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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

This emotional attachment to the land creates a fundamental economic problem - inelasticity of supply. The uncomfortable reality is that the US is making too much food and has too many small farmers. Federal and state governments spend billions of dollars on farming subsidies, they create indirect subsidies through programmes like crop insurance, bioethanol mandates and food aid, but it still isn't enough to keep small farms profitable.

Unless we introduce some kind of guaranteed minimum income for farmers, their long-term prosperity depends, sadly, on farm closures. We simply have more farmers and more small farms than the market can possibly sustain.

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Partially true, but partially not. If everyone grows the same crops then yes. However, there is quite a market for farmers to switch in to more esoteric crops that fetch a premium. However, this requires exposure to new markets, risk, and learning new things. Case in point is hemp, which I grow, and is quite a profitable crop. Eventually, it won't be, but for right now it's something that a lot of farmers could be switching in to and making better money.

What are the commercial uses for the hemp you grow? I notice hemp seeds are becoming a lot more popular as a natural protein & healthy fat source.

Hemp is used to make a variety of commercial and industrial products including rope, textiles, clothing, shoes, food, paper, bioplastics, insulation, and biofuel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp#Uses

Going for the CBD market?

Call me crazy, but I like supporting a policy of overproducing food.

Cheap food means farmers lose. Someone is being sent to the economic butchers block so the rest can have cheap food.

And why should food be cheap that farmers have to spend more than it takes to buy the food?

Regardless it’s moot as commodity crops in the USA is mostly (over)grown for feed or ethanol. It’s a disaster because the cost to environment and water is never taken into account.

And then there is california with its 45 billion dollar Ag income of speciality crops. Most of it is fruits and nuts going to export. 38-39 billion is production costs(at minimum wage rates). The actual food we eat is coming from South America and Mexico. It’s cheap because we are importing our food and not because we overproduce food crops.

Overproduction is also protection against famine and blight.

Produce doesn't keep very long; you can't keep a large store of it in case this year's crop fails. You also cannot suddenly ramp up production in the event of catastrophe; it takes months between planting and harvest. Instead, you have to produce much more than you think you need, so that in the unlikely event that your yield is half of what you anticipated, there is not a food crisis.

You also have to destroy the excess when it's not needed, so that you don't distort the market, or acclimatize it to extremely cheap food.

Deliberate overproduction is a good use of government funds. It stops people from dying.

That overproduction is protection against famine and blight would have been a valid point 100 years ago.

Most of what we overproduce is wasted. We import and export food now. We know how to preserve and process food now. Or converted into processed food. For example: high fructose corn syrup is everywhere. And it’s a lab created by product of our excess corn production. Overproduction and cheap food is causing disease and obesity and waste and environmental degradation.

We can synthesize food in fermentation tanks. We can grow food indoors and in containers and without soil. Having said that..it’s important distinguish between the various kinds of crops we grow..commodities like corn, wheat, rice, cotton, sugar beets, canola, soy etc. and then we have tomatoes and kale and herbs and spices. Everything can be frozen, dehydrated, processed and rationed. Every tilled field extracts a cost from the soil. Every pass of the tractor or every cross country trip to deliver goods is a fossil fuel expense. We haven’t figured ways to use renewable energy in Ag. We save water through drip tapes but we use mountains of plastic. Not to mention the tractor runs to lay it down and to remove it. We grow food without soil and save water but we use electricity with indoor productions.

No matter how you see it, production extracts a cost. Over production is more expensive. Over production a population that is growing exponentially costs even more. We should predict our needs(possible now), forecast expenses(possible now) and budget and ration resources..especially non renewable resources and not fritter them away with wasteful food over production.

So does the US Federal Government, which is the main reason why farm subsidies, although wasteful, are absolutely necessary for National Security.

The quickest way for a country/civilization to fall is by interruptions in food supply. The US is a large country with many people. If the food price increase sharply or if there's food scarcity, it will most certainly lead to social unrest of the kind we've never seen before.

It seems to me that if the point (or at least part of it) of government farm policy is to produce oversupply, you could argue that they set up subsidies to favor small operators.

A large quantity of small farms, with slightly different approaches to problems, slightly different crops, different sources of financing, local ownership sounds like it might be more reliable in the long run. Admittedly, the efficiency of the system would suffer a bit.

You're mostly hedging against weather.

One region gets flooded or hit by a drought, and then produces essentially nothing. So you want N+M regional redundancy, where you can lose the output of M regions and the remaining N can produce enough for the whole.

Imports?

Amartya Sen's work on the huge historical famines argues that they were essentially economic phenomena where there was enough food but not enough money to buy the food. In both the Bengal and Irish famines there were even food exports happening during the crisis.

I’m of the opinion that all national security goods and services should be supplied/funded/organised (delete as appropriate) by the government, even when doing so is unnecessarily expensive, as it’s bad to give a different government the power to crush your own.

Maybe so, but that does rather revert to mercantilism. Or, depending on how you interpret "supplied/funded/organised", nationalised agriculture which has pretty much only been seen in Communist states!

(also for most countries oil is a national security good that they have to import ... this has been a defining problem of the 20th century.)

There's like, a bunch of interconnected issues in agriculture. For instance:

1. Our [read 'us' as being either 'my country' or 'human civilization'] food supply needs to be sufficient to provide adequate nutrition to all living humans.

2. Our food supply needs to be robust against failures in production, transportation and distribution which could be regional, widespread, and last several months or years.

3. Our food supply needs reach all individuals, so that no individual person lacks adequate nutrition.

4. Our food supply needs to grow at a sufficient pace to match population growth.

5. Our food supply needs to be 'sustainable' [used in the sense of 'our agricultural practices shouldn't lead to future shortfalls' rather than 'environmentally friendly'].

6. Our food supply needs to be 'environmentally friendly' [as in, minimizing pollutants, energy costs, land use, and damage to native plant and animal species].

7. Our food supply needs to be 'ethical' [as in, the moral rights of the individuals who participate it and the animals which constitute it need to be respected; what moral rights the people and animals possess is left as an exercise to the reader].

8. Small Farmer Proposition: Individual farmers as well as corporations and state-owned organizations should be able to participate in agriculture.

9. Mercantilism Proposition: Rich countries should not be able to crush the agricultural sector of poor countries through protectionism.

This isn't intended as a strict ordering of priority, but I personally care a lot more about making sure everyone is fed than some of the other issues, and I'll note that if we're not producing enough food, the inadequacy of our food distribution and feeding programs is kind of a moot point. My very-controversial opinion is that that famines are very, very bad and that we should heavily over-invest in preventing them. There are obviously limits to all investments, but it's one of the Four Horsemen for crying out loud.

Unsurprisingly, fixing all of the problems with agriculture is a complex problem, or else we wouldn't be talking about it because it would already be solved, and it's probably going to require many solutions, policies, regulations, technologies and programs to fix, and many of those are going to create more problems that will have to be addressed in turn.

But policy-wise, I think you really want the biggest, dumbest, least likely to fail solutions for the biggest problem of "no famines". Encouraging over-production creates other problems, like depressing wages for farmers and farm workers, both domestic and internationally, but it does a really, really good job of keeping famine at bay, at least domestically. Even in the ways it is prone to gaming or corruption, it still provides a more than adequate food supply. [This is a risk with provisions built on stockpiling; it is much easier for corrupt individuals associated with the program to just not stockpile and pocket the money, or sell stockpiles, or otherwise not do their job, and it can go on for years without being discovered, until you need those stockpiles and it turns out they never existed.]

So even if over-production creates other problems, or is "economically inefficient", I'd much rather see over-production continue, and additional policies, regulations and programs be added to address other concerns, both the problems over-production creates, and the problems it doesn't address, like the adequate distribution of food.

Cheap food hurts the farmers and it still doesn’t help the tens of thousands of kids who go to bed hungry every night.

Nor does it help the obese people, of whom we have an increasing number. The causes of obesity are complicated, but at least some of it is due to poor-quality food.

We grow a lot of food, but a lot of the same thing: starch (maize, potatoes, wheat) and meat (beef, chicken, pork). Those were great when the problem was to few calories, but that stopped being the case a long time ago. We still eat as if we were starving.

It would be great if it were easier to encourage farmers to grow a variety of non-starchy vegetables -- including having quick-service restaurants that would serve them. That would take a pretty substantial reconfiguration of the American diet, but it would be better for us.

Considering the amount of pesticide we use per pound of food created, I don’t support over production.

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