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Comment by runako | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out why it should matter who owns these farms to anyone who doesn't own one. Impact to our food supply seems minimal at best. At worst, we are taking taxes from teachers to send to these rich farmers, which seems like terrible policy.

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Not a an expert in this area at all, but I suspect there's an aspect here if maintaining productive capacity to replace imported food, if that became unavailable. Cursory searching suggests US food exports are similar in scale to food imports. Roughly speaking, with some adaptation that export capacity could be redirected for domestic nutrition.

If, in contrast, you let those farms and skill dry up it would be difficult to rebuild quickly.

I get that aspect. My assumption is that due to scale, location, etc., a farm that transitions from its current owner to a different owner will still be a farm with (possibly the same) employees. I don't see 30% of the farmland in Arkansas (assuming a foreclosure rate that high) suddenly becoming new-build city centers, or factories, or suburbs. It works as farmland, someone will probably buy it to use as farmland.

I don't see why it's strategically important to the US taxpayer that one millionaire own it vs a different millionaire (or corporation).

How does capacity work? If the US needs food because of an export stop of supplier countries because of a crisis, those farmers can't swap out what they produce. Depending on the year of time it might take 12 months to swap out export products for something else. This is not "standby-capacity".

Many things that can stop imports take a lot longer than 12 months to resolve. Wars can take several years for example.

Getting a domestic replacement in 12 months of belt tightening would still be a lot better than having to deal with several more years of that.

Also I'd expect that there are cases were we export X and import Y, and if Y was cut off we could switch to using X somewhat as a substitute. I don't know offhand of any specific plant foods where this is the case, but pork and beef illustrate the idea. We import about 15% of our beef. If that got cut off we could cut some pork exports and use that as a substitute. It's not a great substitute but it is calories that can get you through a crisis.

Cos then you'll believe the story and side with the farmer that voted for the leopards and will vote for them again in the next election cos the "coastal elites are out of touch".

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