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Comment by latentcall | Hacker News Reader

I lived in Colorado for 10 years until very recently and this was a very emotional debate. The ranchers submitted claims that exceeded the reimbursement fund but if I remember correctly some of the claims were questionable and reaching.

My partner worked for Colorado Parks & Wildlife and that organization was largely in favor of this for obvious reasons.

However I do feel for some of the ranchers. Some are barely scraping by and wolves in the area is an additional stressor they have to worry about. Though I do think they are over exaggerating the effects this has had to some extent. The richest ones with the most land won’t be affected nearly as much as the small guys.

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I wonder if a better strategy would be to, rather than relying on the ranchers to submit claims (hard to measure, unlikely events falling on people randomly), they could just tax all tourism and come up with some formula to pay out to all the ranchers based on their expected harm (easier to measure, law of large numbers).

I mean this is ideal, yes, but you're going to end up having probably at least one person get really screwed and before a lightning rod for scrapping the whole system: we see this again and again, most notably in state cases regarding trans sports where it ends up being banned as a matter of law over literally one person rather than something more sensible, like deferring to individual league rules instead of making it a legal question.

Loans were mentioned. Perhaps the wolf-guys can offer low or zero-percent loans (or guarantees) to the cow-guys.

They say the wolves are good for tourism, but would all the ranchers disappearing also be good for tourism?

Thanks for sharing! It seems that many well-intentioned government policies cause disproportionate harm to smaller businesses and other entities (like charity). Perhaps something should be done to compensate for this (such as making reimbursement inversely proportional to capital or revenue).

>The richest ones with the most land won’t be affected nearly as much as the small guys

are you saying they will all lose the same stock on a weighted basis, but rich ranchers can last longer all the while losing money till they too are small ranchers with a wolf problem?

Interpreting it charitably, it's like what happens with maternity leave.

If you have 1 employee who needs to go on leave, you're required to pay benefits (maybe a salary), the work she was doing still needs to be done, and you have to replace whoever you hire as a substitute when she comes back, then you're going to be in a real pickle. [0]

If you have 1,000 employees, approximately the same work gets done, and it's just the cost of doing business. You're able to effectively self-insure against that risk.

The wolf thing is similar. If you're poor, have one cow, and a wolf eats it, that's your livelihood down the drain. If you have 10,000 cows then even a multi-day onslaught from a pack of wolves as you work out the details of why your herd is shrinking is just the cost of doing business.

[0] That isn't arguing against maternity leave, just that saddling individuals with a society-level goal isn't often a great use of resources. In this case, instead of a communal tax for the things society values, you randomly cripple the small businesses you claim to support. Taxes hurt your reelection chances though, whereas pushing the risks to ordinary people (no matter the extent of the worst case) rallies the electorate around your welfare initiatives and concentrates the damage on a group to small to hurt your election. As a side-cost (one I assume is intentional, but I might just be a bit jaded), large companies are unharmed.

The wolf thing is similar. If you're poor, have one cow, and a wolf eats it, >that's your livelihood down the drain. If you have 10,000 cows then even a multi-day onslaught from a pack of wolves as you work out the details of why your herd is shrinking is just the cost of doing business.

if you have 10,000 farmers with one cow each, some number of them will lose a cow to a wolf, the same number of cows that the big rancher loses to the wolves.

it's the same cost of doing business, and the devastation of a small number of individuals is made up for by the large population of 1 cow farmers who suffered no losses at all, doing thus even better than the big farmer.

plus, the one cow farmers, being people and not corporations, will pitch in and help their neighbors because that bad luck could affect any of them.

> same cost of doing business

In aggregate, sure, but people make personal decisions for personal reasons, not because of aggregates.

Early in my career I had an opportunity that looked like a 92% chance (based on stats of previous people going through the program) of a nice tech job and an 8% chance of >2yrs of financial problems keeping me out of tech (1st year going into debt for a below-CoL internship type thing, 2nd year working 80+hrs/week in a decidedly non-tech job to pay off that debt, not having time to devote to portoflios and programming better). On average the program is great, but I didn't take it because an 8% chance of major life problems was too risky for my other goals at the time (early marriage, wife still in school, ...).

That's what I meant by "self insurance." If you add up thousands of events, each of which are fine on average, then the aggregate is likely fine. If one of them is devastating though, the risk of devastation is high if you only have a few events.

> pitch in and help

I'm not familiar enough with rural CO culture to comment. In other rural areas I've seen, neighbors are happy to help with labor (coming together to ward off wolves, helping rebuild broken structures, ...). They're happy to help with physical goods that are effectively a manifestation of labor (bringing over dinner as you're struggling financially or what have you). They're not going to give you a new cow though. Your finances are still hosed if the wolf gets to you.

I don't mean this to be insensitive but one thing I don't understand...

If the ranchers are barely scraping by, maybe they shouldn't be ranchers?

I mean, I spent a while trying to be a photographer but it was hard and paid really badly. So I stopped being a photographer.

Obviously that sucks and it's good to have a safety net for people to fall back on but I don't see why someone being a rancher now means they have to be forever.

Incentivizing large corporate ranching conglomerates is not the solution, as agricultural diversity is our strength, especially in products and sources. Maybe small time ranching could be encouraged through tax rescindment programs?

What agricultural diversity? The 89% of farms are “small” and produce 18% of the value on 45% of the acres. They are generally more hobbies than business, and as such rarely efficient enough to be the sole source of income for people. Non commercial farms are plentiful, but not necessarily useful.

“Family farms” are more impactful, but that’s including operations with 50,000+ acres and large workforces.

A lot of times these 89% are not legally allowed to sell their products, as USDA and FDA require them to outsiurce processing. In the few cases where farmers just do it anyways, the long arm of the law strikes with extreme prejudice, e.g. see Amish farmers selling unpasteurized yoghurt and cheese –products which derive their value by being spoiled through probiotic micro organisms.

Loosen up regulations, but allow everyone to be accountable again, and common law will sort it out.

If less than 1% means ‘a lot’ to you then sure those are meaningful problems.

But, from my perspective most of what’s going on gets zero attention because it’s boring. I know a lot of small farmers who aren’t struggling because that’s not their primary income it’s just a hobby / lifestyle. Making or losing a few grand per year on a hobby just isn’t that strange, but toss growing food into the mix and people assume it’s more meaningful. Larger operations are run like any other business and some of them fail through mismanagement just like any other businesses.

If Wickard vs. Filburn (4) and similar laws/decisions were to be repealed, incentives could stack up and growing your own food to save money, and sell intrastate, may become popular again.

4) https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/317/111

The effort vs economic rewards of growing your own food is horrible. Some people enjoy it as a hobby, I know many of them. But it’s not something that’ll ever really catch on by repealing such laws alone.

Automation/economies of scale + government subsidies + many farmers having massive amounts of specialized knowledge and skills vs what amounts to subsistence agriculture is just wildly in favor of large scale operations.

Farm subsidies enable international shipping to the extent of putting foreign farmers out of work. (1)

This also works in reverse, (2) artificially destroying the pricing mechanism, and externalizing costs to the taxpayer.

1) https://en.irefeurope.org/publications/online-articles/artic...

2) https://www.farmpolicyfacts.org/the-bitter-impact-of-foreign...

I’m not saying they are a good thing, just that they exist.

Hunting by comparison has a vastly better ROI if you want some food independence.

Even if we accept the premise that 'if doing [X] is barely scraping by, you shouldn't do [X]"' is indisputably rational and easy to process for one's one circumstances, you must see that making the choice to be and no-longer-be a photographer is trivial compared to the choice of being and no-longer-being a rancher. The difference in the levels of personal, financial, emotional, and lifestyle investments required to take up or abandon either career choice (for a versatile meaning of 'choice') is astronomical.

It seems the lifestyle they enjoy makes it worth barely scraping as owners of very desirable land. Otherwise it would be worth starting over somewhere else where there are jobs that need to be filled. A lot of people woking jobs in cities and towns are barely scraping by too.

I wish we had a healthy safety net in the US but people in need live different lifestyles beyond ranching.

My stepdad has owned his ranch for 30+ years, before that he worked it while his dad owned it. He hasn't had a "normal" job since the 80s. I can tell you confidently he is barely scraping by, but there's not exactly a lot of options. The mortgage on these ranches are typically very low interest, but VERY long time horizons, for much much more than a typical home. Add loans for tractors, livestock, etc you're talking about a mountain of debt.

Sure I don't recommend young people getting into it, but I don't think you really understand long-time ranchers here.

Exactly. The bottom line is that (most) people aren't stupid. If they're doing something that doesn't seem rational, it's most likely because you aren't seeing it from their perspective and are lacking information.

If the ranchers had what they considered to be better options, they'd go for it.

I don't understand either, everyone wants to be paid more but this is a demonstration of the power of rural America.

I read in a response that the alternative is conglomerate corporate ranching, that's because they have the necessary resources to protect livestock and withstand financial shocks. The article points out high real estate prices because people buy homes for recreation, it makes it hard for ranchers to hire employees who can afford to live in the area. We can import meat from nations that lower costs with more abundant housing.

We can purchase our food from overseas in peace time. Once the trade routes are disrupted or political embargos hit, suddenly you have 300 million mouths to feed and we can't get critical staples to feed them.

Having local production is a national security defensive measure. It makes sense not to JIT our food supplies.

National security is only valued when it’s convenient. This is America we have SecDef Alcoholic, we store nuclear secrets in the shitter and apparently TikTok is ok now.

While on the level of an individual farmer that makes sense, what about the whole of society?

From what I understand, in archeology driving marginal land out of cultivation is one of the prime indicators of a civilization in terminal decline.

Advanced civilizations tend to rely on irrational productivity quite a bit, hence things like the post-COVID labor shortage.

I understand what you’re saying but as another commenter pointed out, many ranchers are in incredible debt. The same is for farmers. You get trapped in a cycle you can’t break from without a miracle.

I think you're making GPs point. We see this exact argument being used against more urban types? "If they didn't want to be saddled with crippling student loans, they shouldn't have gone to college to get a degree leading to an exciting career of basket weaving".

Great, but they did and now they're hosed. Just like in this case, perhaps those ranchers shouldn't have become ranchers and thus caused themselves to go into incredible debt. But they did and now they're hosed.

One can choose whether or not that we the people should help them out when in this situation, but we should apply that with more quality.

To be clear I don’t want to “blame” ranchers for their situation. Many ranchers took over family farms etc. I didn’t mean to make it sound like that.

This answer probably explains the urban-rural divide just as well as wolves do. Photography is a hobby for most which turns into a career for some. If it doesn't work out like it didn't for you it is easy to just go back to hobby photography. Farming, ranching and forestry is a life for most, a career for many. If it doesn't work out you lose your farm, ranch or forest holding and will have to find another life.

Swap out "photography" for "enormous college debt for a degree that's unlikely to lead to a high paying career" and it starts to line up with the rancher example.

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