[jwcooper]

The problem isn't with the farmers. The problem is the monopolies that surround the farmers.

They buy their seeds from massive corporations that have patents on seeds. They sell their produce to global multi-national corporations that set the prices they'll purchase at. They buy their machinery from John Deere or Case IH at extremely high prices.

They have no negotiating power and are squeezed between these massive corporations. This ends up leading to farmers having to sell land to corporations that will then farm it and extract subsidies from the government.

When a farmer receives a subsidy, it usually just ends up in the pockets of Cargill or Monsanto, with whom they already owe money to.

The whole system is broken from top to bottom.

[smallmancontrov]

Yes, and the man who broke the system, who installed the loophole that allowed decades of mergers and trust-building, was even named Robert Bork!

He was a Nixon/Reagan flunky, naturally, but the Dems ignored the issue for a long time. It was exciting to finally see the first real pushback in the last administration under Lina Khan. So many upset businessmen on TV! Unfortunately, elections have consequences, and the work did not continue.

[vkou]

> It was exciting to finally see the first real pushback in the last administration under Lina Khan. So many upset businessmen on TV! Unfortunately, elections have consequences, and the work did not continue.

Perhaps one of the consequences of her actually pushing back on this was one of the many reasons the owner class overwhelmingly backed Trump.

[kiba]

Subsides tend to get absorbed by monopolists of all kind.

This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords. This is why you need to break up monopolies or tax them. The problem is societal endorsement of monopoly rights all kind to the point of invisibility. Witness any conversations about IP rights and lands.

But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market rather than specializing in profitable but more labor intensive crops.

[triceratops]

> This is why UBI is a nonstarter. It will just get absorbed by landlords

Not necessarily. People live where they live because there are jobs. If they don't need jobs because of UBI, or they can take lower-paying jobs, they can move wherever housing is plentiful.

[9rx]

> But also farmers are in this situation because they chosen to compete in an overcrowded commodity market

Hard to predict the future. It was only a few years ago when crop prices were at record highs and some countries were on the brink of starvation because we weren't producing enough community crops.

The cure for high prices is high prices. But also, the cure for low prices is low prices. The older farmers are used to it. It seems the problem right now is that a lot of the younger guys went through an unusually long stretch of good times and have never felt the bad times before.

[upboundspiral]

Commodity markets are necessary for survival. If we cannot make them work as a society something is deeply wrong.

Someone needs to be farming the food we all eat... If every farmer decided to just plant saffron who would farm the wheat and rice and vegetables that it is used to season?

[WarmWash]

The fix is more expensive food.

Everyone loves the mom and pop businesses but shops at walmart for those rock bottom prices.

We can have our fresh family farms back, but you're paying double for your food. We have the system we have because people value cheap/affordable over everything, regardless of what they upvote on the internet.

[reillyse]

Europe has a very robust, high quality and cheap food system.

Food is extremely high quality, environment is managed and wealth is distributed with support for small farmers.

High quality food is a fraction in Europe of what you pay in the US.

There is additional cost to taxpayers of Europe but US taxpayers are paying a ton for the US system too but just getting worse outcomes.

This can be done.

[Spooky23]

That’s not really true, but we’ve incentivized mass scale farming. I know farmers who can sell produce at competitive prices growing in Upstate NY, but they only get a couple of harvests of most crops, even with advanced techniques that let many crops get planted in March.

The government spent lots of money to turn the California and Arizona deserts into the garden of America. New Jersey planted subdivisions.

[thelastgallon]

A better way to do this to remove the transportation subsidy for big businesses. Trucks do most of the damage to roads (4th power of weight) but consumers bear the brunt of road maintenance. If big vehicles paid their fair share of oil taxes for roads, it will even the playing field for local farmers and businesses.

[lithocarpus]

This is true to a degree, but, if big ag subsidies were phased out, small local farms would have a better chance of being viable.

I guess you could say this raises prices, but on the flip side, small farm prices could start to come down if they were more viable.

[wilkommen]

Not true - the fix is to start enforcing the Robinson-Patman Act, the Sherman Act, and every other piece of legislation already on the books which was written and passed by congress for the purpose of eliminating private monopolies. Walmart and other monopolies are using their monopoly power to put small businesses of all kinds out of business and raise prices at the same time. Here's some info on exactly how they do that: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-secret-scam-drivin...

[autoexec]

> Everyone loves the mom and pop businesses but shops at walmart for those rock bottom prices.

People shop where they can afford to shop. Walmart is famous for not paying people enough to shop anywhere except walmart. The fix is to make sure that people earn a living wage and to actually enforce the Robinson–Patman Act and aggressively go after price fixing. Suddenly walmart's prices won't undercut the mom and pop places and they won't have to charge as much to just barely survive. Opening a store that isn't part of some massive chain would stand a chance at being profitable and affordable. More competition leads to more innovation and more opportunities.

[TurdF3rguson]

Paying double for food is a great idea until you realize that now we need to subsidize everyone else just so they can eat.

[jadbox]

Dang. What are the good options here (without throwing people under the bus)? IMHO, the patents on seeds has been an immense pain to the midwest and should be made void with a phase out plan that starts with the most common seeds (which are causing legal havoc by mixing into neighboring farms via wind).

[BroadacreRidge]

Can you elaborate on the "immense pain"? I don't disagree that monopolies in big AG are a huge problem, but last time I saw someone make this point, I looked into it, and there were relatively few cases of big AG suing small farmers over stuff like this. My understanding of one of the main cases that gets referenced in these discussions was where a farmer bought roundup ready seed, promised not to use it to breed, per standard EULA, then bred with it, and intentionally selected offspring to breed further which showed the roundup ready trait. Am I missing something?

[9rx]

Which patents in particular are you concerned about?

[dpe82]

It's not just that; being a very small undifferentiated supplier in a volatile commodities market with very high fixed capital costs, unpredictable/uncontrollable production capacity and long production lead times is a very difficult business, regardless of the industry.

[9rx]

> it usually just ends up in the pockets of […] Monsanto

Who? Monsanto closed up shop and sold off its assets to Bayer and BASF many years ago.

[jwcooper]

Oh yup, you're right on that. I guess my point still stands as Bayer and BASF kind of fit the bill as well.

[bigbuppo]

The New York Drought is real.