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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Ag. can't just be about profit. There's a dimension which is national-strategic interest. Food security, the domestic food economy is important.

It is my understanding that a lot of the US ag. sector is making inputs for processing for corn oil, fructose, ethanol, and for exports to markets which in turn target american ag, selling e.g. beef back to the US, fattened on US Soy.

It's a complex web. I don't want US farmers going broke, any more than I want Australian farmers going broke (where I live)

So getting this right, fixing farming sector security, is important.

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I recommend checking history of deregulation of agricultural industry in New Zealand. It didn't lose the industry. Actually the opposite happened.

Persistent government subsidies are almost never a good idea long term. I understand that some temporary support might make sense in some cases, but not permanent one. It prevents innovation and optimization. And in the long run it usually makes more damage.

Having been in the NZ ag tech industry for the last 25+ years, US subsidies and tarrifs drove a lot of innovation in NZ (also Europe) and then US manufacturers in the spaces I've been in have pretty much collapsed when faced with better tech as farmers switched to using our ( or the European) tech.

Curious what sort of tech? Like better tractors and such?

A lot of meat cutting (and packaging) robotics and dairy automation are the flashy ones. Softer tech like crop, orchard management and cultivar creation as well as stock breeding/selection or logistics all of which came a long way. The development of uses for byproducts i.e. chemical refineries to change milk into something like protein or milk powder and use the secondary products from those processes to produce alcohols or fertilizer.

Please provide examples

It would appear that to remain competitive they had massive consolidation, and with that an increase in animal density leading to major issues with water pollution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CraFarms

So I guess yay deregulation, now with more capitalist privatized profits with socialized costs!

Downvoting without engaging in a discussion kind of directly violates both the spirit and rules around here.

I've posted pretty solid evidence that dregulation, did not, in fact improve the agricultural situation for New Zealand. It absolutely made a subset of corporations and mega-farmers extremely rich at the expense of the natural resources the rest of the country shares. Would LOVE to hear the arguments about how that's a good thing for the people of New Zealand or our planet as a whole.

But then again, that would require thoughtful discourse...

Because it goes against the urban popular group think. "Blue States subsidizing Red States" "NZ did it, so US can to"

Provide any real or partial claims this isn't the whole story and it's difficult to change your mind on something that is fundamental to your beliefs. So downvote and move to the next post that validates your beliefs. Happens to everyone including me.

Just to expand on this idea with more historical context: part of the reason agriculture is regulated like it is in the US is because it used to be much more deregulated. And then speculation and profiteering in agriculture in the 1920s contributed to the great depression and caused the dust bowl. Then, it became a national food security issue. The New Deal is where a lot of the regulation and subsidies originate, but we didn't just do it for kicks. We have, actually, tried the alternative, and it was a disaster.

Growing excess amount of food is part of food security, but farmers are going bankrupt because they focused on labor efficient agricultural commodity products to the exclusion of everything else. For many farmers, it's not even a full time job

I rather we focus on increasing food security in other way.

Maybe we shouldn't be turning corns into cows as that reduce the amount of energy we are able to access. But how do we keep access to farmlands that we don't use now that we aren't turning corns into cows? I suppose we could just use these lands as pasture.

~60 million acres of corn and soybean in the US, the size of Oregon, is grown exclusively for biofuels. This is unnecessary as you mention, as are the subsidies to farmers for these row crops.

Do those crops contribute to the negative numbers reported since most people don't buy biofuel? Or does it contribute something positive to the numbers with government subsidies guaranteeing returns?

I haven't studied the economics of the biofuel farming.

Corn is turned into ethanol, and is then blended with gasoline. The US consumes ~14B gallons of ethanol per year. It’s a net negative because it’s carbon and water intensive and farmers advocate for more ethanol than is necessary as a subsidy via government mandate.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/03/environm...

https://ethanolrfa.org/media-and-news/category/news-releases...

Which could be easily converted in one harvest to feed a nation if needed. That option is very valuable.

The US already has far more food production than needed, this option is of little value.

>Maybe we shouldn't be turning corns into cows

Why? We like beef. I don't want it to go away.

Because corn fed beef isn't as flavorful as grass fed beef. (Or healthy for the cattle)

Subjective....

There is also a dimension which is about caring for your fellow man and caring for the land which the food you grow depends on.

Which society seems to have lost because we've focused too much on the one metric, "money", over all others.

Agreed, in addition there is the dimension of I don’t want to starve to death, so we should make sure we have a viable regulated agriculture industry.

Subsidies also lead to surpluses that can help buffer price shocks during supply crises; here is a recent example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01638-7

Everyone thinks their thing is too special for markets. I’m sure you’ve heard the argument for healthcare, education, energy, water, food, science, infrastructure, etc.

We need to realign on this politically; either we use markets to allocate scarce resources or we don’t.

The answer is probably that the public does not believe in markets. But we haven’t made that explicit, and instead have the worst combinations of policies; with worse service and enabling grifters.

"Ag. can't just be about profit."

Somewhere off in the distance I hear billionaires laughing.

This is only important if you care about the future of humans. At least in America, attention spans have shortened, empathy has decreased, and individualism has increased. Billionaires don't care about the future beyond their own life. And unfortunately, one of the worst of them is now the head of the country.

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