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Comment by clooper | Hacker News Reader

Do you work on a farm or do you just consume their output? Degrowth is obviously not the only option but if you have never worked on an industrial scale farm then you should do some more research before casting blame on people who are trying to educate you about the scale of the problem facing us. Resources necessary for intensive industrial farming are running out. Business as usual is not sustainable regardless of how upset that makes you.

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Agreed. And everyone needs to be aware that this is a global problem. California has some of the best farm land in the world, but many of the years in the past decade have been brutal from water shortages. Some years have had 50% water deliveries and some have had zero, depending on the water district, water contracts, water rights, location, etc. Being told you can you use 50% of your normal water supply generally means you plant half your fields and leave the other half fallow, because most crops aren't viable if you only use half the necessary water.

Well, because more and more farms are being bought up, making farms bigger and bigger, and reducing the amount of "hard working, honest small family farms" everyone likes to imagine they get their food from.

There is no reasonable difference between what "farmers" say and what Facebook says, or the Collection of sad landlords, or the conglomerate of weapons manufacturers for world peace. It's all the same lies to keep the cash cow going as long as possible to extract as much value from our planet before everything goes to shit.

If people did do research, they'd find out that the main, humonguous problem is animal agriculture. Whether it's water (https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23655640/colorado-river-wa...), land, energy or CO2e production, it's not anywhere close to sustainable to eat meat every meal, not even every day.

The people that the article is complaining about are subsistance farmers that are so poor, that NGOs give them free solar pumps. Then this article makes them out to be some sort of water thieves. They are not the problem.

Conflating dirt farmers in Africa and industrial farms in developed countries is totally wrong. No, I don't think industrial farms should be able to overuse water resources that belong to everyone.

> you should do some more research before casting blame on people who are trying to educate you

Clearly these would-be educators are doing a terrible job if one must “do research” before “casting blame.”

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