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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Farmers are pretty much slaves to large corporations now, they still have some clout but it is diminishing day by day. Large supermarket chains buy out the independent farmers after first unfairly dumping produce to depress the price to where the farmers go out of business. Then they put their own people in there, typically for a regular wage and without any power to set prices or to ensure that a farm is operated sustainably and responsibly.

A nationwide independent farmers strike on the basis of right-to-repair laws probably wouldn't get off the ground but if it did then effect might be less than what is needed to effect change and could very well play right into the hands of their opposition.

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> Large supermarket chains buy out the independent farmers after first unfairly dumping produce to depress the price to where the farmers go out of business.

I don't think that actually works. Corn farmers could short corn futures or buy put options to lock in their price, and if Walmart tried to drop the nationwide price of corn by 30% to drive some farms out of business, that would cost many many billions competing with finance companies.

Plus the government puts limits on the number of futures positions you can have outstanding, to prevent market manipulation. And it's illegal to collude with others to get around it.

Yeah, that ship has pretty much sailed.

People no longer spin their own thread, weave their own cloth, and make their own clothes.

Most of the metal objects we own are cranked out by the millions in a factory, not hand-forged by the village blacksmith.

And so on.

To the extent those activities still exist, they are hobbies, or maybe skills exhibited as part of a tourist attraction.

For some reason, though, the "family farmer" still has mystique, while the "family weaver" and the "family blacksmith" don't. There are a number of reasons for that, but on a basic level, the situations are exactly the same, and are occurring for exactly the same reasons -- large-scale mechanized production is simply more efficient on every level.

When clothes were spun, woven, and tailored by hand, most people could only afford one or two garments.

When all metal objects were hand-forged by a smith, they were scarce and super-expensive. Sometimes people would burn down old buildings just to salvage the nails.

Same thing with food. Other than for psychological or medical reasons (anorexia and such), it is very, very rare for people to starve to death in modern Western societies. That wasn't the case in the era of the "simple family farmer".

citizen/soldier/farmer the Romanitas ideal. Also kind of rolls up into the whole Cincinnatus thing.

"the "family farmer" still has mystique" It has a mystique because its a useful political fairytale that still proves effective. It is probably spun and refined in the lobbying arms of the large corporate farms in much the same way the "personal carbon footprint" is in the lobbying / advertising arms of oil companies. Large farming companies have massive political / lobbying influence and use it to their financial benefit, family farms get almost none of that. Similar to how politicians use soldiers as shiny tokens but for the most part do almost nothing for them but the large defense firms sure do get a lot of dollars.

Agriculture specifically has been an important part of American mythology from day 1. For a lot of people, farming is either a personal/family identity, or part of a broader sense of identity in the USA.

It is also somewhat different from other "traditional" professions/trades in that it was not obsoleted by factories and mass production.

"Family weaving" disappeared because it became economically unviable. "Family farming" did not disappear because it is still economically viable, and it holds an extra-special place in the American cultural identity.

Mechanized agriculture is not at all like other forms of mass production. It comes with an environmental debt that must be repaid, or the land becomes barren. To call it more efficient is to ignore this debt, which we can get away with until all the fertile land is gone.

People romanticize small farms because they're stuck in crowded cities working industrial rat race jobs that are meaningless in the large scheme of things. Is it any wonder that the idea of space, beautiful natural surroundings and a hand in creating something really meaningful (and what is more meaningful than food?) would lead there?

But do the farmers want the kinds of changes that would allow them to not be slaves to supermarkets and John Deere? Farmers have a strong leaning in politics towards a side that doesn't like treating people as babies who can't make their own decisions. They could strike on the basis of fighting back against supermarkets throwing their weight around. I agree that striking because of right to repair makes no sense; the fight back against locked down equipment would be to not buy from manufacturers that lock their stuff down.

I don't agree with the idea that we don't need regulation, but it's important to consider that telling people they need the government to protect them will lead to those people pushing back even harder against change.

I mean, this is like a fanfic comment. Can you cite ONE example of this happening? Maybe in a hyper niche crop, but this is easily a very, very, VERY rare occurrence. Don't know of really any farmers (outside of super small scale organic ones) that deal with supermarkets directly

I guess I was a little unclear. My point was that if these things are happening, then there are ways to counter them that don't involve government intervention.

And the parent comment was talking about how a strike due to right-to-repair would backfire which, to me, was implying that strikes couldn't work at all. I don't believe that's true which is why I pointed out that a strike could help for other issues. I don't know what else a farmer might strike over in terms of the issues they currently face, so I just reused what the parent comment was stating as fact. But if there are other similar issues affecting them now, you could swap one of those in.

People tend to politic in their best interests regardless of expressed ideology. I don't think very many farmers are in favor of ending farm subsidies, Iowa corn growers are very much for ethanol pledges, etc.

I'd take it a step further and argue that ideology follows policy, in that people adjust their ideologies to support the policies that benefit them, or to be compatible with the candidates whose policies would benefit them.

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