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Comment by farmguy | Hacker News Reader

Isolation, financial pressure, lack of control, fear of being the generation that fails.

Almost impossible to buy your way into farming as an individual business strategy (10k/acre in the midwest, need ~500 acres to support a family).

So chances are if you farm your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. did to. There's immense pressure on each generation to not be the one that lets the family legacy die.

Our fields are named after the previous families that owned them. Most failed because someone died unexpectedly without putting their land in a trust, or the next generation simply doesn't want to farm (for good reason).

Those that do survive are very game of thrones. "That field belongs to the Dicksons, that one is the Hoechs - they have 2 sons working with them now". Land auctions/purchases go through a lot of backroom dealing where patriarchs from various families horse trade. It's a very interesting subculture of the midwest.

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The thing your post made me think about is that it seems like all of the professions that are actually critical for society (e.g. farming, teaching, construction, fishing, etc. - all of the "essential worker" type jobs) are actually the most punishingly difficult with the worst pay.

Meanwhile I'm changing some text for an A/B test and posting on HN and making bank.

Not sure what my point is here, other than this just feels wrong in some respect.

It definitely often feels like the value capitalism places on certain skillsets is out of sync with the true intrinsic societal value. It ultimately boils down to the law of supply and demand, a brutally unemotional, uncaring concept.

At least in part it's not just supply and demand, but what capital owners have deemed your value is worth, and how much value you can produce for them given your role. A programmer at a big co can take that 300-500K/year you pay them and multiply it 10x, creating a lot of "value" due to far reaching impact at scale.

That is still supply and demand. The "demand" part comes from what you wrote about - how profitable the capital holders believe their tech ventures will be - this sets the ceiling for tech salaries. Currently, the capital holders are still very optimistic, which makes us in this profession still in very high demand.

Upon revisiting this, you make a fair point, I suppose that would drive demand.

It's not just supply and demand. Many farmers effectively price their own labor below the market rate. They are essentially subsidizing their customers by continuing to farm out of habit or tradition or love even when when it doesn't make sense from a purely financial standpoint. The rest of us get artificially cheap food so we don't look too hard at the situation, but it probably isn't sustainable.

Of course it's wrong. We are able to do easy work with flexible hours for high pay, while more important professions can barely scrape by.

That injustice stems from a system that we cannot meaningfully change, though. Our cages are larger and more comfortable, but people making 6-7 figures are not policymakers or influential voices.

Having realized that, are you ready to walk away from Omelas today?

Some of those are, "do it because you love it" jobs - teachers, counselors, nurses.

Others are, "do it because you have no other options" jobs. Low-level construction and farming falls into that. Keep in mind that, historically speaking, large-scale farming has been done by the lowest rung of society. Kids fleeing the farms to the city in search of wealth and opportunity is a tale as old as civilization.

It feels wrong because it is wrong on some level - but the flip side, good wages for these workers makes food less affordable for people, causing another kind of suffering. However, the solution to the human suffering component of these jobs (automation) also destroys all competition except the top rungs of the industry.

If this were an easy problem to solve, humans wouldn't have so many different philosophies on dealing with this.

Tale as old as time, frankly. Someone creates a surplus, another wants that surplus for himself. First we have warring tribes. Then we have warring cities. Then we have warring kings. Then we have warring nations. Then we have warring empires.

Throughout we have various forms of serfdom/slavery/etc. when there's not enough war.

Then we have colonialism, or in Joseph Conrad's words "civilized pillaging and raping."

Today we have capitalism, or just colonialism without the raping.

Monkey see, monkey want, monkey kill and brutalize to get.

If animals could make full use of their environments, I'm sure they would be greedy too. It's just an innate part of living things.

I would not be sure about lack of raping part... At the top it seems somewhat common and mostly hidden... Occasionally it comes to light, but even then people involved go away...

Good point. I was unsure whether to include a note about that.

Things really haven't changed at all.

I have a theory most people have very low opinion of coding as a profession. To them, it must look like the most dry and boring kind of work, even worse than accounting. That's why they don't flood our field by the millions, even after hearing hear how much we make and how cushy our jobs are.

I'm not a dumb person - I like to think at least - and am able to work complex software, run linux (arch) and use powershell quite often.

I have no idea how to work in programming, and the environnement that is shown (non stop meetings, pointless hours of work wasted, weeks of crunch) is very very unattractive to me.

I think it's just too weird still - unless you had an oportunity fall onto your lap to learn it, or went into CS in school, I doubt most see a way in or are not interested in the work environnement.

The obvious counterpoint / explanation is that <<insert a few paragraphs about markets and the role of feedback loops in dynamics systems>>, therefore what you're being paid is, by definition, how much people in aggregate value your contribution.

(<<insert a text that counters the usual objections by pointing out that you're taking an integral over society, so lots of people paying little individually still adds up to a huge number>>)

This explanation is elegant. There's nothing obviously wrong with it, and I challenge you to find an alternative that's at least as fair, and that can actually work with real humans in real life.

And yet, decade by decade, it's becoming blindingly clear that this system is totally bonkers, and allocates rewards pretty much exactly backwards. It's like, holy shit, how much worse does it have to get before some philosophers or economists or mathematicians figure out a viable alternative that ranks occupations correctly?

All of this.

And the personality that farming attracts... it would literally destroy my Dad to fail at something he set out to do.

There was a rumor that my grandfather killed himself. He had car trouble, and had crawled under the car to fix it. But somehow the jack slipped, and the car pushed a screwdriver into his heart as it fell.

He was alone about 5 miles from the home place -- on a road where someone other than his family would find him.

He was in his 70s... old for ranchers in the 1960s. Old for ranchers today. Bills were due, and his sons were all drafted into the military.

But... once he died, 2 of his sons were able to get out of military service in order to come home and help take care of the ranch. Not everyone made it back, but those 2 did.

And the life insurance paid off a lot of their debts that they had no other way of paying. (So now he's got a pasture named after him!)

Anyway it's always been a hard life. They don't need a shrink, they need things to be just a little more fair. They don't need huge wins, but they need the ability to provide for the ones they love.

Bankers, and re-sellers make money. Ranchers and farmers do not. It's a rigged system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRDaPEaDJ7E

> (10k/acre in the midwest, need ~500 acres to support a family).

In Saskatchewan its $2K/acre and you need ~2500. Probably not a coincidence that it works out about the same...

> Almost impossible to buy your way into farming as an individual business strategy (10k/acre in the midwest, need ~500 acres to support a family).

Can anyone explain to me why farmland in developed countries is so expensive? It sounds like a terrible investment to buy it at such prices, and yet somebody's doing it.

The prices are set by large farmers adding acres and acres available for sale are relatively scarce.

When you consider the people doing the buying are at scale (thousands of acres) and can spread the cost of very expensive equipment over many acres it starts to make sense. The marginal cost of farming another 80 acres in terms of time and equipment is quite low.

Correct.

lots of foreign corporations buying it to secure food production and during the 0% interest rate days post 2008 lots of hedge funds and investors who just needed a place to throw money, similar to VCs investing in any random startup they could find. Worst case scenario the investors lose money on farmland and use it to offset taxes on a different investment. Losers are the local people who can't get land because some investor from California or New York buying via online auction

Also, a growing dependency on a constantly increasing amount of input costs - fertilizer, engineered seeds, pesticides, etc. Input costs keep going up, while yields are slowing down, and the prices are already pretty much rock bottom. Hard to see a lot of hope for the future in the situation.

Input costs are high but cash crop prices are definitely not rock bottom and most ag commodities are still near recent highs:

https://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?p=m&t=ZS

So, basically, capitalism is killing the hand that feeds us

How does that follow?

Race-to-the-bottom capitalism forces farmers to fight on price, since they can only sell in bulk to big enterprises, squeazing out their profits.

Farming associations actually help here, since they can negociate like a union, but not sure how much the US would approve of this "communism".

Trust are good and even needed for the producers. Just look at OPEC... It would be lot worse for them if they did not manage supply. Same goes for farmers if they can't control the sell price.

Not really. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of the concentration wealth. But an industry going from 90% of the population to 1%, even over a few hundred years, is going to have some bad effects.

>> So, basically, capitalism is killing the hand that feeds us

No no. It's all working to plan. Consolidation leads to bigger, more efficient farms. Or so the big land owners think... That much land requires ever more sophisticated technology, which big corporations are happy to provide and make people dependent on, all while collecting farm level data to allow someone to play the futures markets.

There is a pecking order. Whom do you serve and to what end?

And now I've reached my cynical threshold for the day and need to unplug and go outside ;-)

I don’t understand this line of thinking.

If you sell a commodity and your competitors are far more efficient, you will lose in the end. Change the commodity from wheat to mining silver and nobody has their heartstrings pulled for you.

Ultimately people aren’t siding with family farms for economics or fairness reasons - they are doing it to support the losing underdog or anti-modernism nostalgia.

I would hope that if we learnt anything from the pandemic, that we learnt that efficiency is not the end all and be all.

Efficiency creates fragile systems.

You can't eat silver.

Farms also shape rural communities, literally and figuratively.

>Ultimately people aren’t siding with family farms for economics or fairness reasons

What would you call Community supported Agriculture? (https://www.kneehighfarm.com/what-is-csa)the farm to table movement? Farmers markets?

"you can't eat silver"

Meaning it's a perishable good, it's a different market. It's good to have a lot of small farms to not have monopolies and as a stopgap to massive crop failures/blight or just bad management.

Like corn: the existence of extra corn (currently making ethanol) to turn into food in case of emergency/war, so it's subsidized.

>Change the commodity from wheat to mining silver and nobody has their heartstrings

Meaning no one has a personal reason to care about the plight of a silver mine

People care about the commodity, not the mine that harvests it.

Similarly I don’t care if it is a 5 acre family farm or a 100k acre corporation that supplies the corn I eat.

We don't all die if there's a lack of silver.

And then if your farm is not as efficient as the big land owners think it should be, you lose everything you ever worked for or loved. It's no surprise some of these people kill themselves.

Just making it more competitive. Yield on corn 50 years ago was half what it is today, which is good for a growing population.

Our neck of the woods in the 70s used to have 25 farms where now 1 family farms the entirety. If you're good at what you do (to the degree you can control), you'll survive and keep growing.

Biggest issues are your kids getting taxed to oblivion on land they inherit (this kills the farm) and outside investors bidding land way above where it reasonably cashflows because it's "cheap".

But don't feel bad for farmers. To inherit $10 million+ in land because your family's had it 100 years is a blessing most people don't get in life.

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyl...

But like they are literally killing themselves so it must not be that big of a blessing...

How much is the inheritance tax?

It depends on the state, but even if you have a $5m exemption on inheritance, if you inherit $10m of farmland, you need cash to keep the land (or go into debt) or liquidate the land.

No federal estate tax on $10m of farm land (kicks in around $13m this year, from what I can tell—the so-called "death tax" is often framed as applying to a whole lot more people than it actually does). Further, I'm pretty sure there are ways to structure a business that'll prevent even amounts exceeding $13m from being affected—granted, that would require advance planning which may or may not have been done.

The rest would vary state by state and depend on the relation to the deceased, but I'm pretty sure it'd be $0 or negligible in most cases, on a $10m estate, for spouse or children at least, even with minimal advance preparation.

Yeah I'm not super sure of the specifics on "death tax", haven't spent time researching it enough. It's just a topic of conversation from time to time in the family.

But the general strategy today is set up a generation skipping trust so that in the event the gov't decides to enact strict step up basis laws it doesn't blow the whole thing up.

Farms in a family trust are not subject to the death event that triggers inheritance tax.

Yeah, such a blessing that people are dying over it!

> But don't feel bad for farmers. To inherit $10 million+ in land because your family's had it 100 years is a blessing most people don't get in life.

... I still think this is pretty sad. I married into family involved with farming and seeing this dilemma is not heartening. One of my in-laws is currently in farming proto-retirement (renting out land now and not actively farming), and I can vividly see how selling out is basically not an option for him. If you spend a lifetime cultivating practices of living modestly and working towards the ideal of the small family farm, a big pile of money:

1) does not interest you very much, since you've built your life around hobbies like going to the bar and socializing with a dwindling crowd of other people who have your lifestyle. Nouveau rich family farmers seldom seem to do much better with a windfall than lottery winners.

2) further, selling out really is the antithesis to what you spent your life doing. Basically you're saying that your lifestyle has outlived it's usefulness in the spirit of "Death of a Salesman" is worth more dead than alive.

I'm probably being overly harsh sounding because I'm not an expert and I've been exposed to the idealist perspective in person quite a bit. But I do have pity for those who have been put in a hard place when they are suddenly surrounded by "game of thrones" and skepticism that massive consolidation will work out well in the long run.

edit: and yeah, I get that adapting is also an option but by definition it's an option for increasingly few.

Its changing who is doing it, not so much ending it. It will wipe out what is left of the small midwest towns though when it all consolidates.

Capitalism is still feeding us. Farmers and their vendors are orders of magnitudes more efficient than centuries ago.

Family farming has always depended on cheap/free labor of children (and slaves / serfs / indentured servants / illegal immigrants). Corporate farming at least makes those transactions more honest and transparent.

lawyers and PR departments afforded by corporate farmers are most certainly not making things more transparent.

the only thing they do is obfuscate the particular human individuals exploiting the workers.

It's one of the reasons I hate this push to get rid of cars and move everyone into cities.

It just increases the isolation of Farmers and other rural people. Strong Towns actually has a stated goal of reducing the interstate system! (Strong Towns, weak country, should be their new name.)

We need to reverse this trend - more people back into tiny cities, and yes, even suburbs.

Sure, looked at only from a money point of view, cities do a lot - but it's all services, and very little actual good people need in order to live. There's more to a strong country than just money.

I don't believe Strong Towns advocated for ending rural towns. Advice for improving cities doesn't say anything about people who don't live in cities. The closest I ever heard was that they should park their cars at the city border and go to the center by train.

I see this critique all the time but never see anyone point to the ACTUAL problem: a lack of accountability.

Is anyone here old enough to remember that telecoms were a plurality? Now they are consolidated into a few, or couple, I haven't checked lately. When they wanted to merge or buyout it used to be big news and regularly got denied to protect the market. But the last few monumental mergers have largely gone under the radar, a series of boxes checked and completed forms, and they're done. It's because people friendly to the entities are in the positions of decision.

We know capitalism has flaws and is imperfect. It used to be our regulatory agencies would tell companies like Monsanto to take a hike. But now, they permit anything the corporations want to do. With that glaring of a problem, are we really talking about an economic framework called "capitalism"? No, we're not.

Were this a Communist country then the oligarchs would be friendly to the regulatory agencies. Same issue, different economic foundation. Do you see where the problem lies now? It's not "capitalism". That's a nonsensical critique parroted by consuming inflammatory rhetoric, a waltz down the sidewalk of extremism from hateful social and news spaces online. Stop it, please.

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