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Comment by knowitnone3 | Hacker News Reader

what is Bill Gates wanting to do with Iowa farm land?

Bill gates is one of the largest farmland owners in the world (or at least was - I last checked about 10 years ago...) He hires people to work on his farm, and managers to manage it. Food is the most important thing for modern society and the reports I have suggest he is trying to raise food in the most sustainable fashion possible (organic is often not sustainable)

Why is organic not suatsinable? Not affordable I get. But does organic damage the environment making it hard to farm again? or use inputs that are not sustainable?

Genuine question. I am alway curious when a statement goes against conventional wisdom.

Organic allows some really nasty chemicals that build up in the soil because they were used 200 years ago. Organic often substitutes plowing for weed killer - this is both bad for the air - more CO2 - and plowing destroys the soil.

if organic finds something good conventional farming adopts it.

conventional farming is developed at research universities. Organic is developed in cities by people who know nothing about farming, and often have an agenda.

not that conventional farming is all good. And even where it is better not all farmers do what is best. However organic is not a step better.

Thanks. Are there good links for this topic?

I'm not aware of anything. I have to read between the lines when experts (some of them university professors in agriculture) talk to figure out the above.

Organic is literally throwing out a ton of modern technology that makes farming scalable and able to sustain the population at its current numbers.

Organic was never about sustainability, so I’m not sure why you think that’s against conventional wisdom. Organic has always been “chemicals bad so we do things the old fashioned way”

It's just a normal part of his portfolio - only because he's so rich does his 'normal' percentage get to the level of being the largest private land owner. Basically it's a good place to stash wealth.

Collect rent.

That's all rich people do. The premise of capitalism is that the people best at collecting rent should also be in total control of resource allocation.

i would guess it's less about rent seeking and more about him making a bet on safe places to store billions of dollars. there's a lot of economic collapse that can happen where farm land remains valuable in a way that housing stock, office buildings, or MSFT stock wouldn't

The qustion does that collapse look like a warzone where a digitial piece of paper saying you own something means very little.

my point is that if you were to look at the spectrum of collapse that can happen, maintaining ownership of valuable farm land is basically the last stop before your billions being worth nothing. if we're to the point of legal land ownership dissolving then there's really nothing more he could have done to preserve capital

Same as any other big real estate investor: speculate.

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