Comment by adsfqwop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adsfqwop | Hacker News Reader

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I'm sorry but this is exactly the mentality that will drive us into a herbicide apocalypse. Farming food for the population is not a game. Stop looking at farming as some sort of equation on how to turn acres into dollars.

The measure of good farming should not be yield per acre, but nutrient density and food safety instead. It's completely upside down at the moment.

Do you think his grandfather would have cared about "competitive advantage" in favor of dropping the standard of produce quality? No. His grandfather had exactly the mentality we need in farming, which is quality before quantity.

You as a farmer are responsible for the health of the people you feed, and the health of the land and its ecosystem.

This mentality that everything has to be turned into dollars in the most efficient way, will lead farmers to sell us chemical bricks packaged as food if they just can get away with it, because..you know..it's efficient.

Think about that for a moment. When the only measure is dollars, you sacrifice everything that is important for humans and the planet in favor of profits.

Philosophically, I agree with you. But your refusal to measure utility (in dollars, because that's the unit of utility) hurts your argument.

When you make a folksy appeal to natural farming, imply that you don't have to assign utility to things, and then conclude by criticizing capitalism it... falls flat.

It's far more powerful to say that we are failing to price in the cost of monoculture farming, given the catastrophic effects it can have. But to say that you should measure yield based on nutrition per acre rather than dollars per acre? that just implies that you know better than the individuals who are making their own choices about what to consume (cheap food that you call non-nutritious, vs. expensive, organic-whatever that appeals to us emotionally).

with all due respect, I don't want someone else making my consumption choices. Let's just all agree to price it at the market.

And if you think that consumers are making the wrong choices, then the solution is to educate them. If you make your best case and fail, then you should consider whether your opinion should be changed, instead.

We know markets are bad at pricing in catastrophic very-low-probability events. That's why the lottery stays in business.

How do you price in dicamba use? It shouldn't quite be banned, but—silence isn't enough.

> That's why the lottery stays in business

and yet it's legal, and few argue for lotto prohibition

in the words of the initial reply:

> Do you think his grandfather would have cared about "competitive advantage" in favor of dropping the > standard of produce quality? No. His grandfather had exactly the mentality we need in farming, which is > quality before quantity.

...

> Think about that for a moment. When the only measure is dollars, you sacrifice everything that is > important for humans and the planet in favor of profits.

the best solution would be to internalize the costs: dicambia is going to cost the economy 5 billion dollars; therefore dicambia-based sales need to recoup that. And if they can't, then the companies should be fined if there is evidence they either knew, or fell short of their regulatory duty to look.

My point isn't that unfettered capitalism is good (it's not: it's terrible). My point is that the opposite extreme and emotional appeal is also not ideal: "when you only measure dollars..!" Well; there is nothing more appropriate to measure in. So let's just make sure everything is on the scale.

Education doesn't magically fix collective action problems.

Modern farming practices just allowed my father in law to take in a fifty bushel per acre wheat crop on less than inch of rain during the growing season. Traditional or organic practices would likely have resulted in total crop failure.

Organic practices use tillage for weed control rather than pesticide. That would have liberated the moisture from the snow melt leaving nothing for the wheat.

A bushel of wheat is more than a month of calories, so that's 10000 of the world's 7+ billion that my father in law is feeding single handedly with his 2500 acre farm.

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