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Comment by wlib | Hacker News Reader

This dynamic could change if previously arid land can be put to agricultural or residential use. But that requires a lot of initial investment. The first step I think is to convince people that the problem can be fixed - and be profitable at the same time.

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So I grew up in fly-over land. That part of the USA where in Daniel Boone's time "A squirrel could go from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground.", but today is horizon-to-horizon corn and soybeans.

Today, we make price-support payments to farmers if grain prices drop below the support trigger. We require corn-derived ethanol in gasoline even though the energy economics of it make no sense. It's mildly nuts.

Let's just put some of that land back to trees. I mean really, instead of paying people to grow an over-abundance of feed grains, pay them to grow organic carbon sequestration units.

I am from a rural area of the country and paid for college in part by working for a farmer up to and during wheat harvest for several years. I completely agree with you.

America's fetish with the preservation of small family farms is incredibly destructive both environmentally and economically. People seem to have this romanticized concept of farmers as Ma and Pa working hard every day just to scrape by and raise their 6 kids. In reality these are businesses with massive amounts of capital tied up in businesses that are only sustainable with government subsidy.

Let these businesses fail, create economic incentives to use the land for more productive purposes like carbon sequestration.

Farm subsidies are still important, they are what stabilizes our food supply so we don't pay 5x as much for bread when we have a bad year for wheat. Its main purpose is more like food supply insurance, if you only produce EXACTLY what you need/get paid for, then even say a 5% less yield in a large area than expected, maybe from weather, storm, or other environmental conditions, could result in food shortages and huge price spikes. You always plant extra to keep you from starving, but if it was completely unregulated, nobody would ever want to overproduce what they could sell or it is pure lost profits. If you couldn't sell 5% of grain last year, you plant 5% less this year, but if this year was a bad season for other farmers, now you don't have enough to meet demand and the prices skyrocket, good for you personally but bad for thousands of other people that need to eat.

Farming is already not perfectly predictable yield to yield, when you add in even wilder price swings it only crushes farms under further financial risks and leads potential famine.

This! At 5.5% of USA GDP [0], some oversupply to avoid supply shocks causing famine is a totally acceptable cost to me. Hell, look at server supply before AWS came along: everyone bought way more servers to account for peak demand and now we can amortize those demands across thousands of different customers. Another example is utilities in how electric supply is way overbuilt with peak generators that are cheap and inefficient to run only sparingly during heat waves in the summer when everyone's AC is on.

[0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

> Farm subsidies are still important, they are what stabilizes our food supply so we don't pay 5x as much for bread when we have a bad year for wheat.

I am not a farmer, so just giving the example I know about: In Holland farmers get 9ct/kg for potatoes. Then in the supermarket this becomes $1.80! Talking normal year here (last year). No long supply lines or nothing. How is that fair or even reasonable? How can they build the reserves to survive a bad yield? So, yes, they need subsidies.

I’m not saying we should completely eliminate farm subsidies. Only that the current model focuses way too much on propping up specific crops and types of farming. Corn and wheat subsidies go far beyond what is necessary to stabilize those markets.

This is partly related to the presidential race starting in Iowa. That's got to be worth a couple of points of Iowa GDP in subsidies alone.

>and be profitable at the same time.

It seems unlikely that it will be.

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