Farmers' Suicide in the United States | Hacker News Reader

Farmers' Suicide in the United States

en.wikipedia.org

77 pointsnativeit35 comments

It’s a tough life and an isolating one. You have to live in wide open spaces with no one else nearby, but it also isn’t the idyllic land you think of. Economics means getting cornered into maximizing what you can get out of the land. Think tearing it up with machinery and planting giant areas with monocultures of high yield GMO crops. A lot of people have a fantasy version of farming in their head, where you have small plots of land, with diverse crops, wildlife, streams, and natural landscapes around you. Instead what you end up with is sort of a harsh outdoor factory for converting local resources (water, soil, etc) and additives (seeds, fertilizer, etc) into a very low margin product. All you can see from your modest home that you went into debt for is giant plots of land that are dusty and ripped up or covered in a single crop as far as the eye can see. Meanwhile, everyone from seed companies, to fertilizer companies, to John Deere, to insurance companies, to buyers of crops are squeezing you into nothing.

Our system as a whole is problematic. We allow big companies to bully small players due to their capital or control over distribution or anti competitive practices or whatever. And farmers who are doing the actual work are in a place in the supply chain where they can be marginalized. Food is also insanely cheap for what it takes, when in truth it should cost more and reward these people for their hard work, which often leaves them with broken bodies. But when you are struggling to survive financially, and have a broken body, and have no community near you, and things are getting worse every year - it isn’t surprising where it leads.

One of my relative complained about high food price. Then I expect imposition of tariff to spike food price even higher, ditto with immigrant deportation if it's actually implemented as the president elected suggested.

You're right that the people who's making the literal food on our table should be well compensated, from farmhands to the farmers who own their land. However, what you're suggesting is putting people between a rock and a hard place.

It would be easier to deal with if housing and transportation costs weren't so expensive though.

I am not sure why you’re getting downvoted, as I think you raise some good points. Personally I think tariffs against China are valuable for geopolitical reasons, and think that might be a higher priority at a time when the CCP is unstable. But it will cause at least temporary pain for consumers, yes. I also don’t know the effect of deportation of illegal immigrants - my understanding is we have a (legal) way for seasonal agriculture workers to work in the US on some special visa. I’d be curious how many workers use or don’t use that program.

As for putting people between a rock and a hard place. I guess I feel that all the companies abusing their positions of power are where I want money to come out of. For example, just because Walmart controls distribution to shoppers in their stores, they shouldn’t be able to bully farmers into zero margins. That cost should come out of Walmart’s bottom line (and therefore from owners and shareholders of Walmart). Likewise for the other big players in this ecosystem. But we have no laws or ability to do any of this. Just thinking out loud…

>Personally I think tariffs against China are valuable for geopolitical reasons, and think that might be a higher priority at a time when the CCP is unstable.

What exactly do you mean by this?

I don't know what the outcome of tariffs will be. but I do know Xi is terrified of them.

I haven't seen any literature about what the possible, with a giant grain of salt, benefits would be of tariffs.

If you switched the players it reads like the story of a tech worker.

> tough life and an isolating one

The people who live on these huge plots of land and have space LOVE IT and would choose nothing else.

I grew up in western Pennsylvania. I hate living in a city and would absolutely choose to have my own farm lol.

These are MAGA loud and proud people who could not be happier with where they are and what they do.

I realize this just vary given the article here? But it's definitely not an accurate reflection of what I see and interact with

I guess you have different economic setups. Owning a farm outright to live on sounds cool. Being a tenant farmer or having a lot of debt on it sounds stressful. I'm guessing a lot of the suicides are the latter.

My dad had a farm as more of a wealthy hobby farmer and it was a nice thing to have. It also did well economically but not in the obvious way - land prices shot up in spite of the actual farming making basically no money. It also had a 100% inheritance tax break (UK) which was nice and probably not totally justified in my dad's case. The farmers, including Clarkson, are marching in London today to protest changing that one.

The economics of farming can be complicated.

Over the last century, we have seen almost unimaginable improvements in agricultural productivity. The US now produces more than a tonne of corn for every man, woman and child in the country. Supply for most agricultural commodities vastly exceeds demand and the supply is still growing relentlessly. Tens of billions of dollars a year in subsidies can't make up for an imbalance on that scale.

The reality is that we have too many farmers producing too much food on too much land. That's a fact that sits very uncomfortably with our intuitions about the world, but it is nevertheless a fact. There are many things we could do to improve the viability of farm businesses and the economics of rural communities, but the only real answers start with an acknowledgement of the fundamental problem of gross overproduction.

https://fas.usda.gov/data/production/commodity/0440000

US produces an huge surplus of corn and soybeans for exports, but not enough fruits and vegetables. We import a ton of produce from refrigerated containers on ships across the globe.

Commodities have minimum price controls and federal subsidies. Produce doesn’t have the same.

Corn produced for Ethanol is grown in 100s of acres. The problem is plants are barely 0.5% efficient at capturing solar energy. Add further that barely 10% of corn makes it to Ethanol.

We’d be far better off removing Ethanol subsidies and encouraging owners to grow produce instead and add solar panels. Solar panels are 50X more efficient than trees at capturing solar energy.

Makes sense, but don't forget that Ethanol is also an energy reservoir. It works at night, it's easy to get more of it when you need it. So it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, there is much utility in being able to easily acquire and carry energy around with you.

There are a lot of other energy reservoir too though, if you put up with some fossil fuel. An acre of solar panels backed by a gas peaker plant is probably going to better than an acre of corn for energy.

Gas isn't renewable, though. You can have Ethanol from corn "forever".

The switch from food aid to ethanol was what raised the bread prices in the middle east and partially caused the arab spring movement . That is a load bearing pillar of the world and altering it comes with a price.

The US Congress lost its last farmer-representative when Jon Tester (D-MT) lost this month to Tim Sheehy, a Republican who parachuted in from Minnesota.

Any thoughts on why farmer-friendly constituents would vote in a parachute candidate? I'm not familiar with the region.

Montana is MAGA. It went from purple to red during the great self-sorting of COVID. So Tester was in a weak seat which he held onto in the last election because the libertarians split the right. This time, the GOP poured in many millions to sway the vote. And now Montana is governed by a bunch of Californians and Minnesotans.

Because the media they consume has a vested interest in lying to them and bankrupting them, and they lack media-literacy to see it. Because it’s really easy to be told that immigrants are stealing from you, and it’s really hard to explain that tariffs and trade wars will destroy soy bean farms. Because it’s really easy to lie to people and make them scared and angry.

Do you have a source for this by any chance? What about Brad Finstad?

Sorry, I should have specified he was the last in the Senate.

Farmer here. Americans passed strict, expensive to follow rules protecting workers and the environment. But then Americans also allow cheap imports from places that trash the environment and harm workers. This is why we need tariffs.

I cried reading this. :-(

Part of me wonders if we will see rising suicide rates among software developers if we have a recession in the middle of what is already the worst hiring environment in decades.

In decades? Can you express that quantitatively? You can just look this up on FRED and see that it's unlikely to be true.

FRED doesn’t factor in the v i b e s

FRED gets employment data from DOL, which keeps down revising its lofty employment estimates. Additionally not all job postings reflect actual openings. The companies post tailored job postings to help their employees who are applying for green cards. Others just post to influence the perception of stock analysts.

Look at the graph of total software engineering employment over the last 20 years and tell me the magnitude of both the market shift and the measurement error that would be required to justify the argument upthread.

BLS doesn’t use job postings for CES.

It’s not, TikTok and Instagram Reels are lying to you

Last night, I got news of a software engineer who committed suicide the day after the election. They were out of work most of the year and struggling deeply.

So heartbreaking and gut-wrenching. :(

I, too, can't find work and am struggling deeply, so I really feel their pain.

Well geez, I’ve been considering switching industries, but suicide seems a bit extreme…

Here are the CDC figures all these articles are based on[0], with a lot of help from lobbying organisations I'm sure. Agriculture lags far behind industries like mining, construction and auto repair, but you won't find wikipedia articles on those. And I am positive most of the people covered by 'agricultural workers' are not those who own the farms, but those who work on them seasonally and are often exploited.

I know I'm coming in hot on a topic that always deserves sympathy, but, at least from a UK perspective, farm owners as a cohort are often playing the victim while being among the most well off in society.

Suicide rates are helped by investing in healthcare, not corn subsidies.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7250a2.htm

> Soybean exports to China dropped 75% from 2017 to 2018.

Time to prepare for part 2

There are several interesting paragraphs buried in "Assistance", especially starting with "As of August 2021, if a farmer wants to sue[...]". tl;dr, there's an antitrust angle here.

Tariffs against Chinese/Mexican goods and the ensuing trade war along with deportation of large parts of their work force are not going to help their economic situation at all.

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