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Comment by rightbyte | Hacker News Reader

It is probably hard to compete with old investments that are payed off already? Prices should rise as maintenance takes its toll.

Fundamentally, farmers are valeuing their work way to low and our work way to high. How many loc of C# do I need for a bottle of milk?

The countryside need to squeeze us the city dwellers abit more. The income disparity allows for it and the countryside need to be able to flourish too.

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Cheap food prices are a very good thing. The farmers who are struggling are the ones with unsustainable business models. The answer for them is to join forces. Small time farming is a not viable anymore and it benefits nobody to try to keep it going. Most of these small timers are also way outdated in their knowledge and methods.

> Cheap food prices are a very good thing.

If anything, food should be more expensive. Current prices do not represent the cost of production, hence subsidies. The consequences are nefarious: farmers spending their entire career paying off debt, half of produce ending up in the trash, underpayed immigrants working in agriculture, cheap imports (subsidized by the origin country) putting pressure on local producers...

Food is literally something we cannot live without. It should be valued accordingly.

Are subsidies not inherently valuing something highly? Except with some safeguards to prevent "Well you're poor so why are you worth keeping alive". Maybe it's better to shift ag subsidies to things like food stamps/some form of UBI, but that would definitively be a prerequisite.

Cheap food stabilizes the entire system. Expensive food is how you get riots.

I think you're spot on and it honestly amazes me how we have so much evidence of this throughout history and yet people can will still end up thinking about this purely in terms of "the free market".

If that is the economist's conclusion than I'd rather kick the economist than take his advice.

Expensive food _literally_ kills civilizations. Not just cities, or countries, entire civilizations.

This sounds uncomfortably like a call for more of the consolidation and industrialisation of farming, in the name of efficiency, that has been devastating to our environment.

> that has been devastating to our environment

Nothing inherent to economies of scale is devastating our environment. Companion planting, soil stewardship and water management each benefit from scale.

Nothing is quite optimistic, issues such as are linked to scale (Just 5min of some random though) :

- http://encyclopedia.uia.org/en/problem/destruction-hedges-an...

- https://crops.extension.iastate.edu/encyclopedia/soil-erosio...

- https://sentientmedia.org/how-does-agriculture-cause-defores...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_pig_fa...

- https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/11/global-s...

Edit: and if you think not just on the ecological side. The core benefice of scale is to produce more while requiring less people. Which mean lower density of people which has so many societal impacts ...

True. It’s just that so far in agriculture, economies of scale have been let loose without much governing for ecology.

> so far in agriculture, economies of scale have been let loose without much governing for ecology

Sure. But scale isn't the problem. (Focussing on its is counterproductive. Amidst falling efficiency, no population will choose long-term ecological impact over short-term food availability.)

Solve the problem directly: incentivize land owners to steward their land. Regulate where needed. Improve agricultural education.

If they are applied, yes.

> The farmers who are struggling are the ones with unsustainable business models.

Or the ones who don't use pesticides that kill our planet

Or the ones which treat their animals decently

Or the small scale farms

Or ...

There is less oversight when it comes to pesticide usage within smaller operations. I grew up in that environment so I can tell you from first hand experience that the grandfatherly figure selling you pumpkins on the side of the road is does not shy away from using pesticides, and unlike the big operations he is not very precise with this dosage either.

My grandfather used mercury as a pestiside on seeds. The joke was that it made the hens abit cracy when they ate spillovers on the court yard. So ye ...

Small-scale farming is more resource intensive than farming at scale. (Effects of pesticides are mixed.)

I like small-farm produce. But it's obviously a luxury. If you're concerned about the environment, buying small-scale organic produce is counterproductive.

Maybe what's unsustainable isn't their business model but our way of life, that's all I'm saying, and so far everything points that way

> what's unsustainable isn't their business model but our way of life

What does that actually mean? (I can point to any sociecoonomic problem and solve it by accusing someone's way of life.)

Consuming and producing everything as fast as possible without any consideration for our well being or the future

Where do you think the line is between small scale and what becomes sustainable? 10 acres? 100? 1000? Bigger?

"joining forces" means selling out to a corporate farm, and becoming a minimum wage laborer.

Farmer cooperatives for distribution are quite common.

But ye consolidation will make things worse for the farmers.

I don't understand how anyone who not inherit a farm would ever consider fighting the interest rate buying one. The amount of work per dollar is insane compared to other sectors.

Yup, because we are dying to have more of these huge latifundia bathing the world in pesticides and being so large they can buy politicians by a dozen.

Are you writing from 1970?

The big problem for farmers is they have to sell to distributors/processors. Supermarkets don't want to deal with 100 different farmers per produce item.

In the last few decades, those entities have merged into megacorp regional and national monopolies. They are effectively fucking the farmer and the consumer.

https://time.com/6171326/meat-beef-industry-congress/

>Over the past three decades, as the largest four beef-packing firms have amassed control of 82% of the U.S. beef market

>Since 1980, an average of nearly 17,000 cattle ranchers have gone out of business each year, the report said.

>Meanwhile, some of the biggest meat-processing companies—Tyson, JBS, Marfrig, and Seaboard—have seen their gross profits increase by more than 120% collectively since before the pandemic, and their net income skyrocket 500%,

This also goes beyond the meat industry of course and extends into everything farming.

Articles that do not reference profit margins are clickbait garbage. All of the above companies have sub 5% profit margins, for many years. If you think you can operate a successful business on even lower profit margins, good luck.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSN/tyson-foods/pr...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/JBSAY/jbs-sa/profi...

https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/MRRTY/financials

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SEB/seaboard/profi...

High food prices make for angry voters, though.

People here in Norway have complained about the price of food for ages. Farmers likewise have complained a lot about their low pay relative to workload.

Some years ago I met some french folks who had recently landed a job here in Norway. They invited me for dinner which we prepared together, and I noticed they had gone to one of the food markets and gotten some quality ingredients. So we ended up talking about the price of food.

They mentioned that when they moved here they were shocked at how expensive food was. However, after a little while they realized that they spent way less in terms of percentage of their income on food compared to what they used to do in France.

In France they had spent around 15% on food, and if they did the same here then all of a sudden food here didn't seem more expensive than in France.

In comparison, most Norwegians spend around 5% of their income on food.

Farmers generally have the prices they get set by the government. From what I can tell what has happened is that we've gotten used to not spend a lot on food (relative to the french say), the government hasn't given the farmers a lot, meanwhile the "middle-men" has grown a lot and take a lot more of the pie compared to before.

For example, a while ago the government reduced the VAT on food from 25% to 12%, and while food prices in the shops dropped right away, it didn't take long before they had crept back up...

I believe the SSB (Statistics Norway) numbers are more like ~10% for food and non-alcoholic drinks [1], it depends a lot on what you look at. Culturally the Mediterraneans have a very different relationship to food - but looking at Eurostat, we're basically on the low end of average [2]?

(Also, the VAT reduction in light of the recent govt-assembled expert panel arguing for the exact opposite as one of the best ways of taxing high-income high-consumption households without hurting lower income groups is... fun.)

[1] https://www.ssb.no/nasjonalregnskap-og-konjunkturer/nasjonal...

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/D...

I used the numbers I recalled being quoted in the news at the time, which also matched my own food expenses. I assumed it was just food, while the SSB number includes non-alcoholic drinks as you say, and we're quite fond of sodas over here[1].

[1]: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-highe...

This graph will make things a bit clearer... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-vs-gdp

Romania is a clear outlier in that Eurostat source. I wonder why that is?

French farmers get a lot of subsidies form the state and the EU, and start violent protests when their standards get threatened.

High prices is acceptable reality. Unaffordable prices is when you get the problems. And there is quite a bit difference between those.

Right. Then import more slave labor to keep costs down. /s

That is literally what we've been doing in the UK for decades. It works!

So has Germany and any other wealthy nation. Locals don't want to work for poverty wages but there's a virtually unlimited number of desperate people worldwide willing to. That was my point.

It's the farming industry thats squeezing the farmer. The hardware, seeds and fertilizer.

My feeling is that farmers are similar to employees they have no collective power to control prices where the John Deere's and Monsantos of the world push prices onto farmers. The buyers of product have pricing power (similar to how wal-mart squeeze's supplier with their buying power).

Let's redistribute the farm land equally first though. And stop the farming subsidies.

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