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Comment by y4mi | Hacker News Reader

That approach sadly doesn't scale, however.

Especially going forward. Wages in non tech industries have already stagnated for years and inflation continues to rise.

Give it another ten to twenty years and there won't be enough money in the working class to sponsor such initiatives.

Heck, it can't scale even short term. The more farmers take part in that initiative, the less money there will be to actually do something with it.

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Give it another ten to twenty years and there won't be enough money in the working class to sponsor such initiatives.

Luckily, (in the US, at least,) the DoA has been paying landowners for decades not to plant things on their land, so the working class doesn't need to foot the entire bill.

It's a reasonable and scalable approach, assuming government cooperation.

I was specifically talking about farmers taking donations to stop using chemical pesticides and similar. Having a department sponsored by tax money could scale, if the lawmakers deem it necessary to increase their budget.

It's a very different approach from the parents example though

Unless the lower classes insist cost of living numbers can't always be made using the cheapest ingredients, they will be forced to accept every new method to make cheaper food as it keeps the poverty line from going up with inflation and sets the baseline of the entire hierarchy of roles and wages.

Yes, environmental sustainability and poverty elimination conflict in the short-term sometimes.

True, but I'm actually saying that poverty is being defined to allow resource savings to trickle up so you had a healthier and more sustainable life at the poverty line a decade ago than today.

Actually, it's worse than that; the fact that price indexes include hedonic adjustments mean that the actual quantity of basic necessities that one can afford at the poverty line goes down with time, but this is “offset” because luxuries that that the poor can't support are qualitatively superior. That is the case even accepting that that basics necessities are made with the cheapest ingredients available, as new cost cutting techniques become available.

It took me a little bit of searching but in 2016 25% of USA farm income was subsidies. https://modernfarmer.com/2019/01/congress-finally-passed-a-n... I imagine with trade war subsidies this percentage has gone up in recent years.

It's up to nearly 40%.

https://www.axios.com/farmers-income-insurance-federal-aid-b...

It would scale if the technology to create these financial instruments easily and to monitor the land existed. There are startups working on it.

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