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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

Farming is somehow still regarded as being some mom-and-pop heartland thing rather than the highly optimized manufacturing operation it has been for decades. Direct farm employment is now just 1.2% of the population. It was 40% in 1900. The special treatments farms and farmers get is an outdated relic kept alive by the electoral college.

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It’s because it’s still mom and pop because 72% of farms are still fully owned by people but they tend to be smaller in size and only account for 30% of the total farm land. And majority of farms are still under a 1000 acre size. The problem is that there are about 27000 farms that are hyper giants of 5000+ acres which are the consolidated operations that account for a huge portion of the US farmland.

Also, farming is mom and pop highly optimized operation. Those two don’t need to be separate things. Once you understand that running a farm can be hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions, you can understand the disconnect.

We should be talking in terms of dollars, not land. It won't change things enough to change the point but it'll probably be worth a few percent.

There is a lot of national security benefit to propping up the domestic agricultural industry. We've probably overstepped that line, but just "leave it to the free market" is a really bad option, too.

People hammer subsidies for farms, but I'd rather not have one bad year cause food shortages the following year when we lose production from shuttered farms. The free market shouldn't control everything.

Subsidies are one thing, I just wish they weren't excluded from labor laws

Unfortunately "the farmers" is simply a marketing gimmick along the lines of "the children". It is used to evoke a specific image and implied set of ideals. And because of that we have to deal with all kinds of crap legislation tied to it.

This is a very online opinion. "The farmers" feed us. Very hard for me to think that's a marketing gimmick.

At the population scale in the US "The farmers" as in the stereotype of the rugged, individual American by and large does not. That's part of the point of this article.

BigAg farms? You're absolutely right.

Yes, cannot emphasize this enough. Farming is an industry, and we have take it seriously as one and stop romanticizing it.

Of course, the irony is that now we romanticize industry too.

The workplace is becoming increasingly abstract. I wonder if there'll be a time when cubicles and spreadsheets become an object of nostalgia or romantization.

wait people used to have walls separating them from their neighbors? and, like, 40sq feet to themselves? what the fuck?

What's wrong with holding in esteem the things that truly underpin our security in this country?

The special treatment of farmers is about food security. We generally trust farmers to keep delivering us food and we're willing to allow them a lot of special treatment because of that.

The highly optimized manufacturing operation has made farming into a powerful tool of statecraft internationally. Other countries become dependent on our beans and corn to [indirectly] feed their people or for inputs for their own industries. That gives us diplomatic leverage.

Once you start thinking about that, a lot of the mystery or 'inefficiency' of farming in the USA makes more sense. For example, the subsidies to grow corn and soy but not kale and squash or whatever was in the article- growing kale and squash isn't a strategic priority.

It’s worth noting that this industrial scale is only possible with pesticides and herbicides that are very bad for insects and suspected hormone disruptors and carcinogens, etc.

Im not sure we were on the same page. I'm saying that the importance of these agribusinesses is similar to the importance of the military- so something like insect damage or hormonal disruption, soil erosion, etc don't rank as factors that count.

> an outdated relic kept alive by the electoral college.

And yet, farmers are a vocal and critical political bloc in every other EU country, too.

Farming is just important. Not as much because it employs a large portion of the population, but because it keeps a large portion of the population alive. It is the original industry that's "too big to fail" - if you let it, you get famine.

Very well said. There is no alternative to having a successful farming industry.

The country wouldn't even exist without the electoral college. It was pivotal in uniting the states under a federal government, and is working as intended. Maybe the USA should be abandoned, and all ties between the states renegotiated, but you shouldn't be able to unilaterally change the terms of the deal.

It was necessary at the time yes, it's just drastically outlived its usefulness.

Useful to who? It's working exactly as intended. You shouldn't get to unilaterally change the terms of a contract. If both parties agree, then sure. But if not, you have to accept the good with the bad, it's a compromise. We've gotten a lot more out of the deal than it has ever cost.

The electoral college was invented in part to increase the ability slave states at the founding of the country keep a certain amount of control - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/electoral-college-slav....

It set up the critical vulnerability that we have today, that in states where the votes are close at the state level, switching just a handful of votes completely moves the votes in the electoral college. This will be a continuing temptation, and a weakness of the us system. The 200 or 300k votes in swing states that had Biden beating Trump and then Trump beating Harris this time is not a great thing in democracy.

So this vulnerability makes it a potential attraction to steal votes. There was the notorious recorded phone call when Trump called up the Secretary of State in Georgia and said he only needed 11,700 votes, please give them to him.

How does any of that change anything I've said?

They explicitly negotiated the electoral college to protect their ability to not be overwhelmed by more populous states, and forever maintain their voice in the union. It is working exactly as intended, and is essentially a contract we are all a party to.

We don't let one party unilaterally change other contracts, why should we here? It seems you'd have to be a very big hypocrite to support such a thing. You should honour the deal or find a way to renegotiate it that makes everyone happy, not just yourself.

For one thing, the social contract among the states was already changed in the 1860s. We're no longer some loose confederation of independent states. The Feds are in charge, whether you like it or not, and the states are effectively administrative divisions, whether you like it or not. We literally fought a war about this and the "states' rights" people lost.

For another, we're not bound to contracts between people who are long dead.

For another, the constitution (little c, not the actual document) is not a literal contract. That's a methaphor.

Finally: Why do you, as a person, want a system where land can vote? Or are you a parcel of land pretending to be a person?

> It's working exactly as intended.

I think the founders would be pretty surprised to see the vast majority of electoral votes being determined all-or-nothing by the popular vote of the citizens of the state. If that was how they intended it to work, you might think they would've set it up that way in the first place.

> Useful to who?

To the electorate at large.

Nope. I find it incredibly useful.

Electoral college is a red herring.

Direct election of senators has been way worse for the country. You need something that represents the states as entities.

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