[dylan604]

> The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food.

Talk to a non-corporate farmer today, and ask them how valued their production of food is. Society, however, does not agree with your sentiment. Obviously I'm nitpicking, but if society agreed with your proposed value, the billionaires of the world would be farmers and not tech people. That's how weird and out of balance we seem to be today.

[dijit]

I think you missed my point.

My point is that we’ve inversed the “value” of each sector.

The highest good you can do for civilisation/society is also the least profitable.

The lowest good you can do for civilisation is the most profitable.

Thus our incentives are opposed diametrically from the benefit of society.

[tim333]

I'm not sure going into farming is even good for society at the moment. My dad was a farmer for a while and there was mostly a food surplus with the EU paying him to set aside land to control that. You do good for society by providing things it's short off.

[spookie]

You should take a look at the price of food after Russia launched their full scale invasion in Ukraine. A significant increase, 15% at its peak and lowering thereafter to about 5%. Still, it is above pandemic levels.

You rise food prices and there's a domino effect on the economy, everything else also increases in price.

It is important the EU is able to produce its own food at acceptable prices.

[pas]

if food security is important then the EU should pay for cost-effectiveness, economic sustainability, ecological resilience, storage capacity, and so on.

AFAIK right now it pays the same for a huge unproductive monoculture of non-edible corn (ie. for bioethanol) as it pays for wheat. (though there's finally talk about some changes to CAP, mostly to stop paying already rich big farms.)

food prices are pretty volatile anyway, and as you see even a war only moved them 15% whereas in Hungary inflation was more than 20%.

[spookie]

Hungary is facing a stagnant economy, with poorly targetted subsidies and overall high corruption. Inflation was already high since 2019 compared to other OECD countries with similar GDP per capita (checked Estonia, Poland, Portugal and Slovakia). They have also continued to engage with Russia economically despite sanctions (even outside the energy sector) leading to sometimes having exemptions or attempting to use that as leverage against EU policies. All of this has further destabilized their economy, given neighbours will hesitate in trade.

Hungary is the worst example you could pick from the EU.

[mrguyorama]

>Talk to a non-corporate farmer today, and ask them how valued their production of food is.

America spends $20-$30 billion a year paying corn growers per bushel of corn they grow

America spends $100 billion+ per year paying people to buy the output of those farmers using food stamps.

America requires that 10-15% of all gas in the entire nation is actually ethanol derived from corn.

Twice now, President Trump has personally destroyed the market for American soybean production and dropped $20 billion on the industry to not piss them off.

I am family friends with the family that grows a significant amount of Potatoes in Maine. They love to complain about anything and everything as they drive around in $80k pavement princess trucks that aren't their $80k work trucks about how much liberals suck as those at least third generation farmers inherit the entire thing and they switch to cute "artisanal" breeds of potatoes that they sell to those same liberals for a nice markup and harvest them with the literal undocumented workers they swear they hate and pay a few dollars an hour, and insist the men aren't men anymore as they drive their airconditioned harvesters and aren't missing any fingers like their ancestors, and spend all their free time getting piss drunk and smoking weed which was grown by their cop buddies as they vote for people who want to make such a thing a crime again, and reminisce about when they were important; In high school. They are actually pretty friendly if you have the right skin color and genitals though.

I think farmers can maybe quit the bellyaching. Most of the modern world solved famine by just giving farmers money for doing a basic job, one that's been so improved and enhanced by technology that they are allowed to care about such things as "How will a trade war affect my profits this year" instead of "Oh my god oh my god an unexpected frost we are all going to die". It is some of the best $150 billion the US spends.

[vablings]

Most of the food production in the United States has been moved over from small individual farmers to large corporations. Any time there is government policy that negatively hurts farmers there is a big push from the media to show small time farmers hurting but the biggest losers are actually the much larger corporations.

Farmers are the ultimate DEI hire and are small farmers are just used as political tools, eventually if companies like John Deere keep getting away with blatant consumer rights abuses these small farmers will be completely wiped out and just left with massive corporations that heavily lobby the government for more subsidy's and free hand-outs