[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.

[smallmancontrov]

Do you propose continuing to not push back instead? That'll show 'em!

Populism is in the air, and for good reason. Lina Khan's FTC was not all they feared, but if it had been, our mistake would have been one of not going far enough.

[throwawaysleep]

Make a deal with big ag to cap food price growth in exchange for allowing ANYTHING they do to farmers. They can squeeze as hard and in as monopolistic a manner as they please on that end.

Kill two birds with one stone.

Farmers have a lot of equity that corporates could be given in exchange for lower food prices.

[NewJazz]

Prices aren't everything. Excessive pesticides can make cheap produce have negative health effects and thus a worse value. Poor soil chemistry can make cheap produce less nutritious and thus a worse value.

[toomuchtodo]

~78% of farmers voted for him. They are directly responsible for their own outcome in this regard.

Canada supplies 75-80% of US potash imports, and potash is a non-substitutable input in agriculture; without it, crop yields drop significantly. China no longer buy soybeans from US farmers, and instead now sources from South America; they have made a token 12M ton purchase, as they promised.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/farmers-bailout-tr...

> Ragland, for example, supported Trump dating back to 2016, making him just one of many in rural America. Trump won a majority of USDA “farming-dependent” counties ahead of his first term, and within a year of assuming office, his trade wars drove American farm exports to China down from $19.5 billion to $9 billion. Ultimately, farmers saw a decline of $27 billion in agricultural exports, nearly 71 percent of that attributable to soybean profit losses. Ragland, a soybean farmer, still turned right back around and voted for Trump again in both 2020 and 2024. Here again, he was just one of many. Farmers increased their support for Trump by 5 percent in 2020, hitting 76 percent support, and then added another 2 percent in 2024, reaching 78 percent support. In 100 of the country’s 444 “farming-dependent” counties, according to Investigate Midwest, Trump won a whopping 80 percent of the vote.

> “So they voted for this guy three times—all these white farmers did. And now this president has turned agriculture in this country to the worst [shape it’s been in] since the ’80s. Farm bankruptcies. Farm foreclosures. Farm suicide [My note: farmer suicides are 3.5x-4x the general population]. Input costs—all these things,” Boyd told me.

https://investigatemidwest.org/2024/11/13/trump-election-far...

> Not only did Trump increase his support among farming-dependent counties, but more than 100 of those counties supported him with at least 80% of their vote.

This is entirely self inflicted, which to me, is wild and a case study for history. This was a collective choice, intentionally made.

[pear01]

Farmers like Ragland are overrepresented.

Why do these rural states (several of which have a total population less than that of major metro areas on the coasts) have two senators?

The senate is an antidemocratic institution. The compromise that every state gets two senators made sense when we were a weak, newborn and vulnerable nation, with a total population of less than 3 million people. Not anymore. The founders likely didn't want people like Ragland to have the vote anyway. They were not salt of the earth farmers they were largely plantation and merchant and legal elites. Ragland is the dumb mob rule they feared.

Maybe the 17th amendment was a mistake. At the very least, why stop there? The constitution is not sacred, as established and as written, the founders would have given Ragland less representation.

Perhaps in the spirit of actual democracy and modern reform, it is time to revisit the idea that every state gets two senators. Given what is really going on here is these states vote against their own interests and then rob blue states to cover up the shortfall. Why are blue states tolerating it?

It would be one thing if it was just about money, but it's not. These populations are being deputized in a culture war that tells them to hate you while they take your money. They need a reality check.

[dboreham]

Meta-answer: whenever you ask a question "why...<crazy thing> is done in the US", the answer will turn out to be "something something slavery" or the related "something something racism".

[jmyeet]

This is an example of taking the wrong lesson from history.

The lesson from the last 20 years is that voters consistently vote to people who speak to their interests and their problems. The biggest electoral landslide in this time is Obama in 2008 and second place isn't even close. Obama ran as a progressive. He didn't govern as one but that's not really the point. Although it's a big part of the reason of why we're here now.

There has (now) been a 50+ year trend of declining living conditions and real wages. People are getting loaded up with debt essentially to make wealthy people even wealthier. Everything has been getting worse.

This was the turning point of the 2016 election. Trump's talk of being an outsider (he isn't), draining the swamp (he didn't) and talking to actual voter concerns was what propelled him to the nomination. And the victory because Hilary Clinton was such a dogshit bad candidate who thought she could win running as a generic corporate Democrat. You know who else run with populist messaging? Bernie Sanders. A nontrivial number of people who voted for Bernie in the primaries voted for Trump in the general. This might confuse you if you think of this as a purely Democratic-Republican divide. It wasn't and it isn't.

So why do farmers keep voting for Trump even though he now has a record of screwing them over? Because he speaks to their interest and their problems where Democrats don't talk to them at all.

2024 was a textbook example of how to intetnionally run a campaign to lose the biggest lay up election in history. No real policies. Ordinary people do not care about tax credits for small businesses. That doesn't help anyone who is struggling to afford rent and food.

So you can say "you made your bed now lie in it" to the farmers but does that help you? Does that help the country? The Democratic Party is complicit in everything that's happened by their intentional inaction and choice to lose.

[toomuchtodo]

The lesson is not for me, the lesson is for these farmers who will go bankrupt, lose their farms and land, and commit suicide in some quantities of each. Perhaps don't trust someone who only tells you what you want to hear, and yet never delivers. Most unfortunately, the lesson will fall on deaf ears while we all carry on. A cautionary tale, for sure. Sometimes we trust the wrong people. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

> So you can say "you made your bed now lie in it" to the farmers but does that help you? Does that help the country?

If there are less voters like this over time, yes, I put forth that will help the country (~2M 55+ voters age out every year, ~5k per day). Whether the country is worth saving, we can save for another thread. If someone won't change their mind, nor their vote, you've arrived at an impasse. You can only wait for time to work. Again, very unfortunate.

> The Democratic Party is complicit in everything that's happened by their intentional inaction and choice to lose.

"They made me do it." is not an argument. You vote for the chainsaw, you get the chainsaw. My understanding was that conservatives held personal responsibility as a core belief. Am I mistaken? Better luck next election cycle.

I take no pleasure in discovering that this is reality. It brings me great sadness. "We must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be." -- Maurice

[jmyeet]

No candidate is owed votes. Candidates must earn votes. If voters didn't vote for your candidate, your candidate failed. The voters didn't fail. The candidate did. And what we have in the modern Democratic Party is an intentional choice not to promise or do anything but to expect votes and simply say "Trump bad" (which he is). That's not a policy platform. And people, rightly, rejected it.

If that creates problems for you (and, let's face it, it creates problems for everyone but the billionaires at this point), you should direct your anger at the candidates not the voters, particularly when the candidate was dogshit with no policies.

Old people dying isn't going to solve this problem. They're being replaced by young (particularly male) voters who are disenchanted, disenfranchised, disempowered and disillusioned because they have nothing to hope for as society is crumbling around the and they have no future.

If you want more people to vote for your candidates, they have to offer them something. It's really that simple.

People not voting for someone who doesn't speak to their issues and offers them nothing is quite literally the least surprising and most predictable outcome.

[watwut]

> The lesson from the last 20 years is that voters consistently vote to people who speak to their interests and their problems

This is false. Trump did not spoken to their problems.

He spoken to their hate, to they wish to harm other people. He is a crook and that appealed to them - they want to steal like him.

They voted for Trump, because they like seeing abuse. That was super clear, if you actually listen to what they say.

[loeg]

Obama did not run as a progressive, lol.

Much of the rest of this is equally ahistorical. Living conditions and wages haven't gotten worse over the past 50 years.

[Spooky23]

Were you in high school or elementary then?

Obama ran on “hope” and “change” very foofy stuff. Ultimately you may be able to support your position by virtue of his saying very little at all.

Wages have in fact fallen for the majority of people in real terms.

[jmyeet]

You must be young because nobody who lived through his campaign would say that.

He was anti-war. In 2007-2008. Only a few years when the majority of Democrats voted in favor of the Iraqi War Resolution, something that helped sink Hilary Clinton's 2008 bid. He ran on universal healthcare. He ran on renewable energy. He ran on increased LGBTQ rights.

He won Iowa by 9 doing this. To a war hero. Kamala lost by 13. To a convicted felon who had a track record of screwing over farmers.

[techdmn]

Completely agree. Trump is selling the wrong solutions, but many people hear a truth when he tells them they are getting screwed. Democrats insist that business as usual is great and simply extort voters: "It votes for a broken healthcare system, a broken electoral system and increasing income inequality or it gets the orange fascist again."

Biden / Harris also essentially offered voters the Trolley Problem. If you don't pull the lever Trump will fund genocide. If you do pull the lever, we will also fund genocide, but maybe less genocide.

If your campaign can be described as an instance of a classic ethical dilemma, maybe the problem isn't the voters? At the very least, if Democrats 2024 campaign rhetoric is to be believed, funding genocide was more important to them than maintaining U.S. democracy.

[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.

[FireBeyond]

Not necessarily? Not that we've had one recently at the federal level, but there are multiple studies that show that state or city level minimum wage bumps tend to show an increase in average rental price, by the same percentage, within sometimes as few as four months.

[triceratops]

You have to live in or near the city to collect the higher minimum wage. With UBI you could live anywhere. Even outside the country maybe. They aren't comparable.

[kiba]

UBI doesn't fix this because whereever someone live will start the process of someone absorbing income, regardless if it's income or not. You need to break the chain between income of people and land ownership by taxing land ownership.

[triceratops]

Land ownership is taxed. With UBI someone could buy land out in the boonies and put down a trailer and just live there.

[autoexec]

There'll always need to be other constraints on landlords because there's zero reason why they won't just all screw renters over in every area no matter how plentiful housing is.

[Spooky23]

You have to make it impossible for them to exist. Rentiers are the lowest form of business, and incentives need to make it difficult for them to prosper too much.

These issues are why policy was oriented around individual home ownership for decades.

[rangestransform]

Orienting policy around individual home ownership just ends up eventually with more people’s voting interests aligned with landowners, and is part of the reason why increasing property values and NIMBYism is so entrenched in American government structures

[autoexec]

We could definitely stand to orient some policy around making sure that first time homeowners aren't typically buying their starter homes at age 40. Having voting interests aligned with landowners wouldn't be a bad thing if most people were landowners.

[triceratops]

There's an argument that landlording gets entirely too favorable treatment from the tax code compared to any other type of business or investment. Seriously proposing eliminating property rentals is weapons-grade stupid.

[triceratops]

How would they do that if 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?

[TurdF3rguson]

Other countries? Asia seems to be able to make a living off of rice farming, and their secret is not going into debt investing in $1M harvesters.

[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.

[sgc]

This is like the education or gun debates, or basically any quality of life message you might have. It's almost impossible to get your message heard. There will always be some non-reason why everything is oh-so-different in the US. It's very frustrating to live here with all the matter-of-fact head-in-the-sand know-it-all bloviating.

Meanwhile our teachers are suffering enormously, our education is terrible, our roads are terrible, we are poisoning ourselves with substandard food, we have extremely expensive but relatively poor healthcare to deal with the problems that creates, we have no time off and are labor slaves where maximum effort for minimum pay is the norm, and half the country has become violently oppressive to the point of absolutely thriving off the suffering they perceive inflicted on others. And still, we know better - of course - because we are Americans.

[autoexec]

There are some very wealthy people who have spent massive amounts of time and money making things they way they are. They've got things set up in a way that benefits them. They go to great lengths to keep Americans convinced that the way things are can't be changed and it's an uphill battle trying to convince Americans otherwise. Even if most Americans wise up they'll still use the resources they have to stop the changes we want from happening. I don't know what the solution is, but I do know it won't be easy.

[Proziam]

I've lived in Sweden, Germany, and the United States. Just being honest about my experience here, but the cheap stuff (like potatoes) are cheaper in the EU but the expensive stuff (like beef[0]) are more expensive.

[0] https://www.globalproductprices.com/rankings/beef_price/

[reillyse]

When you take quality into account it’s no contest. You literally can’t buy American beef in the EU because it is so contaminated with hormones and antibiotics.

[Proziam]

This is a pretty common claim, but in the US you can buy similarly 'pure' beef and it's still cheaper. I prefer the EU approach for general food production, requiring every stage of the process be clean enough that you don't need to chlorinate chicken, for example. But, Americans do have access to the same quality food at much lower prices (and they earn more besides).

[WarmWash]

Europeans don't have to eat 1700 calories in a meal to feel full.

[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.

[9rx]

> if big ag subsidies were phased out, small local farms would have a better chance of being viable.

Maybe. The subsidies that we always hear about is a portion of insurance premiums paid by the government. Presumably if the government pulled out of the subsidy, the risk/reward of insurance would tilt towards not having it. Many farmers already forego having insurance even with the reduced price.

Which would mean nothing until something bad happens. But when something does happen, that means some big farms could collapse. But it would also mean small farms are just as likely to collapse right beside.

I expect you are ultimately right: That once the collapses occur, it would be hard to rebuild a large farm before it ends up collapsing once more, leaving farms unable to ever grow beyond being small again. But is that what you imagine for small farms?

Of course, that's all theoretical. In the real world, the government wouldn't let the food supply fall apart like that. If farms didn't have insurance, it would simply come in and bail them out when destructive events occur. It is a lot simpler, and no doubt cheaper (the subsidy is offered on the condition of being willing to give production data back in return), to implement a solution ahead of time rather than panicking later.

[lithocarpus]

I'm for subsidizing agriculture that improves long term soil quality and abundance. i.e. kind of the opposite of what most big ag row crops do now.

It's tricky to implement any subsidy in a way that's not exploited by big companies. But a place to start would be not subsidizing synthetic fertilizer and pesticides or anything that degrades soil long term, to encourage farms of every scale to focus on natural long term soil improvement.

[9rx]

> i.e. kind of the opposite of what most big ag row crops do now.

From what I'm seeing out there, the big row croppers are largely leading the pack in bringing sustainable improvement to soil quality. It has become abundantly clear that, even if you aren't concerned about the soil, that these modern practices are actually leading to higher yields, improved efficiency, and ultimately greater profitability. — It is small farms that are often struggling to adapt, lacking sufficient capital and/or cashflow needed to transition away from their old tools and methods.

Which big farms are you basing your comment on?

[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.

[WarmWash]

>People shop where they can afford to shop.

No, they shop where they can get the most stuff for the least amount of money.

Temu and Shein didn't fill some kind of product availability void, they filled the relentless consumerism void of people.

[autoexec]

It's not about "product availability" it's about "product affordability"

> "Google Trends data shows that ultra-fast fashion clothing retailer Shein is searched more often in states with high poverty percentages." (https://cnsmaryland.org/2022/11/17/popularity-for-shein-surg...)

That's not to say that rich people don't enjoy a deal, but poor people shop where they can afford. I try not to go into Walmart, but when I have its hard not to notice that the people shopping there don't look very wealthy (In fairness, people with money who buy things at Walmart tend to order online). Even Walmart admits this (https://www.businessinsider.com/wal-mart-says-food-stamps-ar...). 1 out of every 8 Americans is on food stamps, Many of those not on food stamps are struggling to stay off of them. A lot of Americans would love to pay a little more to shop at nicer places.

[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?

[FireBeyond]

Relatively few that got to court.

While some farmers certainly did as you described (and while personally I disagree with the whole concept, leaving that aside for now), others just caught wind drifted seeds on their land.

The issue was that Monsanto et al would often put the onus on small farmers to prove they didn't deliberately breed the seed. Being civil, the issue became more "balance of probabilities" versus "beyond reasonable doubt". When you have Monsanto's army of lawyers, and a "generous" offer to "settle" for a licensing fee and agreement to purchase, then many of those small farmers rolled over. Often the ones that ended up in court were those who did actually have either sufficient resources, or were sufficiently pissed off to "stand their ground".

[9rx]

Which patents in particular are you concerned about?

[jadbox]

I'm not a farmer myself- I just live in the midwest and hear small farmers complain about it all the time. There's a constant threat of legal action they feel about these seeds with patents making it into their fields, and they have no real capital to fight even frivolous patent lawsuits.

[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.