[scarmig]

I'd extend a bit more sympathy to farmers. When they purchased the land, they were also purchasing bundled water rights; land without the related water rights would have been a fraction of the price. And the property, inheritance, etc taxes they pay on the value of the land are assessed at a price that includes those rights. And all of a sudden when those rights become much more valuable, people want to take it from them?

It's a bitter pill to swallow, particularly when the farmer (not without reason) sees it as an attack on their way of life.

[rootusrootus]

> I'd extend a bit more sympathy to farmers.

Yes, but I'd temper my sympathy with the knowledge that small farmers have mostly been pushed out by extremely large corporations. I have considerably less sympathy for them.

[scarmig]

  Farm economic class by sales values (USD annual) | number
  1k-10k    11000
  10k-100k   5100
  100k-250k   900
  250k-500k   520
  500k-1M     310
  >1M         270
  Total     18100

Source: https://ag.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/2019-Utah-Agr... (see page 27 of the PDF/page 25 of the document)

[yamtaddle]

Most of the first tier and probably some of the second are rich-people tax-dodge "farms", I bet. The rest of the first category is hobby-farming—my family probably counted as among that group, at times, because my dad grew up on a farm and liked doing some farm-stuff on farm-zoned land as an adult, but it represented almost no actual income—he worked an ordinary job, the farming was a hobby with books that just happened to sometimes be slightly in the black.

[EDIT] Oh my god, wait, that's revenue, not profit? I take it back, the entire second tier is tax-dodges and hobby farms, too.

[fargle]

> the entire second tier is tax-dodges and hobby farms

nope. that's what some people live on. geez you expect HN to be entitled, but still

[lazide]

No one in the US is living on < 10k of farm REVENUE, and almost no one can live on < 100K of sales. They’d be lucky to clear 10-20% of that after costs, if that.

That’s not even hand to mouth/subsistence even in rural TN.

[fargle]

yeah, it's pretty sad, right? but that's what they do.

mostly it's subsistence farming - e.g. they raise enough food for themselves. and of course, every able bodied family member works for minimum wage somewhere, when they can. but that does NOT make it a hobby farm.

yes, in fact people in the US make the equivalent of less than 10K a year and still live.

[rootusrootus]

What I'm getting from that is chart is... yes, farming is completely dominated by large companies. Something close to 90% of farms by number comprise as much as (but probably less than) 25% of the economic output. This is making a wild (but I would guess conservative) assumption of what ">1M" translates to.

If I'm reading that wrong, I would appreciate the correction.

[scarmig]

You're right in terms of economic output, but that's not the only measure, particularly when it comes to politics; small farmers might not do much for the economy, but they still vote.

I'm supportive of doing something about how water is allocated, but a strategy that writes off the meaningful number of marginal farmers as economic noise is a strategy that results in tons of opposing ads with genuinely sympathetic characters.

[walnutclosefarm]

I am sympathetic with anyone whose livelihood and investments are threatened by external realities or evolving social expectations. But that has nothing to do with what I was saying, which is a realistic assessment of whether farmers will voluntarily alter their water usage. Most won't, and most won't even admit that their usage is a major problem that needs to be fixed. And it's for the reason I quoted: almost no one is able to see themselves as the problem if their livelihood or personal self-respect is invested in their not being the problem.

This isn't an abstraction to me. My parents were basically forced off the farm I grew up on, and their homestead made nearly valueless, by neighboring farmers whose hog-raising facilities and manure management made the place uninhabitable due to stench and dust. Their neighbors never saw their practices as a problem, at least until they retired and moved to town. I don't believe they were disingenuous in this. They simply were not equipped to imagine that their farming practices, on which they were dependent for their livelihood and self-respect, could be a terrible problem. It is precisely because they were deeply invested in them (both in $ and personal terms) that they could not see it.