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Comment by tryptophan | Hacker News Reader

>What farmers need are a way to restore profits in a sustainable fashion. Simply growing more corn/soybeans/rice/wheat isn't going to cut it anymore.

The way this is done in other industries, except for farming, is that half of the producers go bankrupt, production is reduced, and the survivors are able to be self-sustaining and profitable. We really do not need this much soy/corn. The market is screaming "stop making it" and perhaps it is time we listen.

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The market and nature. Groundwater depletion: https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/scie...

And this can't be entirely restored.. since when water is removed, the cavities in the dirt/rock that held the water collapse, and they can't be refilled (for example).

Making the midwest more sustainable would be a good thing.

Punjab is another example of severe groundwater depletion. Experts here say that growing Basmati rice through groundwater is an unwise endeavour, as we are exporting a future valuable for pennies. Now government is recommending Corn to be planted, I guess I will forward them this link.

That's the thing, the developed countries are so arrogant about how much better they do things than the third world, but if you look a bit closer it's the same shit different supposedly developed country.

Also topsoil depletion.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/201...

Yep, NZ used to protect its farmers with tariffs and subsidise them. When the tariffs and subsidies were removed, a lot of farmers went bust, it was a painful period. But now our agricultural sector is competitive on the world stage against subsidised and protected competitors.

There's still a ways to go though, we've seen a massive movement towards dairy conversions which is predicated on free water, cheap electricity and the government not pricing externalities like lowland river pollution.

Norway also protects farmers with tariffs and subsidies but it doesn't have the same bad effects here because it is targeted at maintaining agriculture and human presence in otherwise unpopular locations (high in the mountains, in the north, along difficult coastlines). Where there is a farm there is a need for a mechanic, a doctor, a dentist, all of these people need a petrol station, someone to maintain and build houses, and so on, so it keeps a community alive and makes the country more resilient against external changes. It also counters, to some extent, the drift to the big cities that all countries seem to experience. And one welcome result is that a very large proportion of the food I eat here is produced in Norway.

There is certainly room for improvement but while I would like it to be cheaper I don't want the country flooded with the kind of race to the bottom crap that depresses wages in other countries.

It probably works here because we have few very large farms and strict, and strictly enforced, environmental legislation.

> And one welcome result is that a very large proportion of the food I eat here is produced in Norway.

This is only the last step. Most of the animal feed is bought outside of Norway and from the wheat we do produce only 15% is of high enough quality to be used for humans [1], the rest is animal feed. The wheat that is used for humans have to be treated since it's too moist.

Norway is _far_ from self sufficient and will never be. The farmers (5% of the population) have received subsidies that are equivalent to the deposits to the sovereign wealth fund since the fund was started, that is to say if we didn't subsidise them we could have had a fund that was twice the size.

The general quality of the food in the stores is also very bad compared to other countries with the exception of pork and sheep meat.

There is nothing to gain as a nation from subsidising our farms the way we do except for the 5% that actually receive all this money. It would be much better for the society to let countries that have areas that can produce food properly do that and just buy it from them instead.

All in all I wish we went the NZ route, let the farms go bankrupt if they can't produce something that people want at the price they will pay it and restore the land to the nature.

[1] https://brodogkorn.no/fakta/matkorn/

Yeah something has got to give. Irrespecitve of Consumer Purchasing Power; Norway has the most expensive food prices in Europe[0].

[0] Norwegian Bureau of Statistics, 06.08.2019, https://www.ssb.no/en/priser-og-prisindekser/artikler-og-pub...

> The general quality of the food in the stores is also very bad compared to other countries with the exception of pork and sheep meat.

The variety/selection is poor, prices are high, but the quality is better than the average in much of Europe. Including Germany and very much all of Eastern Europe. Gastritis is mostly unheard of in Norway.

Lidl went bust here trying to sell their crap they can do away with elsewhere, even at bottom prices.

> It would be much better for the society to let countries that have areas that can produce food properly do that and just buy it from them instead.

And then you have your whole nation dependent on Foreign Policy. I think we need tech to improve local food production to a level that is at least self sustainable ( so their citizen don't starve ) and have extras either produced local or imported.

Indeed, Norway protects farmers in order to ensure agriculture is kept alive, as well as keeping remote areas habitable. I think that's a good precaution. However, Norwegian farms are very inefficient compared to for example Dutch farms. And given that energy is very cheap in Norway, they could have built a lot more greenhouses.

As a foreigner living in Norway, I can say the food in the supermarkets is quite bad compared to what you get elsewhere. And while the onions, cabbage and root vegetables that are in the shelves are produced in Norway, most of the other products actually come from elsewhere, mainly from the Netherlands and from Spain. Just check the country of origin labels next time you do shopping. I know I am often wrong in my assumptions of where food is coming from.

For much of the produce (e.g. fruits and berries) you have both imported and Norwegian versions. Some of them are only seasonal here however, and you certainly ain't getting Norwegian bananas any time of the year.

> I don't want the country flooded with the kind of race to the bottom crap that depresses wages in other countries.

This isn't how economics works. higher demand for foreign food raises wages in foreign countries. When the US and European protected agriculture sector floods international markets with cheap, subsidized goods that is what destroys the livelihoods in developing countries A small historical lesson:

https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/september-2002/how...

"Agricultural subsidies in developed countries reduce world prices, and thus the incomes of African farmers. World Bank studies suggest that US subsidies alone reduce West Africa's annual revenue from cotton exports by $250 mn a year. The EU also heavily subsidizes its farmers. The EU, which by the dictates of comparative advantage would be a net importer of many agricultural products, is the second largest exporter (after the US) of agricultural produce."

But does more of the food in NZ ends up being imported ? Food importations have a large impact on the environment because tankers emits a shot-ton of CO2, which is not the case for locally produced food.

> But does more of the food in NZ ends up being imported ?

Depends on the product. Our manufacturing base has been gutted by laissez-faire capitalism (Mondelez and the Cadbury factory being a recent example https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/103965900/popular-dunedin-a...), so most heavily processed foods are imported from Australia.

And 1 of the 2 supermarket chains (Progressive Enterprises) in our cosy duopoly will import other foods from Australia as suits them - but that's because they're an Australian firm and offload excess stock to the NZ market.

In terms of vegetables, fruit, meat, dairy products etc., they're only imported when there's a margin in doing so - for example, we used to have a lot of cheap pork from overseas countries that didn't have to adhere to the same animal welfare practises as local pork producers.

>But now our agricultural sector is competitive on the world stage against subsidised and protected competitors.

You referring to Fonterra?

Not just Fonterra. British farmers routinely demand higher tariffs on our lamb, for example.

Intersting. I don't see the need on tariffs though , the British and NZ lamb taste quite different. That is why I said most of the production aren't really good in Sales and Marketing.

The problem is that these natural market corrections, when they occur with farming, have historically resulted in famine.

Natural, self-correcting famine maybe, but all the same allowing it to occur is understandably undesirable.

One way of alleviating the boom/bust effect is some form of supply management, such as what exists for diary products in Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_management_(Canada)

It's effectively a subsidy, but the subsidy is provided by the actual consumers of the goods (via government price fixing) rather than out of the general revenue pot. Individual farmers get grouchy that they're no allowed to have more cattle than their quota, but the reality is that those limitations protect a commons— if there were no restrictions and every farmer took on a few more cattle, there'd be oversupply, the price would crash, and they'd all be headed to Ottawa for a bailout. Yay free markets.

Note that this whole system is an interesting bit of political football in Canada, because the party that you'd expect to oppose it ideologically (the Conservatives) in fact do not, because their support base includes the rural farmers who benefit from it. The farmers are also well organized and well funded in terms of their lobbying operation. There was a recent mini-scandal about their presence at the Conservative party's national convention, see: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/full-text-the-dairy-lob...

This is true in the US too. Small government Republicans love farm subsidies because farm owners vote Republican.

The position of Iowa in the Presidential nominating system constrains the Democrats fairly severely too.

It’s because of the realities of the electoral college. The less populated states full of farmers have an out of proportion share of electoral votes.

khuey may be referring to the presidential primary calendar, where the conservatives in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina have outsized influence by going first:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/us/elections/2020-p...

> It's effectively a subsidy, but the subsidy is provided by the actual consumers of the goods (via government price fixing) rather than out of the general revenue pot.

This is effectively a regressive tax. A tax that disproportionately impacts those with young children. Largely a tax on parents.

I don't think their lobby is that powerful. There aren't that many dairy farmers, but millions that would love cheaper dairy. I wish croissants made with butter weren't so hard to find.

I suspect that the lack of butter in croissants is simply because the cost of margarine is very slightly lower than butter and thus the profit on those with margarine is higher. A half percent reduction in material cost might be a two percent increase in profits.

And as long as a substantial fraction of the customers keep buying the inferior product there will be no incentive for the introduction or wider marketing of the better one.

So stop buying crap food and tell all your family and friends to do the same.

A croissant without butter is not really a croissant in my opinion and as far as I can tell they all have butter here (Norway), here's an example: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https... (they come from the Netherlands).

It’s also a side-effect of the dairy industry controlling the butter market: so they put out one poor quality product and buyers have little choice:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-wine/food-tren...

> This is effectively a regressive tax. A tax that disproportionately impacts those with young children. Largely a tax on parents

It’s a good thing the government of Canada do not suggest you give dairy products to your children anymore then :-)

There aren't that many of them, but they have an outsized influence on politics because of the role they play in the economics of rural life. Farmers are the major employers for young rural people, they pay for local services to a greater degree, and their families tend to have been active in the local economy for a long time. When the farmers in an area are doing well, typically so is the rest of the economy and vice versa.

Calling it a tax on parents is a serious reach. And while the US has dumping prices that are lower than Canada's (e.g. when they are faced with dumping product down the drain so instead pour it into an area for little), in many areas and times the prices are not far off the US.

The lack of butter croissants has nothing to do with it, as an aside. We simply have a mediocre croissant palate in Canada, so the general market variety are horrendous.

> The lack of butter croissants has nothing to do with it, as an aside

It has everything to do with a centralized marketer that can put out any grade product it wants, and consumers can either buy it at the price they say or switch to margarine/vegoil.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-wine/food-tren...

Expensive inputs further encourages substitutions, especially when the expensive input wasn’t great.

Individual people may not respond well to incentives, but industrial buyers sure do.

The grade argument is debatable. Yes, if you want a bonafide, completely authentic as in France croissant it is less easily obtained (sidenote -- there are makers who do make the higher fat, lower water butter, but there is very little demand), but if a maker is choosing between a imperceptibly different Canadian standard butter and margarine (the former indistinguishable, the latter a vile abomination), and you think that minuscule difference is the reason, you are misled.

Further it isn't expensive. Large quantity butters purchases, including special higher fat versions that aren't generally on grocery stores, are an insubstantial percentage of the cost of making a croissant.

https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/canadian-croissant-...

But again, the reason croissants are generally horrendous in Canada is because people just don't care. If people don't care you end up with the weird bready-things that are marketed as croissants. This is a bit of a personal peeve having just gotten back from Belgium/France a couple of months ago, and being spoiled by every hotel having extremely good croissants.

The debate over supply management is revisited at every election, and overwhelmingly Canadians buy into the notion that supply management has benefits in certain industries.

As an aside -- it's cheaper to buy milk and butter in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and virtually every other urban center in Canada than in San Francisco, NYC, LA, or any other large US center. US dairy dumps their excess on secondary markets like Detroit, and it's always the "Windsor versus Detroit" sort of comparison that we hear parroted.

The decline of famine in the developed world long predates the massive farm subsidies that exist in the United States. The last time there was a major famine in England, for example, was in the 1650s. There has never been a major famine in the USA, yet the subsidies we now think of as the Farm Bill only really started in the 1920s.

> The last time there was a major famine in England, for example, was in the 1650's.

That's an interesting way to cherry-pick a statistic and ignore a genocide (I'll give you a hint: 1840's).

If Ireland had closed her ports, I wonder how much England would have felt the tighter food supply.

England would probably have been fine, considering they were mostly getting inefficient calories like beef butter, milk, and beef from Ireland. Although your citation of the outflows of food is actually a great way to prove my point. There was plenty of food to feed everyone even in the darkest of days, with farming techniques far less efficient than the ones we have now. But shitty economic policy (too small plots of land for tenant farmers, the whole landlord tenant system, colonialism, etc.) and failure to subsidize food consumption for the poor led to really terrible outcomes. Yet there was plenty of food production even when there were no subsidies.

The argument goes that starvation is usually a logistics/corruption problem as much as anything. Technically you can consider the math of supply without it, but practically it matters more than most other things.

Is the current situation unusual, or is it SNAFU?

The Great Irish Famine was systemic problem, not a logistics nor corruption problem.

what is a systemic problem that is not a logistic or corruption problem

That’s the point.

Although the English had all sorts of high minded idealism about the potential for creating dependency amounts the Irish, they supervised the genocide in Ireland.

If a market correction is caused by overproduction there won't be a famine. The level of production will decrease to align with consumer demand (as opposed to government subsidy demand which is far higher).

That's not how life works.

You ever seen the graph of foxes and bunnies? Where all the foxes starve when they kill all the bunnies?

That's what happens IRL, too many food producers go bust, the stored glut gets used, and suddenly you're not producing enough and people die.

A market-priced system for food in the United States would still allow for a massive amount of slack in the case of a supply shock. The typical American probably eats 20-30% more calories than are properly healthy for them, and many of their calories come from extremely feed and land-intensive sources like beef.

Of course, you wouldn't switch to this all at once. You'd announce that you are gradually cutting farm subsidies over the next ten years. The least profitable (efficient) operations would close. This would also develop slack in the form of unused land, which could be held in reserve in case of a supply shock like the one you're hypothesizing.

“Don’t worry if food gets too expensive, you could stand to lose some weight anyway.”

I don’t think I can give a response to this that’s acceptable on HN, but wow.

Is there something wrong with what I said? Is it impolitic to observe that most Americans exist in a serious caloric surplus? I am not excluding myself here or making any moral judgment on those who do. It's just a fact, and it is relevant to the concern that Americans might starve if the food supply contracted.

This might work if income were more equally distributed. If food becomes more scarce and the typical American has to eat 20-30% fewer calories, the price of food will spike significantly. People at the bottom will be priced out and will starve without government intervention.

Managing the food supply to make sure there's always a healthy surplus makes a lot of sense to me. The problem with holding land in reserve, as you're suggesting, is that it takes at least an entire growing season to start producing from that land. That might be too long in the case of a famine.

> That's what happens IRL, too many food producers go bust, the stored glut gets used, and suddenly you're not producing enough and people die.

Maybe that happened in pre-industrial societies, but that isn't what happens today. Today, when things go wrong, prices of some products go up a bit (e.g., meat), and people buy less of it, replacing those calories with cheaper ones (e.g., rice, corn).

The beauty of a well functioning market is that it's not centralized, things don't go wrong all at once, they happen on a gradual scale and folks can adjust.

Or just the right amount of food producers go bust, and things are stable. And then there's an episode of wheat rust/grasshoppers/drought/flooding, and then you're not producing enough food and people die.

(Or, to riff off of what vcf1 said, then you have to spend less of it feeding cattle, and more of it feeding people. That's survivable, at least.)

The US produces 13 billion bushels of corn per year - that equates to 2,200 pounds of corn for every man, woman and child in the country. Those numbers sound completely implausible, but they accurately reflect the sheer absurdity of US agricultural policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_...

And that's just corn! We produce so much of so many other things that we would be totally fine if we cut production by a lot.

That also happens when you kill all the farmland, and deplete all the groundwater.

Except a large portion of the population can till up some backyard space and plant a garden to supplement their cellar full of canned food.

Additionally, the farmland and farm equipment that was owned by bankrupt producers will still be able to produce food after new ownership.

Gardening is a skill that many (probably most by now) people don't have.

It's also the case that a medium sized garden doesn't produce much calories.

> It's also the case that a medium sized garden doesn't produce much calories.

The gardener is doing it wrong if this is their result.

We may have a difference of opinion about what "medium" means, or about what "much calories" means.

When I say "medium", I mean something that is still a modest hobby, and when I say "much calories", I mean at least a few months of food for several people.

Historically.

Food is a global commodity and is largely fungible. If every farmer in the US went bankrupt overnight we could easily sustain ourselves by importing food from everywhere else.

Famine is really only a possibility in crushingly impoverished (much of Africa) or criminally mismanaged (Venezuela) economies. The potato blight was a secondary cause of the Irish potato famine, the primary causes were poverty and (English) government incompetence. (or malice, if you prefer) The United States has nothing to worry about.

Just because a farmer goes bankrupt doesn't mean the farmland and farm equipment disappears. It will still produce.

Some countries avoid a "famine" of petroleum with a strategic reserve. Some countries already have a strategic rice reserve.

Oh please. Clearly there's a middle ground between outrageous subsidies and obscene overproduction and ... "famine".

We don't need to go full libertarian on these farms. We just need to stop growing so much junk.

Another part of the story that's extremely hard to find in the corporate news. We've been wiping out Latin American farmers by dumping subsidized agricultural products for the past half-decade and yet we call everyone else a dumper. And when others fight back, such as India winning the WTO case against US being anti-competitive on solar cells [1], Trump threatens to leave the WTO [2].

[1] https://www.livemint.com/news/india/india-wins-solar-case-ag... [2] https://www.news18.com/news/world/will-leave-if-we-have-to-i...

That’s quite by design, some believe. Same with how development loans work - they basically mean that the country has to export a large proportion of the their output (to get the foreign currency required to pay back the loan - foreign denominated debt really is a poisoned chalice for any country). So they encourage development of resource extraction and farming of crops valuable for export (fruit, etc. but generally not good staples because of the huge amount of subsidised US product on the market). So they eventually dependant on importing staples, which makes the US very influential (sanctions, for example are much more effective if a country can’t feed itself).

> wiping out Latin American farmers by dumping subsidized agricultural products for the past half-decade

At least since NAFTA: 25 years now.

This doesn't work in farming because it isn't a free market. Most farms are owned by Cargill or Monsanto. And they are all propped up by the federal government.

"Cargill is America’s largest privately-owned company, surpassing the second place Koch Brothers by billions of dollars in annual revenues. Cargill is the corporate behemoth at the nexus of the global industrial agriculture system, a system that it has designed to convert large swaths of the planet into chemically dependent industrial scale monocultures to produce cheap meat, palm oil, and chocolate."

http://www.mightyearth.org/cargillreport

Cargill has also slowly but steadily increased its presence around my parts of the world (Romania), taking advantage of one of the most nutrient soils on this planet, chernozem [1].

If you look at this map [2] is the stuff colored in green. Most of it can be found in the US Great Plains, and the second such zone comprises South-Eastern Romania + most of Ukraine + the plains North of the Caucasus (which are part of Russia). Making money out of Romania is easy, we are already a NATO and UE member, but the great stake for companies like Cargill is to be able to invest and take money out of Ukraine's plains, I think there are hundreds of billions to be made out there, not to speak of the strategic advantage of having Tsarist Russia's former bread-basket under your economic control.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernozem

[2] http://i.imgur.com/TmKdaFz.jpg

Oh jesus, TIL. Thanks for sharing.

Most farms are owned by Cargill or Monsanto

Can you supply some citations for that statement?

[edit] Wikipedia would indicate Non-family corporate farms account for 1.36 percent of US farmland area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_farming#North_Americ... [/edit]

Well, technically Cargil's are family farms since it is a privately held corporation (150k employees on $115B revenue) owned by a family which owns and operates the farms. Most (unbiased) estimates are closer to 70% family farms although those have also grown extraordinarily large in the last few decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill

https://newfoodeconomy.org/who-really-owns-american-farmland...

Uhm... I've worked at Cargill. You are quoting the whole value of a corporation not the total dealing with farmers. In fact, Cargill's grain division doesn't own any farms. Pork does, but that's not the type of farm we are talking about. Nothing owned by Cargill is listed as a family farm.

The article actually says United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that at least 30 percent of American farmland is owned by non-operators who lease it out to farmers. Yeah, that is a common arrangement that's been with us for decades.

Also, in some states, such as North Dakota, corporate farms are illegal http://inthesetimes.com/rural-america/entry/19224/north-dako...

All this does is cause relabeling of "corporate" farms to "family" farms since a privately held corporation held more than 50% by a single extended family is a "family" farm. They still end up being so large for economies of scale that no single mulit-generation family (of 20) could possibly farm them. The smaller farms are stuck in debt and poverty or sell out to the other "families". In my experience it's true for almonds, rice, corn, wheat, cotton, hogs, cattle. When you can't see the edge of the farm from the top of a pickup and talk about size by number of wells... it is a "family" farm in name only.

You really are going to have demographics to back that claim up. Technology has been amazing for the family farmer as it has allowed the purchase of machines that allow vast areas to be farmed by far less people. Farmers, unlike their typical portrayal, are pretty savvy about new technologies[1] and can manage both the land and financial tools such as hedging. Its still a lot of families that have been doing this for years and years.

1) although I content the six foot drone the folks here were playing with has a bit of a fun factor too in addition to mapping the fields for their crop forecasts and planning.

Beef grazing would need to be accounted for. Land under agistment, set aside and out of production too, but for rate purposes assessed as agriculture? I think you need to focus on cultivated/cropping.

> Most farms are owned by Cargill or Monsanto.

No, they aren't. Seed companies like Monsanto don't generally own commercial farms. Most farms buy seed from a small set of firms like Monsanto (well, Bayer), and sell to a small set of firms (I think Cargill and ADM are in this group.)

Most farms are owned by Cargill or Monsanto.

I know I shouldn’t care, but it’s comments like this that irritate me. Inaccurate to the point of being silly.

Cargill (especially) and Monsanto are pretty large, but combined they account for around a quarter of the total revenue.

Those companies breed seeds, they don't farm them.

... or Tyson.

Technically they could sell all of that to China for animal feed, the meat consumption of China per capita is nearing Europe and has a huge demand of feed. Too bad trade war screwed all of that and now it looks like a lot of food will be wasted.

Donate it to starving African children.

Not necessarily starving children... but I have seen in the 1990's the USA distributing corn oil, and other surplus of the farming industry through the UN/USAID in Africa. A way of buying influence...

(P.S. I work for one UN food organization especially funded for that purpose :D)

Except grain farming. Our policy makers will happily drive any other type of farmer out of business.

US policy is driving the small producers out of business. We will see prices go up in a few years as farming gets bigger and manufactured product controlled by a few big companies replaces the real thing.

Yes, but when production is reduced we will have a huge spike of food price.

We may need more consolidation in these food production. As in by nature of business cycles.

Do that in farming, and you'll be dealing with bread riots.

Avoiding bread riots is why every single developed nation on Earth heavily subsidizes its farmers, even when they produce at a loss. The ones that didn't got regime changed by hungry, angry people.

Optimized systems tend to become non-resilient - fragile to external shocks. The last thing I want is a fragile system of food production and distribution.

It's better to pay extra into an inefficient system than deal with famines.

I don’t understand the downvotes.

No one wants just-in-time, no-redundancies production of critical-to-life resources. You would be willing to subsidize a healthcare market to ensure hospitals didn’t have the exact supply of antibiotics on hand required “on average.” You wouldn’t want water purification plants to produce a market-optimum amount of water with no room for variation.

Why would you want that for your food supply?

Don’t get me wrong, there are other issues on hand - lack of diversification, oligopoly, etc. but the fundamental argument of “we subsidize critical resources because people die if there’s a shortage” isn’t a terrible idea.

> “we subsidize critical resources because people die if there’s a shortage”

That's not the argument, though. Government subsidies are intended as welfare programs for farmers. Far more food is currently produced than would ever be needed in the case of a shortage. We could produce a lot less and still be fine.

After the 2019 corn crop is harvested, the USDA is projecting 51.5 days of excess stocks in the United States

You can store food for 20 years. Actually having a 3+ year supply of food would cost less and provide more security than current subsidies.

Also, 51.5 days of excess stocks is not 51.5 days of food on hand.

Storage is already at a premium since the US-China trade war. Not enough storage facilities. Maybe the US should cut from the productiob subsidies and subsidize short term storage?

Understandable, and in the same vein of why it is so important for the United States to retain industrial manufacturing capacity (i.e. auto and heavy machinery makers) because you never know when you’ll need to rapidly ramp up production.

Would there be a benefit if we could support and subsidize commercial farms up to a certain size, and no larger, removing the compulsion for ultra-large, mass-industrialization of our agriculture industries?

> Would there be a benefit if we could support and subsidize commercial farms up to a certain size, and no larger, removing the compulsion for ultra-large, mass-industrialization of our agriculture industries?

I like it a lot. We might add a bit of an incentive for non-monoculture agriculture - different strains of wheat, for example. (There's some of that already, and we don't want all the smaller farms to do that, but some doing it might be a good idea.)

NZ stopped protecting its farmers and we're a large exporter of food and the 3rd most obese nation - all those damn famines huh?

NZ is nowhere near the size of the US though. If you face a famine in NZ, you import from Australia, China, India etc. If you have a famine in US... millions of people will be without food, it would be an insanely crazy situation (consider how many firearms are held by ordinary Americans).

The modern American life is very strongly predicated on cheap, abundant supply of _some_ kinds of nutrition (unhealthy for most, but still, something that prevents starvation even if it increases the chances of heart disease etc.)

> If you face a famine in NZ, you import from Australia, China, India

If is the key point here. We've never been anywhere close to a famine despite our farmers operating in an unprotected market.

NZ has a very small population and absolutely no systemic importance. It’s not remotely comparable to the US.

Some great exceptionalism there. So, you subsidise corn farmers because of global geopolitics? Occam's Razor suggests myriad other explanations.

Nothing you're saying makes any sense. As others have tried to say, the population + landmass of NZ make it statistically insignificant compared to US.

Which is completely irrelevant to my discussion of how removing protectionist policies increased the efficiency of our agricultural sector.

It’s relevant if your hypothesis is that it will have the same effect in the US, which I’m tired of saying at this point that it WONT.

So stopping subsidies for corn will impact other crops too? Isn’t nutrition diverse nowadays?

Edit: Answered. Corn is used as a cattle feed and hence beef prices will be impacted. It will have a chain reaction pulling down just corn subsidies.

Tangent: India used to have famines and import grains until Punjab ushered a green revolution with record wheat and rice harvests in 1960s. My grandma told me how before wheat barley used to be the nutritional source, and I for nostalgia sake asked for a barley dish. Nearly threw up.

Huh. I like barley quite a lot. Doesn't seem like it really has enough flavour to be offensive enough to induce vomiting though.

Perhaps it is not the taste but the shape/size and consistency of the boiled grain. For those who don't know, it looks like Kellogg's Smacks, but more chewy, and it can feel a bit strange to chew or to swallow.

I like it as well, nevertheless.

Sorry, should be Bajra. Pearl Millet.

Famines are closely correlated with weather and solar output disruption. I pretty much doubt subsidies can counter something like the Dalton minimum.

1. NZ has 3 times more arable land/person than, say, the United States. It could probably use the same farming methods as China did in the famine of Great Leap Forward, and still have enough food to go around.

2. Driving without a seatbelt, or car insurance works, until it doesn't.

3. You'd probably be producing even more food/person, and be more resilient to market failure/drought/crop failures/etc were it subsidized.

3. Nope. We were producing less food when our farmers were subsidized.

1. According to my googling, the USA has 0.38 hectares of arable land per person, NZ has 0.14 per person.

You're aware only 2% of our land is arable compared to the USA's 16% right? Lots of mountains and hill country here.

Arable's a blunt classification though. In NZ we have no mountain lions preying on our sheep, which makes better use of that land. Not to mention favourable growing conditions.

It would be nice to have more mountain lions in Kansas to thin down the large deer herds.

There won't be bread riots in the US. Too much corn and wheat. We'll just eat cheap for a while.

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