[sofixa]

> You're going to end up in a position where you're telling a farmer how to manage

Funny you say that. Not only does that actually happen in pretty much all developed country, it's actually needed for a variety of reasons. There are subsidies to incentivise the "correct" crops (you don't want all farmers only doing cash crops for export, rendering your country very vulnerable to import markets to sustain itself), there are also rules/policies to rotate crops to avoid top soil erosion which could be devastating, there are rules on what types of pesticides can be used, etc etc etc etc.

[roenxi]

> Not only does that actually happen in pretty much all developed country...

"Everyone does it" isn't much of an argument when it comes to economics, the field is littered with a long history of group-think episodes where most people do things in a way that was, in hindsight, a mistake. And being steamrollered by more economically productive societies that don't ban progress. The modern policies developed countries adopted have resulted in vast investments in China (and Asia more broadly) to dodge the regulatory states that were built.

And the rest of your comment is straightforwardly telling farmers how to farm. On average, I bet they know all that stuff better than the legislators. They're farmers! If we can't trust them to farm then putting regulators in charge isn't going to save us. That attitude of mother knowing best is still going to result in more misses than hits, even if confidently repeated a few times.

[sofixa]

> And the rest of your comment is straightforwardly telling farmers how to farm. On average, I bet they know all that stuff better than the legislators. They're farmers

Strongly disagree. The incentives are just not the same. If farmers use pesticides which will kill all bugs and pollute nearby rivers to increase their yield a tiny bit, that's not good for everyone else. If they decide they're only going to do tobacco because it's very lucrative to export, that's not good either. If the techniques they're using are obsolete (and thus inefficient and resulting in them barely being able to survive against foreign competition) or very bad for the soil/environment.

Farmers produce food, it's one of the most critical things in a country. If things go wrong, there are famines or economical crisis (cf. Egypt, Sri Lanka in the last few years, Soviet Russia in the past century). Hell, many countries were couped to take over control over their farming sectors for commercial interests (Hawai, Central America and the Caribbean, cf. the Banana Wars).