Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Corn in the US is mostly used for harmful purposes. It's used for producing fodder for intensive cattle farming (which of course produces lots of CO2). It's used for biofuel production, which as the article observes releases more CO2 than that it saves. And it's used for producing corn syrup which is an ingredient that nobody needs in their diet.

The rest, which would be usage for e.g. corn bread or other staples of North American cuisine, is of course fine. Nothing wrong with e.g. organically farmed corn. It's a crop that does well under a wide range of circumstances and popular for that reason all over the world. And as a grain, it's an important part of food production.

So, why does this exist? Very simple, federal subsidies to states that have become very dependent on that. Kill the subsidies and that whole industry slowly dies. That would be a good thing. Maybe repurpose the subsidies to have those farmers do something that actually is more productive and less harmful.

View on HN

Iowa has the first primary every year in the US[1]. Iowa produces more corn than any state[2] while being 32nd in population. Corn is very important to people in Iowa and as long as the first two facts remain the same, corn will continue to be highly subsidized and supported in other ways by the US government.

[1]https://www.uspresidentialelectionnews.com/2024-primary-sche... [2]https://www.cropprophet.com/us-corn-production-by-state/

Precisely my point. Maybe that's not a very future proof plan for Iowa? That sounds like at some point they are going to have to cut loose from the federal handouts.

It is apparently easier to make the subsidies continue forever than to consider growing alternatives.

Yep. When it comes to specialization farmers are not excluded. All crops, if their production can be mechanized, need specialized tools to farm at scale. In Iowa at least this looks like combines that are tooled for corn and soybean to allow for cycling the fields every few years.

(Not an expert, just a resident)

That is the American issue in a nutshell.

Iowa doesn't have a primary at all, but a caucus.

New Hampshire has the first primary. It's a state law.

Outside of a relatively minuscule number of people who view politics/elections as sport no one cares and they’re treated the same on the national stage.

Sure but most people don't understand how truly awful the caucus system is so it's worth repeating from time to time.

Might want to mention why it's awful then. It's much easier to manipulate for one.

I was on a phone. It's easy enough to check wikipedia and follow sources from there.

So, rather than a banana republic, it's a corn state?

Corn Kingdom?

Corn Commonwealth or MaizeTatorship

Well, there is a Corn Palace in South Dakota...

I always thought the GOP hates welfare programs...

Moderate libertarians hate welfare programs but their parties rarely win so their candidates often run under the GOP. The GOP just likes the status quo.

It's not welfare it's a subsidy. And it's okay because it's for people we like, rural farmers who vote GOP, rather than people we don't like, inner city populations who vote Democrat.

As always, a party's political beliefs are more complicated than being pro-[thing] or anti-[thing]. To steelman the GOP, I'd say that they're against welfare for individuals because for the most part they're transfer payments that don't require any "work" to obtain (short of filling out some forms). They think that's bad because it encourages laziness. To my knowledge farm subsidies aren't implemented that way. They're implemented as price supports or loan programs, so you still need to actually produce something to get that government money.

> you still need to actually produce something to get that government money

This farmer faked his paperwork and got $1.6 million in illegal farm subsidies.

https://thecounter.org/man-found-guilty-stealing-1-3-million...

I'm not sure what your point is? Obviously they didn't intend for people to defraud the system. It's like asking "how can democrats be for welfare programs for the poor when fraud causes some of that to be diverted to non-poor criminals?"

Paying someone to do something destructive in order to produce something you don't want isn't very smart, even if it keeps them busy in a way that fools them I to feeling productive. If we all did that it would be worse than doing nothing.

>to do something destructive

is growing corn a destructive activity on net? If it is, then we shouldn't just be cutting subsidies, we should be banning it outright. As it relates to this discussion (ie. "are republicans hypocrites because they're anti individual welfare but pro agricultural welfare"), we can safely assume that republicans don't think that and therefore aren't hypocrites. This is not to say whether growing corn is actually destructive or not, only that the republican view is at least self-consistent.

you could argue those corn farmers are too lazy to figure out a crop that is actually beneficial to society and are comfortable resting in their subsidized bubble.

I mean, you could also come up with plenty of other uncharitable explanations for why democrats/republicans endorse certain policies, but that's not helpful if your objective is to understand the other side.

Also the US is terrible at transitions. When manufacturing went overseas, we left the factory workers high and dry. We can end the corn subsidies while providing income and support for farmers to transition to other crops, but that starts to look more like traditional welfare.

> To my knowledge farm subsidies aren't implemented that way.

You'd be wrong. Farm subsidies exist in several forms, but one is for letting fields that could produce x lying unused. Some "farmers" just sign up for that program every year and havent planted anything since they inherited the farm.

That kinda sounds like the planned economy of the USSR. Just produce anything to spruce up the propaganda statistics regardless if the market wants it.

Nominally, maybe, but in practice, they're all about corporate welfare, including for big ag.

Why doesn’t another state move its primary up? It seems like an easy way to get more influence?

Race to the bottom. The political parties won't let it happen.

We’ll the bottom would be everyone on the earliest possible day and then no one has an advantage. Seems like a good thing.

I'm not sure that there is any limit on the earliest day. In theory they could be any time after the last one.

The correct solution is to adopt approval voting and not have primaries at all.

yep.

I vaguely remember a state trying that, and getting smacked by the federal government in retaliation.

The federal government is not responsible for presidential primary elections. It is the parties that are.

I don't know about the Republicans, but as far as Democrats go it's actually a rule:

  Rule 12 Timing of the Delegate Selection Process 

  No meetings, caucuses, conventions or primaries which constitute the first determining stage in the presidential nomination process (the date of the primary in primary states, and the date of the first tier caucus in caucus states) may be held prior to the first Tuesday in March or after the second Tuesday in June in the calendar year of the national convention. Provided, however, that the Iowa precinct caucuses may be held no earlier than 29 days before the first Tuesday in March; that the New Hampshire primary may be held no earlier than 21 days before the first Tuesday in March; that the Nevada first-tier caucuses may be held no earlier than 10 days before the first Tuesday in March; and that the South Carolina primary may be held no earlier than 3 days before the first Tuesday in March.

https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/2020-Delega...

This is what created "Super Tuesday", which is evidence of a race to the bottom that has gone as far down as it can go. It also shows that 4 states were carved out probably as favors (does anyone know more here?). In order to change this, probably a bunch of people who are being treated favorably now will get upset at losing their privilege, and no one in leadership wants to crack that egg. Seeing as that South Carolina, one of the favored states anointed to hold a primary before before Super Tuesday, played such a decisive role in the nomination of Joe Biden, I think the practice of keeping these states first is going to continue for the foreseeable future.

Jim Clyburn of S. Carolina is widely credited of resuscitating Joe Biden's candidacy after his sad start in IA, NH, and NV. He placed a distant 4th in IA, 5th in NH, and Bernie blew out NV with 40% of the vote. At that point, Clyburn endorsed Biden, and Biden ended up winning SC. Then a bunch of candidates dropped out of the race before Super Tuesday (some who were doing much better than Biden overall) and support coalesced behind Biden.

If anything, the slow roll of IA, NH, SC and NV allows the party to calibrate the primary process. If things start going a way they don't like, they can make quick changes like asking a bunch of candidates to drop out of the race (I'm not saying Bernie would have won had they not done this, I'm just pointing out it was obviously done, and what enabled them to do this was the fact that all primaries are not held on the same day).

>also shows that 4 states were carved out probably as favors (does anyone know more here?).

Probably not favors but codifying the status quo to get their endorsement on the rule. That said, I agree that it gives some states more power, but isn't completely useless. It allows the party to test how good candidates are at getting out the vote And adds some option for course correction.

There is a law in Iowa that sets the date of our party caucuses earlier than the earliest primary. Our primaries are not first, rather it's the party caucuses here that are held as the first selection event in the Presidential race.

I am a rare Iowan in that I recognize that this system is dumb, and bad for the country. It's great for me - I have had the privilege of hearing in person in a small group setting every Democratic president since Jimmy Carter. I've talked with a couple of them. I can tell you from personal experience that Joe Biden's reputation as a "hands on" or "physical" campaigner was spot on - he embraced me as firmly and as intimately as any man every has (I am very rural looking, white male nearly his age, for the record). But for all that, the circus that is the Iowa caucuses is a stupid way to start the candidate selection process. I'd be happy to see the back of it.

I wonder what they would do if another state were to set state law specifying the same, or better still one week before Iowa. Would they both just keep moving their primary/caucuses back until it is set immediate after the inauguration of the last election or would the supreme court tell then both to knock it off and set the dates for everyone.

Both major political parties have passed rules that any state the precedes Iowa and New Hampshire will have their number of delegates (aka votes) cut to 1. That is, if they try, their votes literally won't count (except as a tie breaker).

We just need a big state to try it: if California or Texas tries it that rule will get repealed very quickly.

I don't see why California or Texas trying it would change anything.

Either party cannot afford to voluntarily give up so many electoral votes. If I understand it correctly, the # of electoral votes these states have give them enormous sway within the parties.

That's not how it works. The parties have passed a rule that if California or Texas has one of the first primaries they get changed to 1 electoral vote (well, one delegate, which is the equivalent except there are 10x as many delegates as electors) to decide on the party's nominee. So they would lose what influence they have.

The influence of big states within the party because of electoral votes is pretty small. The state's electoral votes are applied by the citizens of the state. I mean, yeah if you could get 50+% of Texas's voters to credibly promise to vote for the presidential candidate of the party that had an earlier Texas primary they would compete hard for it. But in reality, they're going to vote for the republican nominee. Same logic for California but for the democratic nominee.

The thing is that this system can be abused in either direction. To promote the candidate that the party leadership wants or to hijack the law and force an important delegate state to lose their influence.

Imagine if South Carolina was pushed to this one delegate system in 2020. Bernie Sanders was nearly the nominee and South Carolina began his death spiral. If South Carolina was taken out of play by activists in the state, then either the party would have to forgo its own rules or accept that Bernie would have continued his massive momentum coming out of Nevada.

Likewise if on Super Tuesday Buttigieg and Klobachar would not have dropped out at (supposedly) Obama's instance and backed Biden, then Bernie would have emerged much stronger. One way they could have blunted his momentum is if they saw polling early enough that Bernie was going to take a big state like California, we can't rule out the California machine pushing itself to lose the electoral votes in an effort to stop Bernie and then maybe change back its timeline after the election.

Iowa. Former Iowans here. The nation's politics have screwed Iowa, with it being the first primary state all manner of overt attempts of political favoritism occurs in there. The economy is screwed left, right, and sideways with all the attempts at political favoritism. And the intellectual mind there is equally turned around with large helpings of religious infringement on world views, and a material amount of corporate shenanigans because Iowa is tax favorable for corporate headquarters - most the Insurance and large publishing has corporate headquarters there.

The nation's politics have screwed Iowa

Iowa's own laws have screwed Iowa. State law mandates the caucus occur at least eight days prior to any other state's proceedings (similarly, NH law mandates they be the first primary election). The DNC and RNC might also like it that way, but both states are complicit.

As if these states exist independently; come on, you know political operatives and dollars from every state, and every wealthy anyone anywhere on the planet flow into these states trying to influence American elections.

It would be good for Americans to understand how their layered elections work out into something quite undemocratic. Designed to be so [1] in fact. Things don't need to be this way, and to set the country up for bad incentives this way, but it requires understanding who exactly is fighting and benefiting from the current set up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(book) Yes, it's a book. Highly worth the time it takes to read to make the point in full.

There are a lot of elected positions in the US that actually undermine democracy by themselves being democratically elected, such as sheriff, judge, and indeed election commissioner. These are jobs where the correct thing to do is often at odds with the popular thing to do, and favouring the latter over the former is potentially disastrous.

Subcidies are 90% of the reason our country is turning to shit. It leads to corruption, massive distortions and zombie companies that only exist as parasites on tax payers. From the ballooning student debt, to the ridiculous military industry, to prisons being at record numbers, etc. We need a lean and efficient economy which functions "as is", a true and fair free market. Politics should have close to no impact on it and sadly, wirh forced lockdowns which did nothing good (0.2%) and bailouts being handed out like candy, we are very very far from the dynamism which made the country great and free. We need a minimal operating system for the people to run good games over it, we live in Windows Vista.

You're being downvoted to oblivion but you're speaking my language. Government needs to get out of the way and let people thrive, rather than stepping in to subsidize the ways they're failing and encourage them to continue.

Don't forget high tariffs and the Jones act!

Subsidies are the symptom. The reason is fed govt ability to create unlimited spending. The reason for that is 3rd central bank known as 'Federal Reserve' which manipulates interest rate on govt debt issuance.

Honest question - did farm subsidies precede the FR?

Subsidies in general are enabled by deficit money printing which would presently be unaffordable without interest rate suppression.

Farm subsidies take various forms such as tax preferences, import tariffs, and a USDA organization specifically tasked with manipulating crop prices. https://www.usda.gov/ccc

> Nothing wrong with e.g. organically farmed corn.

There is nothing wrong with “factory”, “industrially”, or “sustainably” farmed corn either. Farming at scale is the only thing that allows all 8 billion people to eat.

The romantic view people have of peasant farms is ruining all discourse about agriculture. I blame the books people read to toddlers.

Peasant farms were labor intensive, disease ridden, high risk, low reward businesses that shortened lives and ruined families. But somehow for a lot of people this episode in the history of farming is seen as the optimal blueprint for sustainable farming. They ignore the fact that all "successful" examples of small scale circular farming are making their revenue from donations, venues and from "selling" the model. Not from produce.

Well a lot of conventional farms that are hyperoptimized barely make enough money to get by. It is quite weird how we can't maintain something as basic as food security with a market based economy.

Farming is an efficient market due to the sheer number of competing agents, that drives the price to be close to the cost.

Markets are cyclic. When demand is higher than supply, prices go up, companies profit more and there's incentive for investment. Within time supply exceeds demand and prices go down, so companies barely make enough to pay off and those which are inefficient go broken and are sold, hopefully, to better managers.

This is generally a good thing but, of course, food/farming is of public interest. If prices go up those with lower income might struggle to feed themselves. And if prices go down poor farmers might struggle to survive and be forced into selling their land. Thus government intervenes.

What separates poor farmers from say poor food truck owners?

The issue with farm subsidies is they don’t actually change profitability long term, they simply result in over production. It’s vastly more efficient to build up a long term storage of surplus say 2 years of corn per American stored at -40C which should last ~100 years. Then let huge swaths of American farmers go bankrupt as you scale back production. This was the basic model hundreds of years ago, they still had famines.

Alternatively you can push productivity while paying pay farmers not to produce anything on their land. This keeps them from going bankrupt and requires fewer resources than excess production. We used to do this, it reduces the risk of famine because productivity can be scaled up quickly.

Finally you can just massively subsidize production and dump the excess on foreign markets, this is really bad for other countries and costs insane amounts of money and still results in excess production even as everyone gets fat. This is where bio fuels come in.

PS: There are also secondary effects as subsidizing farm insurance etc, keeps incompetent farmers in business.

"There are also secondary effects as subsidizing farm insurance etc, keeps incompetent farmers in business."

Any data to back that up? If you're incompetent and your crops repeatedly, then you're not going to be reimbursed enough to make it.

"It’s vastly more efficient to build up a long term storage of surplus say 2 years of corn per American stored at -40C which should last ~100 years."

Any data to back this up? This is a huge volume. Freezers capable of those temperatures are expensive and consume a lot of energy.

"The issue with farm subsidies is they don’t actually change profitability long term, they simply result in over production."

I think farm subsidies need to be changed or reduced, but for a slightly different reason. We are basically subsidizing other countries. A lot of our grains get exported, basically sending the fruits of those tax dollars overseas.

> incompetence

It’s not that people are completely incompetent it’s that some people are better at getting subsidies vs growing food. Essentially subsidies add a parallel skill set which becomes valuable but reduces the impact of being an inefficient farmer. I don’t have hard data, but have been told about people who are better at one side or the other.

> Any data to back this up.

The freezing thing was actually from a study I read. Ultra large freezers are very energy efficient via classic square vs cube scaling. The freezer loses energy on the surface and needs insulation along the surface while it and stores inside the volume. Energy costs of shipping vs colder climate etc.

The idea was a FIFO system along a circular storage system, but I don’t recall all the details.

Re: Freezers, yeah, I agree with this. Volume to surface area doesn't scale linearly[0], so you can build something like a giant sphere or cylinder and lose a relatively small amount of energy.

Commercial freezers are also frequently built with vacuum-insulated panels[1] which have very low thermal conductivity.

It's not crazy to build something very large, like a grain silo, to hold dried grain at a low temperature. That seems fairly plausible as a way to reliably "turn off" subsidies over time.

It sort of reminds me of the strategic oil reserve[2] in the US. Similar idea (boring holes in the earth cheaply via using water to etch into giant salt deposits)

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-area-to-volume_ratio

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_insulated_panel

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U...

That's because it makes no sense. The US consumes around 12 billion bushels of corn per year. Yes, some of that may be wasteful (corn syrup etc). But trying to store 24 billion bushels of corn without loss is simply impossible. Each bushel is roughly 1.25 cubic feet, so 2 years would be 30B cf. Imagine a storage unit 2 miles long, 2 miles wide, and 300 feet tall.

The point is to feed people not cows or cars, so your estimate is significantly off base.

A bushel of corn is 56 pounds. Assuming a very high 1lb of corn per person per day only gives 2 * 365 * 330 million / 56 * 1.25 = 5.4 billion cubic feet.

Which still sounds insane except AT&T Stadium in Dallas is 0.1 billion cubic feet and cost only 1.3 billion to construct while including all sorts of stuff we don’t need. So roughly one building that size per state. Even if it was almost that expensive vs a more realistic 1/10th, the cost of corn + ethical subsides would hit that in roughly a decade and we would could then spend a 1 billion a year cooling the things while saving money.

PS: Having just one building would look cool but would be a massive single point of failure. Also, you can store dry corn for quite a while even in non cryogenic conditions.

> What separates poor farmers from say poor food truck owners?

If all food trucks and restaurants disappeared off the face of the earth, people would mostly be able to feed themselves. The same is not true for farms.

>"It is quite weird how we can't maintain something as basic as food security with a market based economy."

Because people at the top need other people making them money rather than revolting.

> It is quite weird how we can't maintain something as basic as food security with a market based economy

We can't? Where's the famine? News to me. Last I checked we still have way more food than we know what to do with (massive worldwide fertilizer shortages and inflation notwithstanding).

Depends on what you mean by food security. We're guarenteed to have enough food without crop subsidies. We would just import a lot more than we export. The government seems that as a national security risk.

And rightly so. You can't immediately switch to domestic supply in case of supply issues and utter chaos is just 2 meals away.

Similar with the artificial battle front between organic vs conventional/industrial, where each side claims the solution to sustainable food production, but no common ground is allowed.

By the way, not all children's books are equally naive. We've recently found a nice one [1] (in German) which shows small- and large-scale farms side-by-side, in a brutally honest way (including butchering).

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Wo-kommt-unser-Essen-her/dp/340775816...

This looks like a great book! Getting back to refreshing my dormant German, have any other good books like this? - Thanks!

If you're looking for similar books with realistic depictions of agriculture: No, that was a lucky find in the library.

In case you just want to practice German with media for children, I always recommend "Die Sendung mit der Maus" [1]. It's a mix of short animated stories with "how it's made" features, where they go filming in factories etc.

[1] https://www.wdrmaus.de/aktuelle-sendung/

Thanks for the resource! I will definitely check it out.

What was that one on Netflix that sold organic specialty produce to restaurants in Chicago? I thought that one was profitable without any sort of assistance.

Either way, we have several examples of local "peasant" farms, some organic, that do well.

They got a lot of exposure, even before Netflix. Now their model is to milk the brand they built. That's not traditional farming, that's marketing wrapped in farming.

Yeah, but if I remember correctly, actual farm operations were profitable, right? The marketing is just extra, or what it evolved into.

Don't get me wrong - small farms are a lot of work. For the most part, at least one member of the family has to have an outside job with benefits just due to healthcare costs. But it can make some money.

I hope to have a small farm as a "retirement" plan. It would mostly be an apiary for the commercial portion, maybe with some log and block grown mushrooms. Then the rest would likely be for personal use. Obviously the major costs like the initial land and health insurance would come from savings, so it would be mostly supplemental income to an already solid retirement plan. I don't think it will happen though.

I assume the biggest draw is the lifestyle ideals. It seems a common dream on this community. Maybe because we're tired of building some intangible thing or some app that nobody really needs, and want to have a physical job with meaningful produce.

> I assume the biggest draw is the lifestyle ideals.

A lot of people who have never physically worked a day in their life like the idea of hard labor. After a week of hard labor, they would decide to take up woodworking instead.

I think it depends on what we consider hard labor too. With all the mechanization today, hard labor has changed. Now it might be considered hard labor to run a log splitter and stack the wood, when in the past you'd be swinging a maul too. Like my grandpa used to plow field with a horse drawn plow, but now you just start up a tractor. So it evolves, and exactly what type of farming it is determines how physical it might be (although any of it is more physical than sitting in front of a screen all day).

Hehe reminds me of a volunteer day I set up for our team. They wanted to work on a farm that's part of the food bank. We spent maybe a half a day picking greens and squash. Most of them couldn't believe how "physical" it was - commenting about it being a workout or being tired.

The people who want to open a dairy farm that's kind to the cows comes to mind. Then they realize that cows need to be milked 2x a day, every day, forever.

"forever"

Or until they stop producing and need to become beef in order to make room for the next generation of milk producers.

> Yeah, but if I remember correctly, actual farm operations were profitable, right? The marketing is just extra, or what it evolved into.

Not really, there are different levels of profitable. Some extremely efficient operations can be profitable at scale, but no one is getting rich.

The places like you describe (have half a cow from one in my freezer now, from just outside Chicago) operate on marketing to upscale customers via advertising/co-marketing deals at fancy/local restaurants.

They also operate a number of farmers markets booths at about a half dozen markets in the city each weekend, and that is both a marketing and sales angle. This is where they pick up a large amount of their weekly subscriptions, and folks like me who order half a cow each year.

> I assume the biggest draw is the lifestyle ideals. It seems a common dream on this community.

I agree the idyllic dream sounds pretty great. However I'd suggest trying to not jump feet first into it. My parents were organic market garden farmers (one of their specialities was mushrooms), and if you need to at least break even your job will look far more like marketing/sales with a bunch of back-breaking physical labor in between than farming or gardening. Animal husbandry is just as involved with the bonus of random emergencies popping up at inconvenient times.

The successful farms in the space tend to focus their time on the "business side" of the operation, and have the standard hired help the large farms have to actually run most of the farm itself. If you've ever visited a "small farm" that did weekend tours this is typically the model they are utilizing.

At "hobby farm" level it can be pretty relaxing if you have no need for the income itself, and don't mind putting good money after bad towards equipment to make your life easier. I've seen these operations work out, but lots of times these folks have an extremely hard time integrating into their new community and tend to move on in a few years.

Just trying to provide a different perspective. Farm life is hard, and involves long hours for very little financial remuneration. I'd only even consider doing it as an absurdly over capitalized hobby.

I have a small apiary currently, so I understand the work and costs to a degree.

As a retirement "job", it could provide supplemental income. That's my goal.

If I'm not doing that, then what am I doing? I hate my job and don't see anything better. At least I could be physical rather than squander my health like my job requires now. Maybe make some money to cover hobby expenses, or use the land to save money by growing stuff for myself. Otherwise, I might as well sit in front of a TV in some suburban house while eating myself to death.

My country is one of the biggest agricultural exporters in the world yet less than 1% of the population works in the farming industry. Farming is what drives all the mechanization and robotics research.

> Farming is what drives all the mechanization and robotics research

I don't doubt it is a big drive, but wouldn't the military take the biggest portion of that cake?

I am unimpressed by the idea that we can solve this with more technology. Some of those billions of people feed themselves. Theit biggest problem isn't minmaxing an 8t/ha yield to 11t/h. Their problem is getting from 1t/h to 6t/h which is entirely possible with just manure, some crop rotation and good quality seeds that can actually be resown.

The idea that e.g. hybrid rice is going to solve world hunger is absurd.

Does a life as a subsistence farmer seem appealing to you? A short life.

Farming at this scale allows people to eat meat for every meal.

Which they should stop doing.

Never.

Depends on how you look at it. Agriculture generally requires a lot of water. Much of this corn is being irrigated with water from the aquifers.

Sustainable farming is good, but I don't think we do very much of it. I wonder if there's any evidence that we can sustainably support 8 billion people.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/kansas-aqu...

And this is why I get so bothered by all the hand-wringing over declining population growth.

>I wonder if there's any evidence that we can sustainably support 8 billion people.

it depends on the type of lifestyle you're willing to have and how much % of the GDP you're willing to pour into it. I'm sure you can sustainably feed all 8 billion people if we poured 50% of our GDP into food production and we only ate rice and beans.

"it depends on the type of lifestyle you're willing to have"

Not just oneself, but entire nations. Scarcity of resources have historically been a major cause of wars. I don't see the world coming to a consensus on lifestyle any time soon.

> Farming at scale is the only thing that allows all 8 billion people to eat.

False; you can feed 8 billion people using small scale / non-industrial farming as well, it just means more people would be working in the farming industry and the cost might go up. But industrial farming is not to provide food, but to provide raw resources - I mean this very article is about growing corn to turn into bioethanol to mix in fuel for cars.

> it just means more people would be working in the farming industry and the cost might go up.

You say that like it's a small thing. Keeping most of the population out agriculture and allowing them to produce other goods and services is the primary benefit of the agriculture industry.

> But industrial farming is not to provide food, but to provide raw resources - I mean this very article is about growing corn to turn into bioethanol to mix in fuel for cars.

Less than half of the corn produced in the US goes to ethanol production. Most of it goes towards feeding people - either directly or indirectly. If we include other produce, then the vast majority of the agriculture industry's output becomes food.

Not really. Small-scale sustainable farms produce more food per hectare than industrial farming. However, they are usually less profitable, since they need more manpower per hectare. Efficiency in terms of money earned is not the same as efficiency in terms of food produced, and with a growing population and a diminishing area of arable land, one seems more critical than the other, especially when you consider that industrial farming tends to destroy topsoil and emits quite a bit of CO2, whereas small-scale sustainable farming usually does the opposite.

> Small-scale sustainable farms produce more food per hectare than industrial farming.

I thought that was only true in poor and developing countries but that large industrial farms in highly developed nations produced way more than everybody else. Have you a source you could share as this is a very interesting point?

Ha, no, you're right. Don't remember were i first heard it, but looking for the sources now, it seems that small farms are more productive in poor countries, but less productive than industrial farms in developed nations. However, the source i found for that [0] doesn't mention what techniques are used, and seems to only focus on size. So now i'm curious if there is reliable data looking at differences in yield between farming techniques? (e.g. industrial/chemical vs organic vs permaculture)

[0] https://grist.org/food/do-industrial-agricultural-methods-ac...

Good article, that.

Gabe Brown claims he can get more calories per acre than monoculture farms[0]. He also claims that it's more thought, but not much more physical work overall. His profits probably depend somewhat on premium pricing that wouldn't hold up if everyone followed his model, but a shift in subsidies could help that.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPjoh9YJMk

Yes, i found several people making that claim (or similar). Couldn't find any hard data to back it up, though (although i didn't search too hard since i'm at work :P)

There are all kinds of things "wrong" with the way we raise corn in this country. It's environmentally unsound (among other things, it's killing the Gulf of Mexico). It's not economically viable, absent significant government subsidies. It's the source of the worst (high fructose corn syrup) and second worse (too much meat in our diet) food induced health problems in the country. And it is, as the posted article points out, at the center of a huge "clean energy" scam.

We could contribute a great deal more to feeding the world, and doing less damage to the environment and our health, but alternative uses for much of the land that is in corn in the US.

Fewer people is the answer. Is there a way to humanely, ethically, and justly limit the population?

Conventionally, talking heads seem to indicate the right way forward is to use tech and industrial agriculture to support 20bn+ on the planet. Seems totally doable, but at the cost of losing the natural environment as well as more natural food sources altogether.

Anyway, I say get us back to around 5bn people and keep it there.

You would said 500 million people 200 years ago.

Malthusians in 200 years will say 50 billion.

Is this helpful? I mean, we’ve already passed the point of too much natural habitat lost and too much industrial ag needed, so I think a number less then our current population is reasonable.

Trying to limit the world's population is impossible. It would require an authoritarian world government and that's not going to happen.

Remove tax deductions for more than two kids per couple. Tax the suburbs more highly. Encourage couples to only have two kids just like we encourage people not to litter. Trade less with countries with high birth rates and raise fees on those countries’ environmental impact. All that could be done democratically, no?

Punitive taxation and restricting trade with Africa wouldn't be a good look...

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

(Not to say it's only Africa by any means, but you do have to go quite a ways down the list before you hit a non-African country).

Sure, but would it be worth it? I suspect yes; the alternative is continued population growth leaving very little natural world on the entire planet and all of us eating an industrially farmed diet.

Good luck getting the first two passed into law, at least in the US. "Encourage couples..." will get no traction. We still have a ton of littering, and all the religious groups in the US (the Quiver Full movement etc) will love that. Cutting trade based on a country's birth rate and adding tariffs based on EI etc will be extremely problematic.

Sure anything can be done "democratically." But politics is the art of the possible...

A few years back, I caught a ride with a cattle rancher while hitchhiking across South Dakota. We stopped by another rancher's property to give him an estimate of how his cows would sell at market. While we were there, we got to talking about how he'd pulled the cows off of one of his fields, and planted corn instead. Thanks to subsidies, it was more profitable to do that, even though herding cattle is really what he wanted to be doing.

So your story is farmer stops doing activity A and does activity B because it makes more money?

I don't think the OP was faulting the rancher. He's agreeing that federal corn subsidies are warping the market.

> because it makes more money

Because it gets taxpayer money for no reason

> You are slowly realizing it has literally been years, maybe decades, since you ate any meal made without corn.

https://twitter.com/swiftonsecurity/status/10748100434957967...

Isn't this either obviously false (yes, corn is in lots of processed foods and oils and most animal feed, but people eat things that don't involve veg. oil, meat, and processed foods all the time) or vacuously true (if we're counting the lining of paper bags, then we should also count plastic made from corn-based ethanol, and trucks that use ethanol in their fuel, and drivers who eat meat which is fed with corn, and we breath air with oxygen produced from corn fields, and...)?

Wouldn't the CO2 from corn be drawn from the atmosphere in the first place? Sure, if you grow corn and let it die, parts of its CO2 content would be bound in the soil. But does that calculation make sense when we look at our fossil fuel consumption? Sure, every bit helps...

Making ethanol involves more steps than just letting corn grow on its own, and those steps burn fossil fuels.

Sure, in that case it is just as bad. But I don't understand how it could ever be worse than gasoline since part of the CO2 in bio-ethanol should at least come from already unbound CO2.

Because the process from growing corn to distilling ethanol requires more energy than it produces. That energy has to come from somewhere, i.e. fossil fuels. It would be cleaner to just burn the fossil fuels than to run the energy through the Rube Goldberg machine of farm subsidies and ethanol.

Not literally true from the energetics point of view, but close enough that when you add in the other carbon releasing side effects (degradation of soil carbon, land clearing) that comes with increased corn production, it is a net carbon producer right now. That's what this study is all about.

Corn in particular is inefficient, burning corn produces less energy than the energy required to grow corn.

Sugarcane is the opposite, it grows easily (too easy in fact, it has tendency to spread in an unwanted way), doesn't require too much diesel to produce, and it makes a fantastic amount of ethanol when pressed.

It's true, and the article mentions land-use change as the main factor. That could be chopping down or burning a forest to make land for corn.

Post-NAFTA, artificially low-priced US corn flooded the mexican market and devastated traditional small Mexican growers.

Whoa there chief. The whole 'that would be a good thing' is an overreach. There are 'better' ways to spend that subsidy but having a steady surplus of food subsidy or not is a way better position for a country to be in than implementing some JIT mechanism with supply/demand set purely by market prices. Just because agriculture makes up a small % of GDP compared to tech we can more easily get rid of Google than we can get rid of grain.

You are arguing with a straw man. They said nothing of getting rid of food surplus or grain. They said to reallocate corn subsidies elsewhere. Presumably one destination could be other foods with greater nutritional value.

fair point. I was focusing on the 'removing subsidies' part and not the 'reallocate' part. Accept the correction

It's kinda hard to kill those subsidies when farmers have been used to them for 50 years, and it's a big political sticking point. The USDA exists to create more export crops. For the US, this might challenge that. That's also why the FDA can never rule that sugar or HFCS is harmful, it's a major American product, and that would be admitting that it's faulty.

Reminds me of an old despair.com demotivator: https://despair.com/products/tradition?variant=2457305795

"Just because you've always done things this way does not mean it is not incredibly stupid."

So, yes change is hard. But we need to change and this is kind of an obvious change to make. If we wait for the FDA to conclude that corn syrup is bad for you, we can indeed wait a long time.

So, don't wait for them and adjust their priorities at the federal level. That's what governments are for. You can't expect these agencies to do reasonable things by themselves when they are obviously stuck protecting the very unreasonable status quo. Bloat is the problem both in these agencies and the obese citizens whose interests they are supposed to protect.

What's the point of export crops if we're subsidizing them? We're basically exporting tax dollars.

What we need is shifting subsidies. Change the incentives year over year so farmer's can adapt. Maybe add some budget to incentivize faster changing without punishing the slower movers. Throw resources towards training and retooling.

Also sugar tarrifs which makes the susbtitute to HFCS artificially more expensive. It's government distortion top to bottom.

I can agree with doing away with or changing the subsidies, but the rest of your comment, unilaterally declaring meat to be bad, corn syrup to be universally bad, and for some reason declaring that "organic" whatever that means today, makes something better somehow, is just a bunch of today's talking points.

> unilaterally declaring meat to be bad

They didn't.

> corn syrup to be universally bad

The research is still out about whether HFC is processed differently in the body. What isn't really up for debate is the pervasiveness of HFC in everything. Because it's subsidized and so cheap, it excess has made it a cheap raw material that's found in just about everything from Tomato Sauce to Bread.

Too much sugar in your diet is bad, and so it isn't much of a stretch to say that having a ridiculously cheap source of sugar that's being added as filler to every imaginable product is probably not great for us.

> and for some reason declaring that "organic" whatever that means today, makes something better somehow

I think the op was trying to say that corn is a hearty crop that grows fine on it's own without a lot of petrochemical fertilizers.

You're jumping to a lot of conclusions.

I'll only respond by saying that the kind of assumptions I outlined above are exactly the same kind of assumptions (XX == GOOD, YY == BAD) based on politics with a hint of science, that led to us having corn-based ethanol in the first place.

I feel like this is where inflation can be pretty helpful. Just like it's near impossible to retire legacy production code, it seems pretty politically difficult to roll back these subsidies. But simply waiting for the inflation to make them irrelevant might be a lot easier.

That's helpful. Whenever I hear people rail against corn, I think of all the corn dishes I love as a southerner. Cornbread, grits, corn on the cobb, and at Thanksgiving, corn pudding. My wife has got me to like polenta as well. But those aren't the problems.

"Maybe repurpose the subsidies to have those farmers do something that actually is more productive and less harmful."

Like what? The article says that the land would otherwise be conserved, ie not productive. Some of it might even be developed.

Ethanol is not a terribly good fuel and causes lots of problems in engines which have seals that weren't designed for it. Engines are also prone to knocking as the energy profile of (enhanced) fuels is different.

I thought Ethanol has a very high octane rating (~110-120 RON) and therefore would reduce knocking compared to regular 85-95 RON fuels. I'm sure it has plenty of other problems though.

Ethanol is awesome when it comes to knock resistance because it is much slower burning than gasoline is with all other parameters being equal. Where it bites is that it requires better seals than gasoline, and it has lower energy density, which means you need higher flow fuel pumps, tubing, filters, and injectors to make the same power.

Do that, though, and you can run a turbocharged engine at much higher levels of boost and create much more power than you would be able to do with anything short of race gas or even more exotic and dangerous fuels.

>Kill the subsidies and that whole industry slowly dies. That would be a good thing.

For you, maybe. Not for the millions of rural Americans whose livelihood depends on agriculture subsidies. There's a reason why we have the Senate, a place where Nebraska has the same power as California. It's exactly for situations like this. The US is a massive country full of competing interests, and our founders knew that eventually the urban population would massively outnumber the rural population, leading to a tyranny through rule of the majority. So states were put on equal footing in the Senate to give the rural populations a voice. And because of that, the Senate will never ever allow these subsidies to be cut. There's simply too much support for it among the rural states.

Industries and business absolutely have to be allowed to die if they are no longer necessary and desired by the market. If not, you're just kicking the can down the road. Give them a UBI if you are so concerned. Don't prop up zombie industries.

>Industries and business absolutely have to be allowed to die if they are no longer necessary and desired by the market.

The defense industry would like to have a word with you. There are certain industries that the government props up solely to maintain the capability in times of crisis. I would argue that ensuring an adequate capacity to generate a self sufficient food supply is important enough to meet that bar.

Defence is necessary so it isn't a refutation of what I was saying.

Also, there is no way the US subsidies of food and billion pounds of cheese in cold storage etc etc have anything to do with a defence justification, it is pure corruption and zombie subsidies top to bottom.

That's the Civil War argument: "we know that slavery is wrong, but we can't just end it because livelihood of millions of good upstanding citizens depends on slavery." And just like slavery, the corn syrup industry exists solely because of a law protecting it.

It’s a hedge for a nuclear war. If this US is in total isolation, they can grow corn, wheat, soybeans etc quickly with high output.

Thinking about the geopolitical strategic layer of ag policy is fascinating!

A huge and good compromise would be to end the ethanol subsidies and only give it for human and cattle food. Anything else has to get by on what the market will bear.

Slowly? It'd probably happen in a single harvest season.

>>Nothing wrong with e.g. organically farmed corn.

Curious, what is the signifier of "organically farmed" here - what benefits does it provide, how does its usage significantly differ of "non-organically farmed" corn?

> Kill the subsidies and that whole industry slowly dies. That would be a good thing. Maybe repurpose the subsidies to have those farmers do something that actually is more productive and less harmful.

So once we've put all the farmers out of work and declared success, what do you suggest they do that is "more productive"? Should they lease their corn fields to crypto bros?

Or... and I'm just spitballing here... perhaps switch to more productive crops? I would hope that no one believes we need fewer farmers here in the U.S. (we need more, IMO), but don't incentivize them to produce more of a given type of crop than actually makes sense.

It's not that simple. Farmers typically rotate crops between corn, soybeans, clover, wheat, etc. It helps restore nutrients to the soil.

https://hgic.clemson.edu/factsheet/crop-rotation/

It is not like agriculture and farming was impossible without excessive production of corn.

The extreme investment needed to grow crops at scale has resulted in hyper specialization supplemented by fertilizers etc.

I have seen farms near me do Corn, Corn, Corn, Soy, Corn based on whatever they think will be most profitable.

In the last century, kinda sorta. In the major corn producing region of the US (I live in Iowa, the heart of the beast), crop rotation is largely reduced to choosing, based on markets whether to grow corn or soybeans on any particular acre. Dairy farmers still grow some alfalfa here and there, but the black earth midwest is pretty much corn and soybeans, full stop.

Switching to more productive crops wouldn't end subsidies. In face, we'd - at first - need more just to make sure folks have the proper equipment. If you currently grow corn and soybeans* then your equipment will be specialized for them, generally.

I don't know about the current landscape, as it has been years since I've lived in the states, let alone mingled with farmers in the US, but at one point, they would pay farmers to allow a field to be unplanted. I find this to be a viable option when mixed with the above and the farmers I knew didn't complain either.

*Corn and soybeans are generally grown together, generally (but not always) in alternating years. Corn tends to deplete nutrients in soil, soy puts them back.

> Switching to more productive crops wouldn't end subsidies. In face, we'd - at first - need more just to make sure folks have the proper equipment. If you currently grow corn and soybeans* then your equipment will be specialized for them, generally.

So what you’re saying is that the market doesn’t work?

"So what you’re saying is that the market doesn’t work?"

I definitely do not back unregulated markets, and in general, do not think markets for food work. It isn't just food, but other things that are general necessities for the modern times. Utilities, roads, and medical care are other examples.

>Switching to more productive crops wouldn't end subsidies. In face, we'd - at first - need more

I don't think anyone arguing that subsidies in general are bad, just that subsidising corn is bad...

My point is that we can't simply change subsidies from corn to other things without thinking about the other things that would need funding in order to do that. I personally don't think all of it is bad: It is a food and feed crop, after all, but I think we could do with more variety in such crops (not so much reliance on corn, and definitely not for ethanol)

....wheat? Rye? Any other similar staple crop?

It doesn't have to be some extreme shut down, it can be a transition to something better for society.

That sounds all simple, but if someone doesn't already grow those crops, they'll need to change equipment. They might need some time to gain knowledge - after all, they've specialized their field.

And "better for society" is... well, not a given. I don't know enough about farming to know what sorts of beneficial crops can be grown where corn/soybeans grow well and I'm not optimistic enough to think we won't just use the "new and improved" crop in much of the same abusive ways that we use the corn crops. I'm going to guess that we could make animal feed for confinement farming out of something that isn't corn We could probably make a sweet syrup out of it, too, and I'm guessing the main benefit to people is that they've made corn syrup the absolute villian and swept away nuance surrounding it, and would welcome the new replacement without much though.

We just need society to be a bit better, I suppose. Quit confinement farming livestock and have better animal welfare laws, for example. Make healthy eating very cheap (and easy with premade food too), have a sugar tax of sorts and food laws to keep sugar out of unexpected places and reduce sugar some other context. Oh, and probably expand public transport exponentially. Feed, corn syrup, and biofuel dependence should drop.

Of course. Stop incentivizing bad stuff. Start incentivizing good stuff. The key thing is to start that transition and not to waste time prolonging the problem.

The Dutch government is actually paying farmers to stop farming. Nitrogen emissions are a big problem in densely populated areas and cattle farming is a known big contributor to that. So, they are paying farmers to get out of the business of converting subsidies into manure. The main point is not to keep them farming but to stop them from doing harmful things. If they can farm other things in a less harmful way; great. But otherwise, things like forests, nature reserves, etc. are also valuable to have. Nothing wrong with subsidizing farmers to create those.

Why are other grains better for society? If Iowa, Illinois, and Nebraska farmed Rye instead, we'd be putting Rye based ethanol in our gas instead.

By more productive, I mean something that is not a net negative contribution/actively harmful to our planet. If all farmers can do is convert subsidies into CO2 emissions for stuff that isn't technically needed, then we're better off with them not doing that. It's that simple.

This amount of corn is simply not needed and it never was. It only exists because of the subsidies. So, maybe grow stuff that is not contributing to destroying our planet and is actually worth something without a lot of subsidies. Organic farming seems pretty lucrative lately. Iowa has plenty of that happening already. There are plenty of things farmers can do that are actually needed that are much less harmful.

Why can’t farmers just get real jobs? Work in a coal mine or something instead.

Putting PV on the fields produces a lot more energy per hectare than you get from energy crops and you don't need fertilizer, pesticides or heavy machinery.

Unemployed farmers should just join an afforestation project and produce more farmland.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com