remains high, hovering around 50-60%. That means these are the guys that are keeping Trump in power. When support among farmers drops to 20% level GOP legislators will feel emboldened to remove Trump from power.
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-farmers-voted-trump-feeling-210...
It's just shocking to me how certain demographics are so eager to vote against their own interests.
I mean, name one thing that Trump has done to help farmers more than he hurt them with the tariffs? (Subsidies they already had, regardless of the party in power.)
What are they getting in return for their vote? The safety of knowing that trans athletes are banned and some Guatemalans in far away "liberal" cities have been "gotten rid of"? None of those benefit them in any way. I still can't quite understand.
GOP has long pursued a strategy of getting rural whites to vote against their self interest. This is why they play up cultural issues such as trans people using women's bathrooms and such other topics that uneducated people can readily grasp.
> The party really abandoned rural voters and farmers.
Not to defend the Dem party (only the lesser of two evils, at least lately), but in what way? Because farm subsidies seem fairly consistent regardless of which party was in power[0]
[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-commodity-...
I suppose they've successfully instilled the fear that "our way of life" will be destroyed if they don't vote for Trump, despite 1) being a lie, and 2) a vote that will make things worse for them. It's amazing how powerful these relatively minor cultural issues can be. It certainly makes for interesting case studies for future political science and sociology university (if the humanities survive).
> It's just shocking to me how certain demographics are so eager to vote against their own interests.
Nobody votes against their own interests. That is something that only stupid caricatures do, not actual people. If it seems that way to you, that should be a very strong signal to reevaluate your understanding of the situation. Most likely, that means either nobody is representing their interests or you have misunderstood what their interests are.
That's like saying nobody ever gets swindled. If you think someone got swindled that should be a strong signal to reevaluate your understanding of how they wanted to spend their money.
> It's just shocking to me how certain demographics are so eager to vote against their own interests.
Something that's been made very clear over the last few election cycles is that a lot of voters will go against their own interests, as long as it hurts their perceived "enemy" more than themselves.
Right. This article discusses how race plays a central role in the opposition to universal health care policies like Obamacare, particularly focusing on how some of the resistance in the South is due to white populations not wanting Black Americans to receive free care: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/univ...
I don't really like Trump, but to be fair here, China does things like this all the time. They did the same thing in Canada, because we didn't want their spy-cars in our country.
We'd really be better off if we had zero trade with them. They're poison.
I watched a YouTube video that made me really worried about this, hopefully there are smart people on here that can see a bigger picture.
I wonder if at some point before large corporations finish buying up the last of the family farms in America, if rural America will figure out Trump and his maga republicans were never their friends.
I don’t think it would. Humans really like to blame other people for things they inflict on themselves. This is less painful than learning self-awareness.
The current Republican Party blatantly preys on this weakness and gives people an enemy to hate so they can keep fleecing them.
This is different than the Democrats, who can’t get their shit together and have a common goal.
Don't you worry, deposed farmers (those farmers squeezed between their mega-size suppliers and mega-size customers who had to sell their farms) voted for Trump last year.
Capitalism. The problem is capitalism.
Any handouts for farmers go straight into the coffers of multinationals to pay for farm equipment, support for the locked down farm equipment, the patented seeds, the pesticides for the patented seeds and so on. The entire subsdization model is a profit opportunity for agricultural companies.
And what do those companies wnat to do? Buy up the farms and run them themselves for more profit. Because they don't have to charge the same amount to their own farms of course.
It's also why the wealthy and big companies like illegal immigration. It's an endless supply of underpaid workers who can be exploited for even more profits. Document these people and everybody's wages go up.
The only country I can think of that is really effectively managing its agriculture and food supply is of course China. China had some food shortages in the late 20th century and a result food security became a primary concern of the CCP. China has to feed 20% of the world's population and decided that food need to be plentiful and affordable. There were a seris of agricultural reforms through the 1970s to 1990s and then China used its increasing wealth to pay farmers when they had to and subsidize food when they had to to manage the supply. It's managed to the highest levels of China's government [1].
Here we have rent-seeking corporations and billionaires (eg the Resnicks [2]) where subsidies are just a wealth transfer to the already wealthy. food prices are out of control. But nobody cares because the profits have to keep going up.
[1]: https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-food-security-key-chall...
[2]: https://perfectunion.us/how-this-billionaire-couple-stole-ca...
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This isn't reddit.
I agree. Personally I don't understand the love that agriculture shows to the Republican party, but hey you get what you vote for.
It seems like this whole year has been implementing policy after policy that screws over agriculture.
USAid (big purchaser) gone. 40 billion sent to Argentina. Antagonize Canadians (Canadians !!) so they boycott American produce. Tarif China so they'll reciprocate on soy beans. Deport farm workers. Tarif imports of steel so machine costs go up. Tarif fertilizer so production costs go up. Tarif everything else to reduce consumer spending power.
Despite all this farmers will continue to vote republican this year, and in future years. I presume they have reasons, but I confess they are hard to understand.
Isn't most ag in the US just big business at this point?
Sure, there are still some small farms.. but there are also rich folk like the Treasury Secretary who maintain farms for status and financial benefits(farms get all sorts of special treatment for taxes, bankruptcy and inheritance).
> I presume they have reasons,
They vote with the one party because they didn't had a lot of problems with it in power and, when they voted something else, it was worse.
Between two evils, people prefer the "familiar" one. Works the same in Europe's "democracies".
Nah. This is not true. They voted, because they looked forward the harm to liberals and cities and lgbt and women who dont conform and non whites. They wanted other to be harmed and openly talked about it. They thought they will be harmed only a little, like the last time.
Historically, republicans were not making policies good for them. By they promissed to be cruel and that was appealing.
I've been curious about this myself, and I listened to some pro-Trump people who seem otherwise intelligent that tried to explain this effect.
One common theme has been that farmers are by necessity highly independent. They can't rely on government services as much as city folk, because everything and everyone is potentially an hour's drive away. They don't see the effect of their taxes being spent, because their local roads are dirt roads, there's no traffic lights, no police cars[1] or ambulances zipping by on the regular, etc...
Conversely, they do get frustrated by the likes of the EPA turning up -- invariably city folk with suits and dress shoes -- telling them what to do. "You can't burn this" or "You can't dump that!". More commonly "you can't cut down trees on your land that you thought were your property".
Their perception of government is that it violates their God-given rights regularly and gives little in return.
The further the seat of power, the worse their opinion of it. Local councils they might tolerate, state governments they view with suspicion, and the federal government may as well be on another planet.
Hence, their votes are easily swayed by the "reduce federal government" rhetoric.
We all know this is as an obvious falsehood: Trump grew the size of the federal government with his Big Beautiful Bill! So did every Republican government before him for quite a while now!
That doesn't matter. Propaganda works. The message resonates. The voters will vote against their own interests over and over and over if they keep hearing something that resonates with what they feel.
PS: A great example of this are the thousands of unemployed people that lost their coal mining jobs. Trump lied through his teeth and told them they would get their mining jobs back. Hillary told them they could be retrained as tech support or whatever. They. Did. Not. Like. That. They wanted their jobs back! So they voted for Trump, who had zero chance of returning them to employment because they had been replaced by automation and larger, more powerful mining machines. Their jobs were gone permanently, so they doubled down by voting against the person who promised to pull them out of that hole. Sadly, this is a recurring theme in politics throughout the world.
[1] As an example, this is why they're mostly pro-gun! They know viscerally that if someone broke into their property, they'd have to defend themselves because the local police can't get there in time to save them.perception.
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.
It's more that farmers are through feeding city leeches. I don't think they care a lick about your "wealth"
Says the guy on a computer.
That would bankrupt the farmers so I don't get this?