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Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg | Hacker News Reader

> I'm pretty sure the fact that it's impossible to turn a profit in any of the "family" small scale dairy farms is a little more important than how hard the work is.

Why exactly is that important? I could not turn a profit running a family plastic casting business in the U.S. either. It's just not something that can be done competitively on a small scale. Seems like milk production isn't either. That's sad for people who want to do that as a profession. It's also sad that writing doesn't pay enough to employ everyone who wants to be writers, painting everyone who would rather paint, etc. Why is that a policy problem (besides the need to ensure these people have a soft landing in a destination profession that is economically viable)?

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Because large agribusiness conglomerates extract their profits largely by creating negative externalities through pollution and underpriced illegal labor? That was kinda the whole point of the article. Government exists to create policy regulating externalities, and they're failing to do their job here.

Pollution is a negative externality, I agree. Paying illegal immigrants to work in the U.S. is illegal, but it is not a negative externality. I'm also not convinced that small farms are better about either of these things than big ones are.

The article included reports shows that the larger farms are responsible for more pollution, because the sort of techniques you use to handle the waste for 1,000+ cows are radically different than the ones you'd use to handle a small business herd. Search for the phrase "manure lagoon"

The same amount of milk needs to be produced either way. I'm skeptical that ten farms with 100 cows each will cause less manure than one farm with 1000 cows. It all has to be dealt with one way or another.

Sure it is.

The profit goes to the lawbreakers, the loss goes to the citizens of this country who can't do that job at a decent wage.

It's a classic negative externality.

> The profit goes to the lawbreakers, the loss goes to the citizens of this country who can't do that job at a decent wage.

By that definition, every transaction where someone accepts a low wage causes a negative externality against someone who would accept a higher one. This does not match my understanding of externalities.

Sure, that's true, but even in the world where large agribusiness was perfectly regulated, economies of scale would still favor them over small-time milk producers.

The article is about the "death of my family's farm". Not about whatever you think policy problems are.

If you read the article, the fact that it's impossible to turn a profit in a small family farm is more important than how hard the work is.

I'm really not sure at all why you want to turn this into a political argument.

I don't want to turn it into a political argument. It was my understanding that we were already having a political discussion, which I entered into.

For one thing, the article itself is overtly political -- which is fine and expected, because farming is politically fraught in much of the world.

For another, when you said "important" in your parent post, I had understood you to mean "important" in the sense of being generically important, like to society. I did not understand that you were referring solely to the importance of the issue from the perspective of the author of the article.

If you were trying to avoid a political discussion, then sorry. My mistake. Feel free to ignore my response to you.

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