Hacker News Reader

Comment by qeternity | Hacker News Reader

Is it not a bad thing to encourage poor people to continue doing the thing that has apparently made them poor?

It's also very not true that farmers are poor in the US (median household income about 30% greater than general population). This mindset is like a century old.

View on HN

"It's also very not true that farmers are poor in the US (median household income about 30% greater than general population)."

Most farmers work a "real" job in addition to the farm work.

Then you also have farm workers, who do not own the farm, and they tend to be poor.

What do you mean by farmers? Of the rich farmers, yes, most do have a second job, but the farming does pay most of their income. It's not just a hobby. The second job is something that they can do in between the farm work. The other thing about farming is it's very much investment heavy. And so for a young farmer just getting started out, you're going to be working at farming and all of your income is going right back to paying things off. And so you're going to need a second job to put the food on the table for a few years. After 10 years, because of inflation, you would hope that your income has gone up while the payment you're making on existing land is kept the same, and so you don't have some left over, and so you can start only being a farmer. After, say, 30 years, most of your land is now paid off, and now you can take all that money that was going into paying off millions of farmlands, and you're making enough income that you could pay off of millions of dollars a loan, and you have no loans, and you are very well off. Of course after 30 years you're also getting close to retirement age and you're probably thinking well I'm gonna sell that farm off and now you have a lot of money that you can put into regular retirement acounts and enjoy a really nice retirement. But that means you're not a farmer and so the farmers themselves really have to live like the poor but they're on track to be very wealthy.

The economic landscape of farming is very bimodal. “Most farmers” (by headcount) are subsistence farmers who live in impoverished countries and don’t produce very much food because they are feeding themselves and their immediate community.

The food that people buy at the grocery store in developed countries is primarily produced a relatively small number of industrialized farming operations which are high dollar businesses.

That is both true and not quite true at the same time. The notion of the Yeoman farm family supporting itself off its land is mostly a myth.

Like everything else. it’s been capitalized and farms have consolidated over time. There were lots and lots and lots of farm workers. who are pretty poor and now lack the assets that their grandparents had.

> Is it not a bad thing to encourage poor people to continue doing the thing that has apparently made them poor?

Right, we should tell the farmers to "learn to code"?

Too bad you can't ask Claude to grow potatoes. Though it probably uses the same amount of water and fuel to tell you it can't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com