Hacker News Reader

Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

>> So, basically, capitalism is killing the hand that feeds us

No no. It's all working to plan. Consolidation leads to bigger, more efficient farms. Or so the big land owners think... That much land requires ever more sophisticated technology, which big corporations are happy to provide and make people dependent on, all while collecting farm level data to allow someone to play the futures markets.

There is a pecking order. Whom do you serve and to what end?

And now I've reached my cynical threshold for the day and need to unplug and go outside ;-)

View on HN

I don’t understand this line of thinking.

If you sell a commodity and your competitors are far more efficient, you will lose in the end. Change the commodity from wheat to mining silver and nobody has their heartstrings pulled for you.

Ultimately people aren’t siding with family farms for economics or fairness reasons - they are doing it to support the losing underdog or anti-modernism nostalgia.

I would hope that if we learnt anything from the pandemic, that we learnt that efficiency is not the end all and be all.

Efficiency creates fragile systems.

You can't eat silver.

Farms also shape rural communities, literally and figuratively.

>Ultimately people aren’t siding with family farms for economics or fairness reasons

What would you call Community supported Agriculture? (https://www.kneehighfarm.com/what-is-csa)the farm to table movement? Farmers markets?

"you can't eat silver"

Meaning it's a perishable good, it's a different market. It's good to have a lot of small farms to not have monopolies and as a stopgap to massive crop failures/blight or just bad management.

Like corn: the existence of extra corn (currently making ethanol) to turn into food in case of emergency/war, so it's subsidized.

>Change the commodity from wheat to mining silver and nobody has their heartstrings

Meaning no one has a personal reason to care about the plight of a silver mine

People care about the commodity, not the mine that harvests it.

Similarly I don’t care if it is a 5 acre family farm or a 100k acre corporation that supplies the corn I eat.

We don't all die if there's a lack of silver.

And then if your farm is not as efficient as the big land owners think it should be, you lose everything you ever worked for or loved. It's no surprise some of these people kill themselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com