The coming food crisis in the United States | Hacker News Reader

The coming food crisis in the United States

mastodon.online

14 pointsChuckMcM7 comments

I know, this doesn't necessarily seem like HN material, but hear me out. An industry that is ripe for disruption and efficiency restructuring is agriculture. Whether it is robotic farm equipment, indoor 'factory' farms, closed system aqua-ponics, whatever. People need to eat, industrial farming is showing the same signs of stagnation and indifference as industries that have been disrupted in the past by the application of technology. Is this 'tomorrow's big wave? Who knows but it is a lot more real that bigger and bigger language models and it is a lot more impactful long term. So many factors are coming together which are going to make a food crisis in the 'developed' world and there will be some big winners who have applied new ways of getting from seed to table.

Once it's about "winners," getting free money from the government is a lot more efficient than anything that involves going "from seed to table."

And when food is about "winners," famine is but a losers gonna be losing.

That was kind of Sarah's point :-). People who 'farm' because they want free money, not because they actually want to feed people, compose a large fraction of the entities holding arable land in the US. As a result, they won't switch to crops for food, crops take a while to switch over, therefore when the subsidies go away and they all start losing money Americans are going to pay extortionate sums for "imported" food. Those who can't pay will be in a world of hurt.

The US was built on tobacco, sugar, and cotton because agriculture has been conducted in the interests of the wealthy and powerful for as long as there has been civilization…6000 years more or less since humans started irrigating deserts for profit.

People who accumulate vast land holdings do so for rents. That’s the juice needed to keep holding it comes from. If the world seems to be changing, it is most likely reversion to the mean.

Heh, your more cynical than my former college roommate and that is a high bar :-).

I choose to believe that both things can be true, if the rents evaporate then so will the 'juice' and they will offload those holdings. Also, the demand for produce, and the externalities of tariffs, will create opportunities for produce produced domestically.

I’m not cynical. There are many many good people in the world. Historically they are not in power kind of by definition because

  power != strength

IE the disenfranchised can be strong but cannot be powerful.

And folk wisdom does not apply to significant wealth. Significant wealth doesn’t operate paycheck to paycheck. Charles Windsor is not going to liquidate his real-estate because rents went down because the Windsors are not leveraged.

Extrapolation from personal American home ownership experience (or SMB experience) to big girl real-estate is a category error. Events in the Crimea and currently in Ukraine are the cheapest way to acquire that real estate…in terms of money.

Land reform doesn’t happen by thinking.

Them kids that grew up in farm families and moved to SF to code may move back and learn the farm trade before dad dies. Hopefully.

Much of the land is being sold off to China.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com