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Comment by jessant | Hacker News Reader

Nothing stopping people from doing that.

There is an enormous body of law in the US that incentivizes a top-down corporate business structure and disincentives a co-op business structure.

I think human nature incentivizes top-down corporate business structures and disincentivizes co-op businesss structures.

Which is why 75% of France's farmers belong to an agricultural cooperative?

Are those profitable though? Farming is heavily subsidized by the EU.

And American agriculture is likewise heavily subsidized by the federal government.

US agriculture is also heavily subsidized

Only commodity crops and those listed on Wall Street/stock exchange.

Not the food and vegetables and fruits we consume. Hogs and corn and sugar beets and canola and soy are subsidized.

Farming is heavily subsidised throughout the industrialised world.

Farming in New Zealand is not subsidized, and I believe the same is true of Australia. It's possible to compete on the open market and succeed.

NZ used to have subsidies but they got rid of it. Good for them. Fonterra is their big co-op. But with Chinese investment/ownership, most of it is going towards milk powder for export. They posted a loss for the first time last year. Canada has subsidies but different from American. They use a system called Supply Management. They make smaller family farms work better and will survive unlike American dairy. We have more CAFOs and factory farms that are not ecologically and environmentally sustainable in the long run. It’s a mess.

I can't speak for France specifically but if it's anything like the UK and Ireland then farming families are dis-incentivized to sell land because its costs nothing to hold, and always increases in value. As a farmer you might not even own the land you work on but rent it for the season, and large corporations don't work well with that kind of uncertainty.

Perhaps, but the body of law point means we’ll never find out if you’re right or not.

I would be very careful in trying to attribute something as complex as corporate structures to human nature. We have seen massive changes in all parts of society throughout the last 10k years. I don't think the human genome has changed so rapidly as to cycle through slavery, feudalism, mercantilism, capitalism, etc.

It's always such a convenient and supremely lazy explanation. It's human nature for blacks to be servile. It's human nature for peasants to be ruled by the lord of the manor. And so on.

> Nothing stopping people from doing that.

So... human nature. Human nature is stopping people from doing that.

This is quite a claim, but it's too vague for me to research independently. Where would I even start in exploring the "enormous body of law" that "incentivizes a top-down corporate business structure?" I am not asking rhetorically -- this is news to me and I'd like to know the details.

Of course, co-ops aren't common in the US, but they do exist (like REI) so I'm just curious about the details of this criticism of the legal landscape in the US but without further information am unable to research the claim.

Arguably that's exactly the problem. There's so much law applying to farming that you'd need a sizable legal department to know it all. That favors centralization.

That applies to every field as corner cases are covered. Restricting it to what is actually relevant to the domain is sufficent to "consultation with relevant country lawyer" as opposed to entire law firms.

There are many corporate things that "stop people from doing that".

Seed monopolies [0]. Costco is undercutting chicken production just to maintain a $4.99 offering to their customers [1]. Mega farms have put over 2700 family farms out of business in Wisconsin [2]. CAFOs create pollution equivalent to 168 million people in the state of Iowa with only a total population of 3.2 million people [3]. All of this manure gets dumped back into the soil for monoculture corn farming which is grown to feed livestock which is also significantly inefficient and drains local resources on clean and fresh water supplies and significantly pollutes downstream via runoff into large rivers [4]. The main polluters are, again, these large scale farms concentrating operations for efficiencies to fulfill the ever expanding lineup of highly processed foods the majority of western culture now eats on a daily basis.

Money stops local farming. These mega farms are not in the business to make a great product, they're in the business to make a great profit - at the expense of their customers, no different than the tobacco manufacturers agenda. Between lobbyism, patents, mergers and grants by states desperate for revenue the concentration of control in farming has become very bleak in a short decade.

[0] https://philhoward.net/2018/12/31/global-seed-industry-chang... [1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/11/business/costco-5-dollar-chic... [2] https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/industrial-dairy-farmin... [3] https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/agriculture/20... [4] https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/center...

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