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Comment by zahma | Hacker News Reader

I don’t see why being a farmer is implicitly linked to waste.

Sure he has farm interests in mind, but farmers will be among the first to really feel the affects of a dying lake ecosystem.

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Historically farmers (and most people really) have sucked the area dry before getting worried.

US farmers are certainly doing that right now, the incentives encourage it, and they're quick to lobby against changes in incentives.

That's also what you get from a prisoner's dilemma, a farmer switching to conservation will increase their production prices and / or lower their yields (as they'll at least need to invest in new farming methods, probably new hardware, and will have to learn those), and they'll fall behind their neighbours to say nothing of the market as a whole.

You make a good point, but perhaps that one “their own” is at the helm can make a difference in ensuring trust so as to break the prisoner’s dilemma (see point 6 in the executive summary).

It's only because agriculture is the big user, and the most dependent on overdrawing water resources. Farmers are no different from other people, and the oft-quoted line of Upton Sinclair that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his livelihood depends upon his not understanding it," answers your question. Farmers who have built a livelihood on irrigation are resistant to the notion that their water use is the problem, because if they admit it, they have to drastically change, or maybe give up, their way of making a living.

It's really no different from trying to convince a tech mogul that social media is harmful to children and adolescents. They can't see it, because they won't see it, or they won't see it, because the can't see it, since seeing it invalidates their business model.

I'd extend a bit more sympathy to farmers. When they purchased the land, they were also purchasing bundled water rights; land without the related water rights would have been a fraction of the price. And the property, inheritance, etc taxes they pay on the value of the land are assessed at a price that includes those rights. And all of a sudden when those rights become much more valuable, people want to take it from them?

It's a bitter pill to swallow, particularly when the farmer (not without reason) sees it as an attack on their way of life.

> I'd extend a bit more sympathy to farmers.

Yes, but I'd temper my sympathy with the knowledge that small farmers have mostly been pushed out by extremely large corporations. I have considerably less sympathy for them.

  Farm economic class by sales values (USD annual) | number
  1k-10k    11000
  10k-100k   5100
  100k-250k   900
  250k-500k   520
  500k-1M     310
  >1M         270
  Total     18100

Source: https://ag.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/2019-Utah-Agr... (see page 27 of the PDF/page 25 of the document)

What I'm getting from that is chart is... yes, farming is completely dominated by large companies. Something close to 90% of farms by number comprise as much as (but probably less than) 25% of the economic output. This is making a wild (but I would guess conservative) assumption of what ">1M" translates to.

If I'm reading that wrong, I would appreciate the correction.

You're right in terms of economic output, but that's not the only measure, particularly when it comes to politics; small farmers might not do much for the economy, but they still vote.

I'm supportive of doing something about how water is allocated, but a strategy that writes off the meaningful number of marginal farmers as economic noise is a strategy that results in tons of opposing ads with genuinely sympathetic characters.

Most of the first tier and probably some of the second are rich-people tax-dodge "farms", I bet. The rest of the first category is hobby-farming—my family probably counted as among that group, at times, because my dad grew up on a farm and liked doing some farm-stuff on farm-zoned land as an adult, but it represented almost no actual income—he worked an ordinary job, the farming was a hobby with books that just happened to sometimes be slightly in the black.

[EDIT] Oh my god, wait, that's revenue, not profit? I take it back, the entire second tier is tax-dodges and hobby farms, too.

> the entire second tier is tax-dodges and hobby farms

nope. that's what some people live on. geez you expect HN to be entitled, but still

No one in the US is living on < 10k of farm REVENUE, and almost no one can live on < 100K of sales. They’d be lucky to clear 10-20% of that after costs, if that.

That’s not even hand to mouth/subsistence even in rural TN.

yeah, it's pretty sad, right? but that's what they do.

mostly it's subsistence farming - e.g. they raise enough food for themselves. and of course, every able bodied family member works for minimum wage somewhere, when they can. but that does NOT make it a hobby farm.

yes, in fact people in the US make the equivalent of less than 10K a year and still live.

That’s using the farm mostly to feed themselves, and then supplementing with a bit of income here and there for ‘hard currency’ - which is very different in my mind at least from supporting themselves with the farm (as a business). But I see your point.

That’s definitely subsistence farming, and common the world over in some form.

And agree, not a hobby farm at that point.

I am sympathetic with anyone whose livelihood and investments are threatened by external realities or evolving social expectations. But that has nothing to do with what I was saying, which is a realistic assessment of whether farmers will voluntarily alter their water usage. Most won't, and most won't even admit that their usage is a major problem that needs to be fixed. And it's for the reason I quoted: almost no one is able to see themselves as the problem if their livelihood or personal self-respect is invested in their not being the problem.

This isn't an abstraction to me. My parents were basically forced off the farm I grew up on, and their homestead made nearly valueless, by neighboring farmers whose hog-raising facilities and manure management made the place uninhabitable due to stench and dust. Their neighbors never saw their practices as a problem, at least until they retired and moved to town. I don't believe they were disingenuous in this. They simply were not equipped to imagine that their farming practices, on which they were dependent for their livelihood and self-respect, could be a terrible problem. It is precisely because they were deeply invested in them (both in $ and personal terms) that they could not see it.

ISTR some mentions of social media tech moguls raising their children either without access to social media at all, or at least severly limiting their screen time.

> but farmers will be among the first to really feel the affects of a dying lake ecosystem.

How is this so in the case of the Great Salt Lake?

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