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Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

> 4. The grain industry must diversify.

Since these folks by and large do not grow food for people in America to eat, just how important is this to Americans who do not work in ag? Why do we subsidize farmers to produce products for export? Why do we not do that for other industries?

Two things are true: farming is very hard & a certain set of rich[1] family farmers are coddled.

1 - Chappell, the farmer in the lede, grows 2,400 acres on an 8,000 acre family farm. That's about $5m of land under cultivation on a farm potentially worth near $20 million. This is the type of farmer we are bailing out. This farmer, who is richer than 99% of Americans, and those like him.

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Well strategically in an economic SHTF situation at least we could theoretically feed our populace with the surplus.

But we all know that realistically, at this point, the people in charge would just sell it for a pittance or dump it to manipulate market prices even if 70% of the country was starving— because this is the kind of society we’ve all created.

I hear the argument that food is different, I do. What I don't get is why any of us should care _which_ millionaire owns & operates the farm. If one millionaire isn't scaled enough to run it at a profit and has to sell to a richer millionaire or corporation, don't we still have the same net SHTF outcome?

Maybe we should nationalize farms so no one has to be hungry?

subsidizing businesses that are trapped in that role is essentially not that different from a nationalized or otherwise centrally planned industry

> businesses that are trapped in that role

None of them are trapped, there are bigger buyers that have capital and are willing to take them out. We don't have to subsidize millionaires with our taxes, especially if they don't want the subsidies!

Yeah, I’m saying that theoretically it’s a good idea because it’s food. However, that doesn’t matter because we as a society decided that our food supply is less important for feeding people than as money plumbing for rich people. The money plumbing is supposed to get the food created and allocated as efficiently as possible by rewarding innovation and competition among food businesses; unfortunately, in many instances, efficiency and innovation in plumbing hacking is as profitable or more profitable than being better food producers.

The subsidies would be fine if they were helping farmers working in good faith efficiently produce food for people to eat.

If we develop all agricultural land while chasing dollars it cannot end well.

Of course we won't develop everything, but I'm not sure the monetary value of the land adequately prices the value of being able to grow crops. I won't pretend to have a plan, but watching very productive cropland get converted into lawns and warehouses makes me leery of how ag land is dealt with.

Here, we are basically talking about people who grow export products, not food eaten by Americans. My understanding is we could take most of these farms completely offline without much impact to US food supply (I could be wrong on this).

There appears to be a dichotomy right now between commodity farmers whose export markets have collapsed due to national policy and those who grow food for American consumption, who are not having that problem. I'm trying to gauge how important the former is to those of us who do not work on those farms.

Only about 20% of corn and 40-45% of wheat is exported. Since a lot of the rest goes to animal feed either directly or as distillers grains (waste product from ethanol/biofuel production that is still edible), it could definitely impact food security here in the US.

The complicating factor is that those grains are the feed for the last stage in beef production, with about half of all US agricultural land going to pasture for the previous stage. Eliminating those grains could significantly impact how much food the rest of the land can actually produce.

Those are big percentages of export. You also raise the point that there are other categories of domestic use that also are not food (distillation, biofuels).

But again, we're not necessarily talking about farms literally closing. This is mostly about which rich person gets to operate a given plot of land. If a farmer goes under and sells to another farmer, at the margin why should we care? I still have yet to see a good answer as to why we should care which millionaire operates these farms.

> Those are big percentages of export.

Until you have a bad crop year. That's when you are glad you are in the habit of massively overproducing for seemingly unnecessary reasons. Like we saw glimmers of during the 2022 global food crises, those exports (and other uses, like biofuels) start to wind down when the locals begin to worry about going hungry.

> If a farmer goes under and sells to another farmer, at the margin why should we care?

We don't — unless many farmers are all at risk of going under at the exact same time. That's when disruptions become realistic. That concern isn't limited to farming. 2008 and 2020 showed great examples of where we feared many players in other industries all going under at the same time and did what we could to prevent that from happening for much the same reasons.

One approach I've seen, aside from zoning related laws, is to give ag land huge property tax breaks. Want to convert it to some other use? Expect a 90% increase in property taxes.

It's far from perfect since some large landowners run "hobby" farms to get the tax break while producing nothing of significance for the greater society. Other developers take the bet that they can get the land developed and sold before the biggest bills come due and it will be someone else's problem.

To a certain degree, isn't diversifying kind of antithetical to the niche grain serves? That is to say, it seems like the whole role of grains is to be a fairly generic source of starch. I'm not sure that you could diversify much while still serving that role.

Point taken. I think the "grain industry" has that problem, but no individual farmer is duty-bound to go 100% on grain for export every year. For example, they could grow grain crops intended for consumption in the US as a hedge against the (predictable) disruption in export markets.

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