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Comment by dauertewigkeit | Hacker News Reader

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 Most of these small timers are also way outdated in their knowledge and methods.

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> 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?

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