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Much of this is an antitrust problem.

The inputs to farming, especially seeds, fertilizer and machinery, are controlled by monopolies and near-monopolies. There have been too many mergers.

On the sell side, there's monopsony or near-monopsony, with very few big buyers.[1] Farmers are caught in the middle, with little pricing power on either side.

There's not much question about this. There are antitrust cases, but with weak penalties and weak enforcement.

[1] https://equitablegrowth.org/competitive-edge-big-ags-monopso...

No, much of this is a political issue. America wants food standards that are different from many trading partners; fair enough. But it makes it impossible to export many farm goods as a result. This is outside of the current political climate, and has been going on for ages. It's just coming it a head now.

People outside of the US look down on inferior products like HFCS, bleached chicken, hormones used in beef cattle, prevalence of GM crops, the preventive use of antibiotics in poultry, hen battery cages, and permissive-by-default use of additives.

If at least all those bad farming practices would lead to very affordable food, then one could make an argument for it... but currently the US just does worst of two worlds.

Interesting Side Note: bleached/chlorinated chicken

The things which makes this a no go in the EU is ironically not the chlorination per-se, but the fact that chlorination is needed.

Like basically the EU thinks the way the US allows farmers to keep and raise chickens is so bad/unsanitary that chlorinating them isn't sufficient to make them safe for (repeated) consumption.

Which makes sense given that some of the things involved can lead to (non exhaustive list):

- non healthy chemicals _in_ the meat, not just on it

- increase in parasite, bacteria or virus infection _in_ the meat

- increased chance bacteria have some form of antibiotic resistance or other mutations

- not wanting to support "that" level of animal abuse (which is not just illegal but criminal in many EU countries, but also that doesn't mean that EU countries are that much better, they just drew a line on the level of animal abuse they tolerate which is in a different place then the line the US drew, but both are far away from the line animal protection organizations would drew)

> but the fact that chlorination is needed.

You're wrong. The whole point is this: in EU, you cannot chlorinate your chickens. This means that to sell chicken, you need to make sure that your chicken is good to eat without chlorination (by making sure your whole production chain is sanitized up to sufficient level).

In the US you don't need to make sure your production chain is super high sanitation quality because you can chlorinate the chicken afterwards. This means that you don't have to spend money/effort cleaning up your chains, because you can dip them in chlorine after.

From a health perspective there is honestly not that big of a difference. The resulting product in both cases is chicken that's safe to eat.

The real reason for the difference in policy is the incentives that it creates for the meat-producers. In the US there is no incentive to keep sanitation up in the production chains because the chicken will be chlorinated anyway. This actually incentivizes sloppy (cheaper) production methods over ones that are more sanitized but more costly.

On the other hand, in the EU you cannot wash chicken meat, so it needs to be kept clean and sanitized throughout the production process.

> The whole point is this: in EU, you cannot chlorinate your chickens.

It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue, really (pun intended).

In the end, it doesn't really matter why things got where they are - what matters is where we want them to go next. And US interests seem to be hell-bent on continuing to wash chickens. So they will continue to be banned from Europe.

You just said the same thing.

>The real reason for the difference in policy is the incentives that it creates for the meat-producers. In the US there is no incentive to keep sanitation up in the production chains because the chicken will be chlorinated anyway. This actually incentivizes sloppy (cheaper) production methods over ones that are more sanitized but more costly.

If there's no actual downsides from the chlorine, what's the issue? In many cities the municipal water source is local river that's polluted, and needs treatment to be drinkable. Part of that process might involve adding chlorine. I'm sure that all of this can be avoided if the water is sourced, at great expense, from a glacier or whatever, but nobody would suggest we should ban chlorinating water, and that allowing chlorinating water would be better because it forces the water source to be clean.

The poor sanitation in American poultry farming can have other negative effects outside the meat being safe. Such unsanitary conditions make dangerous conditions for workers including an elevated risk of novel avian flues and, if ever the chlorination isn't properly executed, the meat is extremely unsafe to eat.

Chlorination is a good idea when you can't control the supply chain (i.e. drawing water through infrastructure that's been compromised) but the better solution (if it's reasonable) is always to fix the supply chain. In the case of a city relying on chlorination vs. bringing clean water in by train the chlorination is a clear winner. When it comes to meat it's a cost issue and the EU made the decision to force that cost onto the producer while the US has made the decision to bear the cost at large.

> the fact that chlorination is needed

Indeed.

High levels of bacteria are a symptom of poor hygiene and low animal welfare due to conditions which are not permitted in European farms.

If you know the chicken is going to be chlorine washed, then you end up being lax higher up the chain.

There is also a genuine argument to be had as to, for example, whether the practice contributes towards antimicrobial resistance.

> There is also a genuine argument to be had as to, for example, whether the practice contributes towards antimicrobial resistance.

The chlorination is less in question here compared to the extreme overuse of antibiotics in animal farming in America. But it is fair to be skeptical of America's chlorination approach due to the increased danger of animal-human disease crossovers. Poor sanitation can lead to a lot of elevated work risks for employees.

The EU doesn't allow chlorination of chicken

    > bleached chicken

I Googled for more info, and I found this quote: https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/04/15/nx...

    > Less than 5% of poultry processing facilities still use chlorine in rinses and sprays, according to the National Chicken Council, an industry group that surveyed its members. (Those that still do use a highly diluted solution at concentrations deemed safe.)

    > Nowadays, the industry mostly uses organic acids to reduce cross contamination, primarily peracetic, or peroxyacetic acid, which is essentially a mixture of vinegar and hydrogen peroxide.

    > prevalence of GM crops

> What do European chicken meat plants use to reduce bateria load?

sanitary conditions

My understanding was that the meat-packing process in the US involves a butchering method that results in more fecal matter contamination, posing the risk of salmonella, which necessitates the wash. Those bacteria occur naturally, so you can't avoid that without being careful with butchering, which is probably what the EU standards require. But I doubt the big meat conglomerates like Tyson will want any hit to productivity, and they would fight a change every step of the way.

> What do European chicken meat plants use to reduce bateria load?

I'm sure it's just salt and water.

I don't understand why consumers will pay for a chicken breast which has been injected with salt water. It comes out when you prepare it.

Also some people don't season food with salt (you can add salt at the table if you really need it). Meat with added salt taste very salty to me.

It's also down to vaccination requirements for EU based farms who take far more preventative measures than US ones.

It's why you can eat raw eggs and keep them out of the fridge in the EU/UK but not in the US, because the chickens are vaccination for Salmonella.

The reason for keeping eggs in a fridge is different (primarily washing vs not washing). This has been discussed a number of times at HN.

Here is an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19815155

Japanese egg production is even cleaner, but then consuming raw eggs is commonplace in Japan.

Generally, I agree with your post. About "keep them out of the fridge": I thought this is mostly due to wash or not-wash the eggs before packing. I think washing removes a thin layer that makes the eggs last longer, but can be visually less appealing. Please correct me if you know better! Japan also vaccinates heavily for Salmonella, and they eat plenty of raw eggs in their cuisine.

> . I think washing removes a thin layer that makes the eggs last longer, but can be visually less appealing.

European eggs look just fine. The wash we talk about here is chemical, not just cleaning out mess with water.

But yes, this is about wash or not-wash thing. Just that is has nothing to do with visuals.

That’s really the whole point - EU food standards indicate that the need to use acids to prevent bacteria growth is the problem. The EU system is based on having higher sanitation requirements at all steps from feed to cage to plate.

> look down on inferior products

I object to the use of "look down on" in this context.

The products listed are inferior products, end of.

"Look down" suggests an expression of contempt. But there is no contempt to be had here, it is a simple fact.

> bad farming practices would lead to very affordable food, then one could make an argument for it.

I ... just... I ....have no words for what I just read there.

Its affordable so its ok .... really ? SERIOUSLY ?

They didn't say "it's affordable so it's okay". They said "if it made it very affordable, then one could make an argument for it". And they're right. If you could reduce poverty by providing food at 1/2 or 1/5th the price of European-quality food, that would absolutely be worth having an argument over. Of course, this isn't actually the case, which is why they then said it's the worst of both worlds - American food manages to be both unhealthy and expensive rather than only one or the other.

>inferior products like HFCS, [...] prevalence of GM crops

The others I agree with, but there's no evidence that HFCS or GM crops are bad.

What? On HFCS:

While glucose is used by nearly every cell in the body and has tight regulation by insulin, fructose is largely processed by the liver, where it more easily is converted into fat, triglycerides and uric acid.

Intrinsically this messes with our bodies insulin resistance, for a start, contributing to diabetic issues, as well as increased fatty liver disease, and elevated triglycerides.

It bypasses our body's normal appetite regulation, as fructose also (in addition to insulin) does not stimulate leptin, providing the body with no/less feeling of satiation, and is also less effective at stimulating ghrelin (hunger hormone).

You feel less full, you keep eating, calories and obesity go up.

This is at its worst in liquids, as liquid fructose is absorbed rapidly, and leads to effective weight gain even at small amounts of consumption.

Carrying on from that, contrary to your statement, HFCS has absolutely been linked in multiple studies to increased obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.

I can't imagine where you're hearing that there's "no evidence that HFCS is bad" other than those in the production pipeline or their lobbying.

HFCS came about when there was an abundance of corn and nothing to do with it. So when they discovered corn syrup they added corn subsidies and heavily tariffed cane sugar. Ethanol appeared and is a far greater corn sink, so HFCS no longer even serves that purpose.

But the processing industry doesn't want to disappear (money and job losses), so they lobby and the status quo remains. Same with private health care in a cozy position where they act as an unneeded middleman. It's too lucrative to certain people, and they won't willingly give it up.

Looks like the healthcare system.

Looks like a pipeline.

you do know those are industrial food manufacturing outcomes not farming outcomes? Ain't no one bleaching my families chickens, or giving their cattle growth hormones. Americans have been tricked and mislead by marketing and conglomerate, some of which is European.

Could America meet those standards and export at a higher profit though? If not, it’s not what’s contributing to their poor financial situation

Yes, and they equipment size keeps becoming bigger and more expensive, making it harder to afford for smaller farms. Meanwhile, China is disrupting this by building small and affordable farm equipment for the rest of the world, thus lowering international prices.

Also new technology is helping previously nonviable soil to be useful.

Equipment makers in the US have been hammered by tariffs too, and they even manufacture in the US. Tells you something about how absurd the tariffs (taxes) are.

Of all the guns that rural Americans love, the humble foot-gun is the most beloved.

---

Someone else can argue the morality, ethics, economics, and politics of it all, but VERY simply, US Federal Government Agencies are machines for redistributing wealth from cities to rural areas.

Rural America voted quite heavily to stop those subsidies. That's what efficiency means.

---

Maturity means suspending judgement and listening to people you disagree with, but I feel that's very out of style these days.

There was a NYT article about farmers going to a town hall meeting where they met their federal reps.

One farmer mentioned how they've done these meetings for years and nothing changes, maybe they get a handout from the feds, but he says they effectively just go to support the monopolies that they as farmers sell and buy from.

Same reps, same meetings every years, nothing happens. Farmer seemed to have all the pieces except the idea that he might want to vote for someone else ...

>Same reps, same meetings every years, nothing happens. Farmer seemed to have all the pieces except the idea that he might want to vote for someone else ...

I get it's funny to dunk on dumb Republican farmers voting for the same party for over and over again, and not getting what they want, but it's hardly a farmer or Republican issue. How is this any different than say, Democratic voters who want medicare for all (or whatever) and not getting that for decades?

Fix your voting system. This two party system you have if caused by the First Past the Post voting system you have. Basically mostly all the is uniquely broken about US politics is downstream from FPTP. You can't get smart solutions if all your options are dumb and dumber.

> How is this any different than say, Democratic voters who want medicare for all (or whatever) and not getting that for decades?

How is it different? It’s different because people do stop voting for right-leaning Democrats who are all talk, and then they lose and Republicans win, and then the Republican voters get exactly what they voted for (and everyone else gets it too).

Republicans control the government, what on Earth do Republican voters have to complain about? They got what they voted for.

If they’re unhappy with the government they should complain to the mirror.

At least (some) Democrats actually say they want Medicare for all. The farmer parallel would be like voting for a Republican hoping for Medicare for all.

Though I'm a bit biased, because it seems like if you want anything other than for billionaires to get more money, you would vote Dem.

to be fair, this isn’t a perfect solution but it does get us much closer to that solution each time. There are still plenty of democrats whom don’t support solving these problems (for any number of reasons, I’m not going to conjecture here why)

The best solution I’ve seen is to just keep pushing leftward—even if we only get a few increments here and there.

> How is this any different than say, Democratic voters who want medicare for all (or whatever) and not getting that for decades?

To be fair, the progressive movement in the Democratic Party is much larger than any actual working-class movement in the GOP. MAGA is not exactly pro-union, pro-striking, or even pro-farmer, given the tariffs. The Progressive Caucus otoh is now 45 % of the House Democrats. Zohran Mamdani was just elected mayor of NYC, and is already making big moves against landlords.

And that's even aside from the voters who don't vote for corporate Dems, and then get blamed by the DNC for losses. Every time someone asserts that "Bernie Bros" sat out in 2016, they're talking about Democrats who refused to keep 'voting for the same party over and over again'.

> How is this any different than say, Democratic voters who want medicare for all (or whatever) and not getting that for decades?

Because democrats largely support M4A and socialized health care in general. A handful are squishy on the issue, and the structure of the senate requires significant bipartisanship to pass[1]. But if you want it to pass you want to vote for democrats, duh. If you do happen to vote for a democrat who actually opposes that and complain to them that they didn't vote for it, then yeah: you're dumb.

[1] The exception that proves the rule being the ACA itself, which passed on an EXTREMELY rare party-line 60 vote majority. And didn't include a government-offered insurance option because of the objections of Just One Guy (Joe Lieberman, representing the insurance hotbed of Connecticut) whose vote was needed.

> How is this any different than say, Democratic voters who want medicare for all (or whatever) and not getting that for decades?

They can see progress. ACA wasn't a slam dunk, but it was progress.

Also, you aren't voting for a Republican or a Democrat, you are voting for a person, and if the person you are voting for supports M4A, that's what you can do. If someone else in the same party doesn't support that, you can't do anything about that. However, your representative is one piece of the puzzle. Giving up on that is dumb.

It's not like the Democrats are under the heels of a tyrant leading their party and country over a cliff.

I agree. Personally I don't understand the love that agriculture shows to the Republican party, but hey you get what you vote for.

It seems like this whole year has been implementing policy after policy that screws over agriculture.

USAid (big purchaser) gone. 40 billion sent to Argentina. Antagonize Canadians (Canadians !!) so they boycott American produce. Tarif China so they'll reciprocate on soy beans. Deport farm workers. Tarif imports of steel so machine costs go up. Tarif fertilizer so production costs go up. Tarif everything else to reduce consumer spending power.

Despite all this farmers will continue to vote republican this year, and in future years. I presume they have reasons, but I confess they are hard to understand.

The Republican party has a well polished message assigning blame to anyone else: gays, Muslims, illegal immigrants, trans people, feminists, government employees, etc etc etc. If only they can put those people in their places, prosperity will rain down on the proper Americans. As it did in the 1950s when those people didn't exist.

It works. And it will keep working.

Yes. It's very effective, very dangerous, and it's not at all unique to America; the exact same approach results in high-minority vote shares across Europe.

I think a lot of it comes down to the rural/urban divide, in a rural setting there's a lot less convinence, fewer services. A need to be more self suficcient. While urban settings have many amenities and services, they also tend to be hotspots for mental illness, crime, lack of housing for those who don't or can't make enough money to afford increasing rent and food costs, it's harder to police (more resources needed) illness from concentrated pollution. Theres some who see the conservative side of politics as fiscally conservative, and the liberal side aiming for more social support. This is a gross simplification of U.S. politics (I'm Canadian, we have a rural divide as well, take a look at how the urban Canadian centres vote vs rural, the difference is our party colours are backwards to yours!) So many rural folks see the tax bill and say "what do I get for this" and many urban folks see the need for stricter regulations, more social support etc. And say "We need more resources, let's throw money at the problem". Coming from a small town if you see someone in need it's not too burdensom to lend a hand, in a dense urban situation it's neccesary to turn your back on the many individuals and say this is a social problem that is more comfortable to abstract to the government to handle. Now subsides for farmers seem weird from my vantage point. On one hand the scale of operations for a farmer do seem lofty compared to my experience as an individual earner, I don't have to budget for sub $1M equipment upkeep/replacement etc. But on the other I'm not beyond considering "conspiracy theroies" like "sugar makes us more susceptable to influance, and lowers immune response, leading to higher healthcare costs" - bassically we are the product not the customer.

More importanly there's a rift between "I care" and "I'm paid to care" that's common for social support, just like it's common for the tech industry.

All this is an over simplification, but I'd love for us to do better as a whole. I think that starts with people using their empathy and curiosity to understand the divide. Maybe through understanding we can be less judgemental of each other and find ways to work together, or at least understand and build boundaries to make the divide more livable.

Subsidies for farmers ensure surplus capacity. Lead times are long and you can't risk even a temporary failure. So you spend more money than current supply and demand would justify.

In the US money tends to be distributed from more populated regions to less populated regions. The idea that rural americans oppose social spending because they don't have access to these programs is false.

It does seem that they are often unaware of the the social spending on them. Some of it is surely economy of scale: it's diffuse so everything costs more. Delivery of social services is much more efficient in urban settings, and its failures make the news.

The huge bulk of social spending is in the form of direct payments or reimbursements. Medicaid, disability, snap. That stuff. I don't buy that this is much more efficient in urban settings.

I am not a US citizen, just an observer.

What is the alternative when the Democrats appear just as much beholden to corporate finance, and position themselves as the party for city dwellers?

I also disagree on the wealth redistribution. Government agencies are managers of risk. *

Is there a risk to the country's food security if farmers go bust on mass? Then the Government needs to mitigate that risk. Fairly simple.

* This was the explanation from the director general of non-US primary industries department as to the whole reason they exist. Managing biosecurity risks are particularly important, but also managing fishing stocks and helping farmers mitigate their risk.

Voting for Democrats is the alternative.

If the Republicans get voted out and become powerless, they (or the successor party) will have to be better to regain power.

Anything else is some accelerationist nonsense.

i would love to hear Farm-To-Taber answering this. she, a farmer and farm worker, ran as a democrat. i really like and recommend her podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@FarmToTaber

she regularly does episodes about politics in regards to farming.

> What is the alternative when the Democrats appear just as much beholden to corporate finance, and position themselves as the party for city dwellers?

For the love of God, please don't "both sides" this stuff.

When is the last time you took a look at the bills coming before Congress and how they were voted on? Like, literally go to the congressional website and view bills and vote tallies? Would you believe it if I told you stuff like "Prevent rich people from stealing wages from their workers" are voted SOLELY ON PARTY LINES.

In fact, we have the most divided congress in like 100 years. There has not been a point in the last century in which the 2 parties were so different.

Lastly, there are at least 50 Dems in congress right now who explicitly aren't beholden to corporate finance and regularly introduce bills to remove money from politics.

> Lastly, there are at least 50 Dems in congress right now who explicitly aren't beholden to corporate finance and regularly introduce bills to remove money from politics.

Sometimes seems like they introduce those bills only when they can't possibly pass. Makes for good theater and talking points ("I _tried_, look!").

So I don't see those particular Dems doing that as much as I see the Schumers & Pelosis doing it. And to that end, I agree completely.

Though not introduced by Dems, this is a great example of just how stupid all of this is: http://congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-concurrent-res...

Of all of the things currently plaguing the US, the fact that they think this is appropriate speaks volumes.

Democrats write constantly about trying to reach rural americans. I've never seen democrats meaningfully position themselves as the party for city dwellers. Instead I've seen democrats simply refuse to describe cities as hellholes full of crime, laziness, and sexual promiscuity like the republicans do.

The Dems dont actually do much to reach those rural Americans though.

What specific actions would you like elected dems to do that you aren't currently seeing?

That’s because they don’t appear to actually be trying to win. They appear to exist for the sole purpose of playing the good cop to the republican bad cop.

Both sides are as bad as each other. Sure there may be a few individuals who truly stand for something and would sacrifice everything to make some change, but the majority don't and in many cases will never have the power or opportunity to bring about change.

Why?

They're individuals who above all look to secure the steady job that will provide the standard of living they aspire to. Unless someone can self-fund and run as an independent, they are beholden to those who provide the funds required to run for office and also have to pander to whichever party put then on the ticket.

You are correct, no replies but people don't like your message.

No, they aren't.

Go look at the bills coming before congress and tell me how many are voted purely along party lines? Then look at the bills themselves.

And the vast majority of the party is actually working towards real change. And guess what's happening to those who don't (the Schumers and Pelosis of the party)? They have a 5% approval rating and have to CONSTANTLY deal with people from their own party telling them to step down.

They are never voted out.

Yes, a handful of people in the Democrat party suck.

But that's not the same as saying they're the same as Republicans. Not even remotely close.

The "both sides" stuff is an amateur, armchair take that tells me the person doesn't actually follow what's happening.

And again, you don't need any more proof that what they actually vote on. Go ahead, look up the bills. How does the "both sides" argument stand up to the fact that we have the most divided congress in almost 100 years?

It's all cultural. The Republicans captured the messaging around "ordinary folk."

Isn't most ag in the US just big business at this point?

Sure, there are still some small farms.. but there are also rich folk like the Treasury Secretary who maintain farms for status and financial benefits(farms get all sorts of special treatment for taxes, bankruptcy and inheritance).

>farms get all sorts of special treatment for taxes, bankruptcy and inheritance

When I see the amount of exploits the wealthy use to avoid taxes and maximize profits, I realize working a 9-5 job is for fools, considering how much taxes I'm paying on my salary.

In my town, a capital city, near my home there is a vape lounge. In the parking lot of this lounge are 3 Ford F-350 King Ranch Dual Rear Wheels, adorned with a small amount of decalling on the side for the vape lounge. Each of these trucks goes for about $80K.

But I suppose they're "company vehicles".

And this is before we get to the really wealthy.

Agreed, and thats why I continue to vote for representatives who won't raise those taxes.

The corruption will continue but at least I don't have to continue to feed it.

They instead lower taxes for every bracket except those making 2x to 5x the poverty level. The lower brackets are a bribe, and the upper brackets and corporate/payroll tax cuts are the purpose. Meanwhile medicaid getting cut just shifts unpaid er visit costs onto that same middle range. The middle gets hollowed out by both parties.

    > rich folk like the Treasury Secretary who maintain farms for ... financial benefits

    > Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is an investor in North Dakota soybean farmland but has stated he has divested from his holdings to avoid conflicts of interest, addressing criticisms regarding his personal financial stake in agriculture.

A bit late, though

>In truth, Bessent disclosed early in the Trump Administration that he owned several thousand acres of farm land in North Dakota through a limited liability partnership. He was supposed to divest those holdings 90 days after taking office, by April 28.

>In August, government ethics officials warned in a letter to the Senate Finance Committee that the secretary failed to comply with the rules and needed to sell the land. Bessent's Treasury ethics officials explained that the "assets are illiquid and not readily marketable."

>The August letter said Bessent "would be recused from particular matters affecting these assets." But that was just weeks before Bessent flew to Malaysia to meet with Chinese counterparts and hash out the framework of a deal that crucially included a commitment to buy American soybeans.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/12/21/trea...

>Google AI tells me:

How about an actual source?

I think it's actually because of the gun control crap that Dems push.

Farmers really like their guns, not because they need it to compensate for themselves, but because they really do largely live in areas where the local police response is 30+ minutes because they are in sparsely populated counties that are just farms, farms and more farms.

A very high profile mainstream Republican proposed the most severe anti-gun policy I think anyone at his level ever has: taking guns without due process. And they still voted to reelect him twice. The idea that the GOP is not anti-gun is a fantasy.

You’re buying into Republican propaganda if you believe this.

> I think it's actually because of the gun control crap that Dems push.

Anything specific? Because from where I sit, the Dems aren't anywhere near as strict as they should be wrt to gun control.

Or are you just believing the stuff you're hearing from conservative media? Are you really of the belief that "farmers" need assault rifles? What about bump stocks?

How many school shooting have we had? What legislation came from those? Can you even name any?

    > 40 billion sent to Argentina

Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48780

    > In October 2025, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced U.S. financial support for Argentina, including a $20 billion currency swap line financed through the Treasury Department's Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF).

    > Last Friday, Argentina fully repaid the US$2.5 billion it obtained from a US$20-billion swap line with the Trump administration

    > “Our nation has been fully repaid while making tens of millions in USD profit for the American taxpayer,” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote in a Friday post on X.

A currency swap absolutely isn't "basically a line of credit". Any swap is a credit agreement insofar as each party is committing to future possible liabilities, but a currency swap is a very standard instrument which is part of central banks' monetary policy toolkit and helps them in their mandate to ensure currency stability. Swaps can be extremely flexible so the terms differ wildly, but they're not generally a line of credit that can be drawn from, they're an agreement to pay or receive amounts based on future movements of some underlying rates.

So what is a currency swap. Well any swap is an agreement with at least two legs, a pay leg and a receive leg. The normal type of swap is a interest rate swap so say I agree to pay you every month 3% fixed interest on 10m USD and you agree to pay me some floating rate (say 3m usd libor + 100bps) interest on the same amount. So every month we do a calculation where if libor+100 is greater than 3 then I pay you otherwise you pay me. We might do this to hedge our interest rate exposure. Like say you're a bank and I'm a bank and most of my borrowers are fixed rate mortgages and most of my savings accounts pay floating rate interest. I want a hedge so the floating rate doesn't end up costing me too much.

A currency swap is like that but with different currencies. So say we change things so it's 10m USD on one side and 15m EUR on the other side and we agree to exchange principal amounts. So that sets an exchange rate of 1.5 as well as the interest rate thing from before. If interest rates or exchange rates now move, this provides a hedge. So the hedge now is not just against the rate changing but also against the currency moving adversely. Central banks use this to ensure the import/export vs domestic balance of their economy is appropriate given the levels of trade between nations and also as a hedge against adverse currency movements affecting both assets they hold (yes they hold bonds etc) and their outstanding debt (which for the Fed will include "Eurobonds" they have issued in other currencies than USD).

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/currencyswap.asp is a general explanation

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb-and-you/explainers/tell-me-mor... is the perspective of a central bank on currency swaps and their use

I've been curious about this myself, and I listened to some pro-Trump people who seem otherwise intelligent that tried to explain this effect.

One common theme has been that farmers are by necessity highly independent. They can't rely on government services as much as city folk, because everything and everyone is potentially an hour's drive away. They don't see the effect of their taxes being spent, because their local roads are dirt roads, there's no traffic lights, no police cars[1] or ambulances zipping by on the regular, etc...

Conversely, they do get frustrated by the likes of the EPA turning up -- invariably city folk with suits and dress shoes -- telling them what to do. "You can't burn this" or "You can't dump that!". More commonly "you can't cut down trees on your land that you thought were your property".

Their perception of government is that it violates their God-given rights regularly and gives little in return.

The further the seat of power, the worse their opinion of it. Local councils they might tolerate, state governments they view with suspicion, and the federal government may as well be on another planet.

Hence, their votes are easily swayed by the "reduce federal government" rhetoric.

We all know this is as an obvious falsehood: Trump grew the size of the federal government with his Big Beautiful Bill! So did every Republican government before him for quite a while now!

That doesn't matter. Propaganda works. The message resonates. The voters will vote against their own interests over and over and over if they keep hearing something that resonates with what they feel.

PS: A great example of this are the thousands of unemployed people that lost their coal mining jobs. Trump lied through his teeth and told them they would get their mining jobs back. Hillary told them they could be retrained as tech support or whatever. They. Did. Not. Like. That. They wanted their jobs back! So they voted for Trump, who had zero chance of returning them to employment because they had been replaced by automation and larger, more powerful mining machines. Their jobs were gone permanently, so they doubled down by voting against the person who promised to pull them out of that hole. Sadly, this is a recurring theme in politics throughout the world.

[1] As an example, this is why they're mostly pro-gun! They know viscerally that if someone broke into their property, they'd have to defend themselves because the local police can't get there in time to save them.perception.

I buy all this, and I think your analysis is spot on. There's z log of cognitive dissonance going on here.

>> One common theme has been that farmers are by necessity highly independent.

I think they like to think of themselves as highly independent. But in truth of course they are highly dependent, on city customers for their product, on foreign countries for exports, on federal govt for subsidies (both direct and indirect), on suppliers for machinery, seed and fertilizer, and in some cases on immigrant labor.

Just as we are dependent on farmers. It's all interconnected.

Ironically they may tolerate local govt, and had federal govt, but they are most dependent on fed govt policies.

They do of course have many legitimate grievances, but I'm not sure that voting for the party that seems to hate them is a winning strategy.

>and in some cases on immigrant labor.

Why tho do you feel the need to defend big agri businesses skirting employment law and pressuring wages downward by bringing in illegal people? I find it a bit weird looking at the US how they seem to kneejerk into different camps depending on what the other side does with some old outliers like bernie who retain their line.

>Ironically they may tolerate local govt, and had federal govt, but they are most dependent on fed govt policies.

I live in a much smaller country but here there's similar pressures at play. I feel like a more nuanced take that farmers either don't voice or don't voice well here is that the federal and EU gov has benefited these big corporate farms they compete with because they're by far the best at siphoning off these various subsidies that farmers supposedly depend on. At the same time gov requirements make it almost impossible to run an smaller independent farm or one that doesn't depend on one of these middlemen to an extreme degree.

I worked for a meat conglomerate here in belgium and plenty of the farmers they dealt with didn't own their own cows (and plenty went under). They essentially rented their business to the company which owned the animals on their land, provided the calf feed made by their subsidiary, employed a load of vets, had an international transport company, had me and others writing software that would automate the mindbogglingly stupid forms and rules for transport (which were interpreted comically differently by regional departments of the federal food safety agency so depending on the jurisdiction you had to do radically different things).

Just the paperwork to run a competitive farm was/would have been impossible to deal with for many of these people and it was so clearly made up by people who never had to deal with the consequences directly.

On the other hand there's also plenty of examples of things like the gov rugpulling with environmental legislation in the netherlands.

Things like caping farms at past nitrogen emissions (benefiting the big ones) after first encouraging farmers to take loans and invest insane amounts into equipment to reduce those emissions.

    > Why tho do you feel the need to defend big agri businesses skirting employment law and pressuring wages downward by bringing in illegal people?

Since you are based in Belgium, how many native-born Belgians are still performing low-skill manual labour on a farm? Probably very few. Most of them are probably from the poorest parts of EU or some kind of temp farm hand visa. Specifically: Fruits and vegetables require lots of low-skill manual labor for harvest and packing.

    > At the same time gov requirements make it almost impossible to run an smaller independent farm

> It is interesting that you immediately jumped to "illegal people".

USDA estimated 42% of farm hands is doing illegal work few years ago. Other sources estimated to 50-60%. That is a fuckton and has an incredibly significant impact on wage pressures. It was also brought up in the context of GOP policy "the party that hates them" which has focused heavily on illegals and caused quite the uproar. It's hard to not jump to it in that cotnext and also more than those "US H-2A via for temp farm hands" i believe.

>how many native-born Belgians are still performing low-skill manual labour on a farm?

It's mostly migrant work indeed same as in the meat industry I observed. They proudly had giant old black and white wall covering pics of locals doing the work decades ago but now among more than a hundred there were maybe 2 belgians on the factory floor at any given moment. That said here in belgium I suspect the amount of illegal work in agriculture is lower than in the US and places like Italy.

>Call me cynical, but I am not nostalgic for the "smaller independent farm". If farms want to be smaller and independent in the 21st century, they need to distinguish themselves with product (usually: organic or "free range"), branding, and value add (example: create a cheese brand that only uses your special organic cow's milk). If they cannot or will not, then they will need to sell their business to the mega agg corps.

Call me cynical as well but that doesn't help for the most part.

I follow some such farms that do exactly that. 2 examples from sweden I know jump trough hoops for those organic and "free range" labels. Hoops that are made specifically for the massive operations. So the giant poultry halls get to add some square meters of semi outside space, pull in a big proportional subsidy and aquire the free range label whilst the guy trying to differentiate himself has to add elaborate construction to his chicken tractors for his free roaming chickens to follow the spirit of the law made for the massive operation.

I personally know and helped a peppers/tomatoes and respective seed operation. All heirloom, mostly organic and they too almost had to close their books because they suddenly needed seed passports and a load more paperwork and the legislators apparently hadn't considered that this was something that was also done by corporations that count with numbers smaller than 1mil. That's not me being hyperbolic. They straight up confirmed they hadn't thought it possible that someone might run an operation without boatloads of employees or an upstart.

Also small is relative in the context i described. Many of these were still big expensive operations making investments costing hundreds of thousands, operating a lot of land. Just run by a normal family rather than a big coporate structure.

Mind you the meat company i worked for was also a family operation but the family all drove Brabuses that cost more than my house and had spare money to invest in retirement homes, etc....Puts it a bit in perspective.

> If they cannot or will not, then they will need to sell their business to the mega agg corps.

I do not wish to live in a corporatocracy nor do i fancy a form of capitalism where healthy competition is impossible since nobody can enter or maintain in certain vital sectors.

> Why tho do you feel the need to defend big agri businesses skirting employment law and pressuring wages downward by bringing in illegal people?

Not sure if they (no matter if big business or small farm) could find enough American citizens to do those jobs, even if they were better paid...

Shouldnt they at least have to try? Who else gets to throw up their hands before even trying to raise wages and offer an attractve (as much as is possible) employment offer to domestic labor before they get to skip all that to get to the good stuff where they get to pay even shittier wages, afford less rights or access to judicial review for their workers, and basically totally control them thru deportation threats should they get to uppity on Freedom Land's supply?

You can try, but the unemployment levels in the USA have not generally been low enough to find enough workers in total in recent decades. Worse, even the last few % of unemployment is a deliberate policy choice to prevent a rapid cycle of wage inflation as everyone competes for a limited supply of workers:

The farmers would have to pay enough for "seasonal work spending all day doing manual labour in the sun without any AC" to compete with "year round work spending all day stacking shelves in supermarket where the temperature is at consistently in the range that doesn't put off the customers". And if the farmers got the former shelf stackers, then the supermarkets need to find more people to do the stacking. Food prices go up, both wholesale (because the farmers have to pay workers more) and retail beyond that (because so do the supermarkets).

I keep seeing stories about poorer Americans struggling with food prices even without this kind of cycle; but it doesn't end with just those two examples, it's all the low-pay jobs that are inherently more comfortable than farm labour, and if they find themselves short of labour and raise wages they too have to raise prices to balance their books, and whichever professions they in turn get labour from have the same choices, it ripples across the entire economy. Which may be good or bad for other reasons, but it's a massive impact across the entire economy, not something which is an easy one-liner.

Also, despite all those issues, look at this from the point of view of those workers: They've got seasonal work that pays them somewhat more than they'd earn in their home countries, and until very recently that work would not have come with a risk of being deported to a completely different country than they'd come from.

>not something which is an easy one-liner.

It seems to me like it would initially make inflation spike a lot if applied abruptly but regardless of the timeline would also increase the standing of the lower classes doing menial work substantially. This also has an effect on those other cushier low wage jobs as they then have to compete with the previously unattractive fieldwork. And they bloody well have to compete because food prices would rise and people are sensitive to that.

There's more to it of course and maybe it's in some way good but there's no way the current way of doing things with half or more of farmhands being illegally employed does not provide downward wage pressure for americans. We don't have to be wishy washy about that bit.

>look at this from the point of view of those workers

The government has no mandate to benefit them over it's own citizens beyond the obvious (foreign aid, disaster relief, etc) though.

> The government has no mandate to benefit them over it's own citizens beyond the obvious (foreign aid, disaster relief, etc) though.

Yes, absolutely, I'm just pushing back there against "basically totally control them thru deportation threats should they get to uppity on Freedom Land's supply"; this was, previously, a mutually beneficial relationship despite being… I was about to write "second class citizen", but no, less than citizen even then.

That said, current regime clearly regards foreign aid, disaster relief as not worth supplying, they either don't understand the soft-power benefits to the USA or don't care.

>Why tho do you feel the need to defend big agri businesses skirting employment law and pressuring wages downward by bringing in illegal people?

They said immigrant. Why do you feel the need to equate that term to illegals? They are not the same thing.

> They said immigrant. Why do you feel the need to equate that term to illegals? They are not the same thing.

While true, the estimates are that about half of agricultural workers in the USA are undocumented (AKA "illegal").

I understand that. Those are the facts. But I think it's doing harm to innocent people to conflate immigrants with illegals.

Indeed; and likewise myself, that's why I try to ensure all my own responses rephrase as "undocumented".

Conversely, at this point Musk is both a well-documented migrant and (as can be demonstrated by all the lawsuits he's lost), not entirely law-abiding.

Because their (in)dependence was questioned on various fronts in the context of the american bipartisan system and more specifically the republican party and it's policies aka "the party that hates them".

Wrt the subsidies, consumer market and all that i don't have much to add but wrt the migrant workers the point of contention to my knowledge is mostly illegals (regardless of the actual number deported, the perhaps brutal way in which this is done, etc), ICE, etc. It's also my understanding that illegals are far far more present in farm work and a few other industries in the US (and to lesser extent in europe) to the extreme extent that those without legal work authorisation make up nearly half or more of the farmhands. (USDA estomated 42% few years ago but others had good reason to suspect between 50 & 60% or a even more) So yeah there's no real way to not think of illegal farm work there.

In that context and the opposition there's some elements like Bernie that seem to stick to their line and call this kind of faux open borders a right wing position whilst the rest of the democrats and their base seem to kneejerk the other way in response to recent events and republican standpoints and suddenly seem to have started supporting illegal entry, employment, etc

I was a bit tongue in cheek in my response. Yes, you're right that (almost famously) farm work is done by a disproportionate amount of illegals, but conflating those with immigrants as a default does injustice to the hardworking people that followed the rules.

> Just the paperwork to run a competitive farm was/would have been impossible to deal with for many of these people and it was so clearly made up by people who never had to deal with the consequences directly.

You are assuming this is an unintended effect, but it is very much the intended effect of bureaucratic rules and the reason large companies and conglomerates constantly lobby for them: they can afford the overhead costs (until the inevitable external disruptor comes around and totally eats their lunch, see europe) and smaller players cannot. These rules are moats built by big companies.

Doubly so for subsidies tied to complex filing and reporting requirements: large companies easily do this (they have department(s) just for handling these larger than whatever department in the government is handling the paperwork), small players can't and miss out.

> They don't see the effect of their taxes being spent,

They are quite aware of taxes because 13.5% of their income on average comes directly from federal subsidies paid by taxes on "city folk".

https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...

> The voters will vote against their own interests over and over and over if they keep hearing something that resonates with what they feel.

Most large farm owners are very well off and are absolutely voting in their own interests for the party whose primary goal is to cut taxes on the wealthiest while cutting government support for the poorest.

The rural working class and poor on the other hand are however often voting against their economic interests, but their economic situation has long been ignored by both partie, so having given up hope for economic change, they often vote on culture/identity issues.

>Most large farm owners are very well off

Most family farms (From my area) are land rich. The land is worth a lot, but they never sell it. The farming essentially pays for the land, and maybe a little to live off of. They are NOT raking it in.

Also almost all of them have notes on this land, not owned outright.

What % of farms in your area are small family farms (either by count or economic %)?

In the country it’s like 40% of the farms and 20% of the value. That stat alone shows the real problem, big agricultural is wildly more efficient (without wading into the externalities). And big agricultural gets the lions share of the benefit of the subsidies.

I’m not even sure that’s a bad thing but half the reason these conversations are so circular is that small family farms are not what most agriculture in the US is yet we vote like it is.

I'm not sure the definition of "family" farms, you can have a family name corporation that is still $100M+ in value. Even then I have no idea who all of them are.

My family farm is small enough they alone cannot support a entire family upper-middle class lifestyle, but the land is still worth millions. But they all have notes, good years mean the crop pays the bank and maybe some supplies for next year.

    > My family farm is small enough they alone cannot support a entire family upper-middle class lifestyle, but the land is still worth millions.

Small farmers are generally aware that this makes no financial sense. They're participating in a multigenerational family tradition. There are also typically relatives urging those still farming to sell the farm so they can get their share (which may not be that huge, when all is divvied up).

The USDA where I pulled that stat defines it as farms that have less than 1M in income (gross) per year. A farm that makes that much is going to only support at most 1 full time farmer. The further subdivide farms under 350k which clearly falls into some terrible definition of hobby.

Which tracks with my experience. I don’t know any family farmers where farming is their only, or even primary, occupation.

> They are quite aware of taxes because 13.5% of their income on average comes directly from federal subsidies paid by taxes on "city folk".

I have some investments that will go up and down $10K on a daily basis. That's just a number in a mainframe somewhere, I don't even notice unless I go look, and even then it doesn't "feel" real. If I have to hand over an extra $1 for my coffee in cash, I feel it viscerally. I grind my teeth. I hate it.

The immediacy and in-person nature of an EPA fine feels a lot worse than some grant that may be little more than an annual electronic deposit in a bank account.

> Most large farm owners are very well off and are absolutely voting in their own interests for the party whose primary goal is to cut taxes on the wealthiest while cutting government support for the poorest.

To be fair to farmers, it's more complicated than that. A lot of farmers are wealthy because the poorer farmers have been squeezed out, often because of the actions of the very governments they voted for. This has caused a lot of consolidation into large conglomerates, which utilise their tax breaks to outcompete smaller farmers, further squeezing them.

"retrained as tech support" isn't a real solution either.

"because everything and everyone is potentially an hour's drive away."

Which only 1h because of federal subsidies as rural communities learn. Without health subsidies many hospitals will close, and it's no longer a 1h drive but a 5h drive.

People often live in a delusion on why things are the why they are - their explanation often is the one that suits them most (also see USAid).

>and I listened to some pro-Trump people who seem otherwise intelligent that tried to explain this effect.

If all you know is by listening to people recently on TV then you don't know farmers very well.

I try to get almost all of my information from long-form interviews. From what I've seen, few people (mostly professional politicians) can lie non-stop for several hours in a row in a consistent fashion.

Isn't that still biased towards people who want to record themselves?

One problem in this entire thread is "US Farmers" in one group... The industry is too big to lump them all into one category.

> I presume they have reasons,

They vote with the one party because they didn't had a lot of problems with it in power and, when they voted something else, it was worse.

Between two evils, people prefer the "familiar" one. Works the same in Europe's "democracies".

Nah. This is not true. They voted, because they looked forward the harm to liberals and cities and lgbt and women who dont conform and non whites. They wanted other to be harmed and openly talked about it. They thought they will be harmed only a little, like the last time.

Historically, republicans were not making policies good for them. By they promissed to be cruel and that was appealing.

And every single time there is discussion from liberals talking about rural voters, they have to mention that they know whats best for them, how they vote against their interests. I keep telling them this strategy doesn't work. The smugness is real and all it does is a) push people farther away and b) get everyone who thinks like you to give you internet karma, both worthless.

So what's the alternative strategy that gets them over to ""woke""?

Well the first thing is removing identity politics, especially in replies or discussions.

Also, not viewing it as "Come to my side". This isn't star wars, rebellion vs empire.

Convenient shorthand for a huge number of issues. OK then, how about convincing them to support:

- impeachment and prosecution for high level corruption (e.g. the Presidential cryptocurrency)

- prosecution of constitution-violating police and Federal paramilitaries, e.g. in Minnesota?

- leaving LGBT people alone legislatively (at this point I'm not going to ask for improvements, just that the situation not be made worse)

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Ok, let's talk about identity politics. It started with people bringing their religion in to their lawmaking. Let's ditch that first and see what else we need to do.

This is a lot of it. Urban liberals see rural working class as backward and racist and uncultured. Just having a non-coastal accent (eg southerners) is treated as a marker of low character in our media. I recall how GW Bush’s accent was treated, as do many rural voters. Look at the discussion here, it’s about “those people” being too dumb to vote for their own interests. Unsurprisingly, people resent that.

My favorite example of this is RFD TV [0], a tv channel dedicated to farmers.

The name came from Rural Free Delivery, which was a program by the USPS to ensure farmers in rural areas received mail because it was not profitable for private carriers to deliver in remote and rural areas.

Around 2010, realizing that the message of a government program was good for farmers they completely white washed and removed the concept of free [something] from big government being good from all branding, websites, and tv programs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFD-TV

Funnily enough, British farmers did much the same thing. They voted for Brexit and now they are finding that the British government gives much less of a fuck about them than the EU did.

> Maturity means suspending judgement and listening to people you disagree with, but I feel that's very out of style these days.

This applies to all of us these days. I'll lump myself in there too. I don't care what "side" you are in, if you get angry hearing someone you disagree with politically you're not helping matters any. We're too polarized. I wish we could stop with the bickering and find common issues we agree on and agree on the solutions and push our reps from 'both sides' to fix the issues in a way we can all agree on. The political theater is too exhausting and unhealthy.

Political polarization is an active choice made by right-wing media in the US. Creating dissension and outrage is the bread and butter of Fox News, OANN, etc.

It's more that farmers are through feeding city leeches. I don't think they care a lick about your "wealth"

That would bankrupt the farmers so I don't get this?

Says the guy on a computer.

This question may be naive, but why is the agricultural industry so subsidized? I understand the moral argument, but why, economically, does subsidizing farms result in a more efficient allocation of resources? I've heard that it's because farming as a business is full of unpredictability, but if that were the case, wouldn't there be a significant market for private insurance, and wouldn't the cost of that insurance be priced into the cost of food?

1. Farmers vote. And, Farmers live in states where the value-per-vote is high under both state-vote balancing, and gerrymander. Farming is politically useful.

2. Food is part of national security. It's sensible to keep the sector working.

3. Consumers hate variability in food pricing. So, general sentiment at the shop is not in favour of a strong linkage of cost of production to price, and under imports, there's almost always a source of cheaper product, at the socialised cost of losing domestic food security: Buy the cheese from Brazil, along with the beef, and let them buy soy beans from China and Australia to make the beef fatter. -And then, you can sell food for peanuts (sorry) but you won't like the longer term political consequences, if you do this. See 1) and 2).

America has a surplus of soy beans, it’s China that needs to import from us or Brazil. The mess farmers are in now is that China has decided Brazil is a better source for them given the current trade war going on.

China actually imports a lot of food from us, they seem to be the biggest consumer of chicken and pork feet, for example, which we don’t seem to have much use for. The current subsidies are because that export trade, which farmers have depended on and invested in, has basically disappeared now.

I agree with you that the food supply chain is vital to (any country’s) national security, but I don’t think anyone with any real power takes this seriously.

> This question may be naive, but why is the agricultural industry so subsidized?

I believe this is the same tune we hear in other industries: it’s the effect of the consolidation of companies which provide the inputs (seed and chemicals) leading to a lack of competition and the increase in prices on a captive consumer base.

When farmers feel the crunch due to macro forces in the market (and tariffs), the government effectively acts as a backstop for the conglomerates providing the inputs. Think of the farmer’s hand as an open palm, the subsidy flows through it directly to the company to which they are indebted (the money is in the ground as I used to hear during a brief time in crop insurance).

While these subsidies may have initially began with the quaint notion of protecting against scarcity (as many sibling replies seem to believe), the reality is that farmers are being squeezed just as the rest of us. Profits are way up while competition is way down.

It’s similar to oil. Our people are very price sensitive to food and gas. It’s required in America at all economic classes fairly heavily in our society. So, politicians have decided to try to force prices low and keep hidden costs at the federal level. It allows for reallocation of wealth (a richer person’s taxes helps pay for a poorer person’s lunch and gas to the grocery store). Also, if taxes aren’t enough to cover it well we run our country at a huge deficit so it’s all a big illusion of sustainability that pretty much is destined to fail eventually anyway. I don’t think people or politicians really care about the future or what world their children will inherit as much as they act like they do here; or I’ve not been witness to that thought process in most of our systems.

You have to realize the vast majority of farmland is in states suceptable to floods, droughts, hurricanes, pests, frosts, etc. You can read stories of an off year where locusts were so bad they darkened the skies, for example.

Compounding this, farm equipment is freaking expensive. It's not abnormal for a large farm to have hundreds of thousands in payments on machinery. In a good year they make hundreds of thousands. In a bad year they're on the hook for hundreds of thousands. It can take only one bad year to wreck a farm, which is why their suicide rate is so high.

It's hard to imagine as a dev. But imagine you make 200k. Then next year, because of ransomware your boss installed, they tell you you owe 200k through no fault of your own. What would that do to your finances?

Insurance is a parasite. I'm usually against subsidies, but for as something as important as food, it seems reasonable.

You've repeated the part that the parent poster claimed to understand ("I've heard that it's because farming as a business is full of unpredictability"), but skipped over the part they didn't understand ("wouldn't there be a significant market for private insurance?") with the statement that insurance is a parasite.

Can you explain more why insurance is a parasite? Maybe a state-run insurance would be better?

Subsidies (AFAIK, please correct me if I'm wrong) typically either get paid when farming supplies (tractors, seeds, fertilizer, land etc.) are bought or when the final product is sold. So they are paid when things go well for the farmer, but not (or less so) when the farmer has a bad year.

I feel like the risk of bad years would be better managed by paying farmers when bad years happen. You know, like insurance.

Not everything is about economics. As the romans said - you need bread and circuses to stay in power. Keeping food cheap serves an important political function. It also serves an important security function to keep food domestic because if you are at war with where your food is grown, you are not going to win that war.

> As the romans said - you need bread and circuses to stay in power

“One thing, however, that I will note that Juvenal does not say is that the panem et circenses are either how the Roman people lost their power or how they are held under the control of emperors. Instead first the people lose their votes (no longer ‘selling’ them), then give up their cares and as a result only wish for panem et circenses, no longer taking an interest in public affairs” [1].

[1] https://acoup.blog/2024/12/20/collections-on-bread-and-circu...

It keeps the farmers politically subservient and makes them dependent on the continuation of the establishment. Otherwise, they could become a power bloc unto themselves that could act against the establishment.

The romans got their grain cheap from egypt.

Egypt and the north african provinces were a part of the Roman empire fairly early on. They were also some of the wealthiest and most important provinces in the Empire.

You can't eat private insurance.

The consequences of not being able to produce enough calories is severe. It is much better to overproduce and everyone gets fed than producing just enough and a climate event erases out 20% of our calorie production.

The US produces an unbelievably enormous calorie surplus way beyond what is needed for the health of the country and in fact its detrimental.

The biggest is not even used as food, over half of corn acreage is used for ethanol. That's an amount of land that's truly beyond comprehension. Its a horrible program as well, corn ethanol is worse than the gasoline it replaces in terms of carbon footprint when taking land use into account. And it raises the price of food. And we even subsidize it multiple times, we subsidize the crop as corn and then we subsidize it as ethanol. Biodiesel and renewable diesel (different products) have spiked in recent years as well, most of that is made from soy, canola, or corn oil. They have similar problems though aren't as bad as corn ethanol.

Another huge negative surplus is the amount of liquid calories, mainly soda, that are consumed. Most nutrition science that I've read points to the enormous amount of liquid calories as the part of the US diet that is driving obesity epidemic. There are of course other aspects to the obesity as well.

Finally, substituting some of the US consumption of beef with chicken and some of the chicken with beans.

To recap US overproduces calories to the point that it hurts the country. It damages the land, the ocean with dead zones, the climate with carbon. We pay for it multiple times in subsidies and with higher food prices. It hurts our health which we pay for in suffering, shortened lives and health costs.

> over half of corn acreage is used for ethanol.

That doesn't mean much without more details. Corn is used as a tool in the crop rotation to enable growing foods for humans to eat. As we learned before ethanol's time in the sun, farmers are going to grow it anyway to support their rotations. The only question is if it is better to recapture that into usable energy or to let it rot out in the field.

> ... when taking land use into account

But if not taken into account? The harsh reality is that ethanol plants are unable to pay cost-of-production-level prices for corn. It now typically costs $5+ to produce a bushel of corn, while ethanol plants generally start to lose money as the price rises above $4.50 per bushel. You're not growing corn for ethanol. You accept selling corn to ethanol buyers when you can't find a better home for it.

Corn especially is a tough one to predict. A couple of years ago yields around here were nearly 100 bushels per acre higher than normal! Even if we put in the mightiest effort to grow exactly the right amount of corn for reasonable food uses, that 100 bushel surprise means a good 1/3 of your crop has no predetermined home right there. Of course, it can go the other way too. If you end up 100 bushels per acre short of what you expected...

Between needing to grow extra to protect against unexpected low yields, combined with unexpected high yields, half to the corn crop having no home (and therefore ending up as ethanol) isn't that far outside of what cannot be reasonably controlled for.

> To recap US overproduces calories to the point that it hurts the country.

That's fair. We don't have the technology to do better, unfortunately. Maybe once LLMs free up software developers once and for all they can turn their focus towards solving this problem?

> Corn is used as a tool in the crop rotation to enable growing foods for humans to eat. As we learned before ethanol's time in the sun, farmers are going to grow it anyway to support their rotations. The only question is if it is better to recapture that into usable energy or to let it rot out in the field.

This doesn't make sense in light of the large expansion of corn acreage that corresponds to ethanol policy.

https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10323 https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_corn_acres_planted

> large expansion of corn acreage

Corn acres have expanded, but the same is also true of other crops. Given corn's role in the crop rotation, it stands to reason that when other crops expand, corn comes with it. There are a lot more mouths to feed nowadays. The world's population has grown by approximately 30% since the last change in ethanol policy.

> that corresponds to ethanol policy.

The ethanol subsidy in the last policy change ended in 2011, yet, as you point out, corn acres have continued to expand, which seems contrary to what you are trying to suggest. What correspondence are you finding?

corn->ethanol is government subsidized robbery. I paid for those nutrients let them rot. Now consumers have to buy more and eat more calories to get the same nutrition. All so we can have net negative ROEI ethanol?

> corn->ethanol is government subsidized robbery.

There was that brief period where subsidies were enacted to spur on construction of ethanol plants to take up the excess corn that was rotting leading up to that time. They have long since come to an end. You could still call E10 requirements a subsidy, but you'd only be paying for that if you willingly chose to consume the product.

> Now consumers have to buy more and eat more calories to get the same nutrition.

Why?

> All so we can have net negative ROEI ethanol?

I'm not sure your math is mathing. Recapturing something, even with some marginal loss, is still a greater return than nothing.

Your buffer here is meat. Cattle are tremendously inefficient consumers of grain. Eat your burgers in the bountiful years, then slaughter 75% of the herd in a hardship year, eat well for six months, then spend the next three, four, five years eating more grains while the herds recover.

Ethanol is another one.

That's the sensible way to do it.

Somehow I doubt that it's the way we do it... But maybe the variability is coming from world trade and developing nations.

Cattle are inefficient consumers of grain, but highly efficient consumers of grass. Most land used for pasture can't effectively be used for anything else.

This argument might sound good, but those cattle are fed crops, not just sunshine and the grass they walk on.

Most crops grown in the US are used as animal feed. They are dependent on arable land that could be used to grow food for humans directly and much more efficiently. We just like the taste, so we accept the inefficiency.

Eh. The "inefficent calorie conversion" take is sort of lazy and misses the nuances. I just looked it uo, and it seems that only about 55% of yields are for feed, and there is definitely some more nuance there, since a lot of feed meal comes from stalks and parts if the plants humans would not consume. This notion of calorie inefficiency also misses the mark on what would be planted and harvested instead to contain the same bioavailable nutrient profile thay comes from meat. In otber words, using land for feed to convert grains to another type of food is probably more necessary than just "taste".

I don't care to research it further, but I own a small 5 acre farm and can attest that some crops grow in some areas and some don't. So even if you did map it all out on a piece of paper where you'd get all your beans and lentils and whatnots I doubt it would work in real life. Cattle can handle a couple hard freezes. My tomatoes can't.

There is, as you say a lot of nuance here. Making cattle go away doesn't suddenly make say 55% more wheat suddenly appear on market shelves.

Indeed the argument to remove beef production has always struck me as an interesting starting point to a longer conversation.

So ok, cattle are gone, and there's now say 30% more grain on the market. Presumably this lowers prices to humans? Do people suddenly eat 30% more bread?

Health, and weight, issues aside (not sure an increase in carbs at the expense of protein is a win), do people just shift to other protein (like chicken). Does this mean a huge oversupply of grain, and a consequent drop in prices?

Let me put it another way. Does removing a market currently consuming 30-50% of the crop make things better or worse for farmers?

IMO Having livestock feed as a market keeps prices up, and as this article points out they're still too low. Killing off the cattle market kills off grain farmers too. I'm not sure that's the win people think it is.

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We feed the average cow >10lbs of grain and also some alfalfa for every pound of meat we get out right now.

Part of the cull would likely be shifting towards more grass fed production. Another part would simply be prioritizing chicken or pork for a while.

Americans would riot without burgers.

Some of them date back to 'westward expansion', where they were incentives to encourage settler immigration (e.g. Texas tax exemption from 1839). They've stayed on the books because nobody wants the trouble of suggesting their removal.

More generally, however, it's a cost that is paid to support massive efficiency gains in other sectors. Like roads, aviation or the military. The freight system particularly would be unreliable if food prices floated according to only supply and demand, due to freights vulnerability to political upheavals, militias, etc.

It's out of political fear. The irony is that it doesn't actually work all that well.

Apparently, New Zealand abandoned all farm subsidies at some point and while the transition was abrupt and rough for farmers the farming sector recovered and is now performing much better. They abandoned it because they could no longer support it economically. They were producing lots of sheep that couldn't be sold. Now they produce much more meat with much less sheep.

Farming subsidies aren't unique to the US. Here in the EU, farmers are giving away subsidized potatoes in Berlin currently. You can literally go to a collection point and pick up some free potatoes. They have so much over production that farmers literally don't know what to do with it. Nobody wants them. In the same way there's a history of subsidized beetroot farming for sugar production, too much wine in France, butter and milk surpluses, etc. This happens over and over again.

In the US, the two main crops that are being subsidized are corn and soy beans. Corn syrup isn't exactly a thing that the rest of the world needs in their diets. It's a very uncommon ingredient outside the US. And commonly associated with obesity issues inside it. Soy beans are useful for export and for feeding animals. Exports are problematic (tariffs) currently and animals can also be fed with corn.

And of course much corn is also used for ethanol production, which in turn is used to greenwash fuel usage in the ICE vehicles that burn it. Bear in mind that intensive corn farming is very CO2 intensive. The extensive mono cultures in the US are destroying the landscape and contributing to desertification. It's not great the environment or global warming. It doesn't make any economic sense to be subsidizing corn production at this scale.

The problem here is that these are relatively low value crops that would not be produced in anywhere near the current volumes without subsidies. They aren't actually needed in these volumes either. Farmers mainly grow it because they get money to grow it. They would be growing more valuable things without subsidies. Or at least be diversifying what they do. The irony of this is that many farmers don't even like being that dependent on subsidies.

The whole system perpetuates but there's no solid argument for it. Everyone could arguably do better without that. But it's easier/more convenient to not change the system. So politicians keep on "protecting" the farmers (i.e. their own seats).

>Here in the EU, farmers are giving away subsidized potatoes in Berlin currently.

I looked into this story because it doesn't sound correct. It seems the potatoes were indeed sold but due to an unusually high yield this year, the trader decided not to pick them up so the farmer gave them away rather than try to find another buyer. And it was just one farm in Saxony. So this is not an EU or even a Germany wide issue.

I have some friends that picked up free potatoes. That's why I mentioned it.

https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-germany-potatoes-eu-agriculture...

Hope you understand this is the equivalent of an ice cream parlour handing out free ice cream because the freezer broke. It has nothing to do with government agricultural policies or subsidies. Otherwise your friends would be getting their free spuds every week.

Thanks for the fact check!

Also the whole system is very exploited and rigged. Powerful people are pulling huge amounts of money out of the agricultural sector, and every government subsidy is feeding that engine so those people can continue doing that.

The ability for a nation to feed itself is national security, period. Anyone who says otherwise is wishfully thinking or naive.

The quickest way for a government to collapse is famine.

IMO it is the role of the federal government to ensure that the US is not dependent on another country to feed its people. This is probably not popular here, but its a fact.

> so subsidized

Emphasis on "so", i.e. past obvious strategic rationale like food "security", there's reason to believe US ag has excessive subsidies. IMO answer is like every other "strategic" sector, farmland political economy has been captured by wealth (i.e. Bill Gates largest farmland owner). There's a fuckload of tax haven / loop holes tied to farmland that defers capital gains tax, estate/inheritance tax, property tax. Farmland is stable investment (because land) used to park wealth - it's an asset class, hence if held as asset, wealthy will double down / double dip to make sure it doesn't go idle, so they lobby all the "easy" crops to get massive subsidies and now something like 80% of subsidies goes to top 10% of recipients. US doesn't need to produce that much surplus corn/soy, but it's relatively easy to grow so big agri with capital sunk on those crops will lobby for continued subsidy of said crops, build up even more wasteful sectors like agri to energy (30-50% of corn goes to ethanol), and next thing you know a very inefficient ground water to subsidized agri commodity to gdp generator takes on it's own logic. TLDR, people good at at spread sheets rigged US agri like they rigged everything else.

Pricing anything into the cost of food would be political poison. Paying farmers to grow nothing is considered preferable to that

It's not always about price. Paying farmers to grow nothing ensures they stay open if we need them to grow something.

When I farmed we had set aside land paid for by the government. When there were predicted shortages on food in the future, we were allowed to farm that ground.

You don't want farmers going under. It just takes one bad year that way and we're all fucked. I've never lived through a proper famine, but Grandpa talked about the dust bowl and depression. It sounded fucking awful.

This exactly.

The fuss made about agricultural subsidies by non-farmers is misguided. Dropping subsidies doesn't make food cheaper, it makes it go away.

Consumers are addicted to cheap food, so they pay taxes instead to make up the difference. Given a progressive tax system this actually is a very efficient approach to take. And overall, as a % of the total budget, these subsidies are insignificant.

What is hurting farmers are reduced markets. USAid used to buy up a lot of surplus production (effectively a back-door subsidy), lots got exported to China et al. Given the economic antagonism towards the US (thanks to things like tarifs and insults) demand for US food exports either dropped naturally (eg Canada) or with reciprocal tarifs (eg China).

Politicians like to say "we don't make things here anymore" ignoring the most fundamental production of all (farming). They destabilize foreign trade, and (if we look at more labor intensive crops) target farm workers for deportation.

To be fair, agriculture states are also red states, so it's fair to say they voted for this.

>What is hurting farmers are reduced markets

I know there is a rule about reading the article, but did you? This [trend] is nothing new, USAid has nothing to do with it other than short term changes.

The vast majority of countries have barriers preventing our highly efficient production from selling in their countries. Think Argentina and meats, Switzerland and all things cattle, EU and pretty much everything.

Tariffs were one way to pry open those markets, but of course, the few agricultural products that were already selling , were affected in the retailiation . It will take some time for things to sort out.

Not surprisingly most countries want to be self sufficient with food production, so tarifs on food imports makes sense.

Unfortunately though I don't think US tarifs are the solution here. Leaving aside that antagonizing the end-consumer seems unproductive (eg canada) there's also a perception in Europe that US food products (especially meat) are of low quality.

Whether that perception US true or not US immaterial. (My own visits to the US and experience of US food would suggest the US optimizes for quantity not quality, but anecdotes are not data.)

Much of the barrier with exporting beef are the higher food standards, and documentation, required in Europe. Lowering the standards doesn't seem to be politically acceptable either.

That’s what foreign aid is for:

1. Keep strategic production capacity alive.

2. Spread American soft power.

3. Get warm fuzzy feelings because you prevented millions of people from dying of starvation.

No, the US will not depend on foreign aid to [primarily] feed it's citizens. Never going to happen.

You've got it backwards - foreign aid using US grown crops provides increased very stable demand. Take any excess grains made in a given year and ship them to another country, the farmers get paid well for it so they keep their productive capacity high, and the marginal cost of getting it to a charity overseas is low anyway. This means there's always enough grain to feed our citizens.

And it keeps foreign countries dependent on us and gives us another avenue to coerce them. Wins for us all around.

Because agriculture is hard industry. The producer prices that is what the farmer gets are often laughable cut from final product. And this is due to farmers having little or no power in the system. Their products are made at certain time. And then they start declining in quality and finally rotting away. Most of the value ends up in other parts of the chain.

You could increase prices relatively little and farmers would earn lot more. But no one else is willing to allow that to happen. As such directly subsidizing them is more efficient.

most of the subsidies are insurance not direct payments.

At least in Europe they have inproportionally big lobby and food is considered a security issue. If it would not be subsidized it would probably be beaten by much more cheaper imports. You can see they ignored security issue with energy and it backfired pretty bad.

… but why, economically, does subsidizing farms result in a more efficient allocation of resources?

It’s doesn’t.

Agricultural subsidies in the US, and I presume most states but I’m not as well read on their policies, are a mixture of realpolitik, war preparedness, and graft.

If you are trying to square the circle, you can’t, because economic efficiency was not an input for the decisions on these subsidies.

because the energy states of inputs are so massively beyond ordinary bounds that distortions of unexpected kinds develop and persist in markets that otherwise appear to be straightforward? And, this is not new, but more energetic and more far-reaching than ever before. (more comments would have to chose a lens through which to postulate e.g. economic, legal, energy exchange, human nature ... etc.. ?)

Ag. can't just be about profit. There's a dimension which is national-strategic interest. Food security, the domestic food economy is important.

It is my understanding that a lot of the US ag. sector is making inputs for processing for corn oil, fructose, ethanol, and for exports to markets which in turn target american ag, selling e.g. beef back to the US, fattened on US Soy.

It's a complex web. I don't want US farmers going broke, any more than I want Australian farmers going broke (where I live)

So getting this right, fixing farming sector security, is important.

I recommend checking history of deregulation of agricultural industry in New Zealand. It didn't lose the industry. Actually the opposite happened.

Persistent government subsidies are almost never a good idea long term. I understand that some temporary support might make sense in some cases, but not permanent one. It prevents innovation and optimization. And in the long run it usually makes more damage.

Having been in the NZ ag tech industry for the last 25+ years, US subsidies and tarrifs drove a lot of innovation in NZ (also Europe) and then US manufacturers in the spaces I've been in have pretty much collapsed when faced with better tech as farmers switched to using our ( or the European) tech.

Curious what sort of tech? Like better tractors and such?

Please provide examples

It would appear that to remain competitive they had massive consolidation, and with that an increase in animal density leading to major issues with water pollution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CraFarms

So I guess yay deregulation, now with more capitalist privatized profits with socialized costs!

Downvoting without engaging in a discussion kind of directly violates both the spirit and rules around here.

I've posted pretty solid evidence that dregulation, did not, in fact improve the agricultural situation for New Zealand. It absolutely made a subset of corporations and mega-farmers extremely rich at the expense of the natural resources the rest of the country shares. Would LOVE to hear the arguments about how that's a good thing for the people of New Zealand or our planet as a whole.

But then again, that would require thoughtful discourse...

Because it goes against the urban popular group think. "Blue States subsidizing Red States" "NZ did it, so US can to"

Provide any real or partial claims this isn't the whole story and it's difficult to change your mind on something that is fundamental to your beliefs. So downvote and move to the next post that validates your beliefs. Happens to everyone including me.

There is also a dimension which is about caring for your fellow man and caring for the land which the food you grow depends on.

Which society seems to have lost because we've focused too much on the one metric, "money", over all others.

Agreed, in addition there is the dimension of I don’t want to starve to death, so we should make sure we have a viable regulated agriculture industry.

Growing excess amount of food is part of food security, but farmers are going bankrupt because they focused on labor efficient agricultural commodity products to the exclusion of everything else. For many farmers, it's not even a full time job

I rather we focus on increasing food security in other way.

Maybe we shouldn't be turning corns into cows as that reduce the amount of energy we are able to access. But how do we keep access to farmlands that we don't use now that we aren't turning corns into cows? I suppose we could just use these lands as pasture.

>Maybe we shouldn't be turning corns into cows

Why? We like beef. I don't want it to go away.

Because corn fed beef isn't as flavorful as grass fed beef. (Or healthy for the cattle)

~60 million acres of corn and soybean in the US, the size of Oregon, is grown exclusively for biofuels. This is unnecessary as you mention, as are the subsidies to farmers for these row crops.

Which could be easily converted in one harvest to feed a nation if needed. That option is very valuable.

The US already has far more food production than needed, this option is of little value.

Do those crops contribute to the negative numbers reported since most people don't buy biofuel? Or does it contribute something positive to the numbers with government subsidies guaranteeing returns?

I haven't studied the economics of the biofuel farming.

Corn is turned into ethanol, and is then blended with gasoline. The US consumes ~14B gallons of ethanol per year. It’s a net negative because it’s carbon and water intensive and farmers advocate for more ethanol than is necessary as a subsidy via government mandate.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/03/environm...

https://ethanolrfa.org/media-and-news/category/news-releases...

Subsidies also lead to surpluses that can help buffer price shocks during supply crises; here is a recent example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01638-7

Everyone thinks their thing is too special for markets. I’m sure you’ve heard the argument for healthcare, education, energy, water, food, science, infrastructure, etc.

We need to realign on this politically; either we use markets to allocate scarce resources or we don’t.

The answer is probably that the public does not believe in markets. But we haven’t made that explicit, and instead have the worst combinations of policies; with worse service and enabling grifters.

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"Ag. can't just be about profit."

Somewhere off in the distance I hear billionaires laughing.

This is only important if you care about the future of humans. At least in America, attention spans have shortened, empathy has decreased, and individualism has increased. Billionaires don't care about the future beyond their own life. And unfortunately, one of the worst of them is now the head of the country.

JD Vance’s acretrader app is making out like bandits selling that farmland they are buying for cheap. This is on purpose

It is the ecconomy. Harvest have been above average around the world the past few years. In turn supply and demand puts prices low. one bad year and harvests will be down and prices way up.

i've been working for John Deere for 15 years - I have seen this cycle several times already. people blame various politics when it happens, but the fundamentals are enough to explain nearly all of this. Anyone in farming knows this and plans for it (not always successfully)

> overall operating expenses remain well above pre-2021 levels. Rising costs since 2020 have been driven primarily by sharp increases in interest expenses (+71%), fertilizer (+37%), fuel and oil (+32%), labor (+47%), chemicals (+25%) and maintenance (+27%), alongside notable gains in seed (+18%) and marketing costs (+18%)

These numbers are huge though. I think it is fair to say that this time it may be different.

Looks like inflation to me - we all pay the same interest and everything else has been going up.

Sarah Taber for the lowdown all things US Farming https://www.youtube.com/@FarmToTaber

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

~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.

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.

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".

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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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Again, wages have not fallen in real terms. You're just making this up.

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.

> when the majority of Democrats voted in favor of the Iraqi War Resolution

The majority of Democrats in the Senate voted in favor (29-21). In the House a much larger majority voted against (81-126) the resolution.

A total of 7 Republicans voted against the resolution. Between both chambers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit...

>He won Iowa by 9 doing this. To a war hero.

He won Iowa by 9 due to the fact that the war in Iraq was incredibly unpopular and the economy was imploding.

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.

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

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.

> what we have in the modern Democratic Party is an intentional choice not to promise or do anything but to expect votes

Do people really believe this? That there are no policy programs from Democratic candidates? Nothing on healthcare, childcare, eldercare, education, housing, energy? Just no promises at all?

I ask because that is obviously false, but it seems to be a common misapprehension. I'm wondering what candidates could do beyond talking about their policies at length (which they do) that would get people to believe that they have policies.

> Do people really believe this?

It's objectively true.

> That there are no policy programs from Democratic candidates?

Does increasing ICE funding count [1]?

> Nothing on healthcare, childcare, eldercare, education, housing, energy? Just no promises at all?

Literally none of those things. The Democratic Platform is "Trump bad" and to be a nicer, gentler face on fascism.

> I ask because that is obviously false

What policies do Democrats actually stand for?

This is so obviously true that you need look no farther than the NYC mayoral election. Zohran Mamdani came from nowhere to win the the Democratic primary on a fairly simple platform of universal childcare, cheaper food, faster and free buses and freezing the rent (on rent stabilized apartments). Those are all concrete policies. Less than one month into his administration and we hvave a pilot program for childcare [2].

And what was the Democratic Party response? Democratic Party leaders (eg Schumer, Jeffries, Booker) would not endorse him, despite him winning the primary. Some tepid endorsements came late. Instead the Democratic Party with a wink and a nod ran a spoiler candidate, Andrew Cuomo, who previous had to resign in disgrace from being governor after multiple allegations of sexual harassment.

Think back to what Kamala ran on. Not stopping the genocide, not even calling it a genocide (both positions of which were highly popular with the base, even more than a year ago), a tax credit for small business, having the "most lethal" (her words) military and an immigration plan that was indistinguishable from the Trump 2020 immigration plan, including building the wall that the Democrats had previously campaigned against. She mentioned "price gouging" one time. That was hugely popular because it was the one thing that went to the affordability crisis. But she never mentioned it again because Wall Street didn't like it. Nothing about healthcare or the cost of rent or education. Not a thing.

> I'm wondering what candidates could do beyond talking about their policies at length (which they do)

Who talks about affordability, housing, healthcare and inflation "at length"? There are a handful of Congresspeople who do (eg AOC) but it's not a party position and certainly none of the out 2028 presidential wannabes talk about it.

Here's a little test for you. Whenever they talk they'll usually say that someone (usually Trump) is bad. Maybe they'll say a certain situation is bad (eg high rents). Whenever a candidate or ap olitician does that, the very next thing out of their mouth should be a solution. "Yes rents are high and I'm going to tackle this by doing X, Y and Z." Every problem should be followed a solution. If you don't hear a solution, it's just empty platitudes.

But the Democratic Party doesn't do that. They don't like making promises because then they can't be held to promises they never made.

> ... that would get people to believe that they have policies.

Progressive policies are poular. Democratic pooliticians are not. One of my favorite examples of this is Missouri. Trump won the state by 19. There was a ballot initiative to increase the minimum wage, an obviously prograssive policy. It won by 15. So this progressive policy outperformed Kamala by 34 in a deep red state. Put another way, 17% of the voters who voted in 2024 in Missouri showed up to vote for Trump AND to increase minimum wage.

This isn't a messaging problem. The Kamala campaign spent over $100 million in Pennsylvania and didn't move the needle. It's a platform problem.

[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/cory-booker-ice-proposal-progressiv...

[2]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/01/20/...

> If voters didn't vote for your candidate, your candidate failed. The voters didn't fail. The candidate did.

Voters aren't immune from failure. Voters fail when they stay home and don't bother to vote at all, when they remain ignorant/uneducated, when they vote for a party/team instead of the candidate, etc.

It's tempting to let voters off the hook when candidates lie to their faces but ultimately it falls on voters to be aware of the track record of the candidates, be educated on the issues, and use a little critical thinking. I certainly can't feel too bad for them when they reelect a candidate who already screwed them over once already. Everyone knows the old saying: "Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me... you can't get fooled again."

> Voters aren't immune from failure.

Hard disagree. Voters are never at fault. It is incumbent upon the candidate to give the voters something to vote for.

> ... they stay home and don't bother to vote at all

Because they had nothing to vote for. Candidate's fault.

So what you've touched on is what's called "lesser evil voting", an idea that it is the voter's responsibility to engage in harm reduction. For too long the Democratic Party has relied on this to do nothing by just being a gentler face on fascism. Some might say you're rewarding that behavior by turning up to vote for them anyway, even when they offer you nothing. Millions stayed home in 2024 because they were offered nothing. That's the only power voters had and they exercised it. And I said at the time that the Democratic Party will learn nothing and change nothing as a result of a devastating loss in the easiest lay up of all time.

> Voters are never at fault. It is incumbent upon the candidate to give the voters something to vote for.

It's the voters job to vote for the person they want in the position. If you're prepared to ignore the reality of the deeply broken two party system that means writing in someone. The end result is the same as not voting, but at least it's a clearly deliberate act and can't be dismissed as or assumed to be laziness, apathy, or equal approval of either candidate.

> an idea that it is the voter's responsibility to engage in harm reduction.

If you refuse the responsibility for doing the least harmful or most beneficial thing for yourself and the country, who do you think is going to do that for you?

> For too long the Democratic Party has relied on this to do nothing by just being a gentler face on fascism.

Even if every election was strictly a choice between a fascist and a gentler fascist (and that's not remotely been the case) do you think that it doesn't make any difference which one wins? Do you think that there will no difference in the amount of death and suffering that results? Even if you were only given the choice between there being more or less death and suffering for yourself and others in your country do you really think the smartest move is to not bother to make any effort whatsoever to reduce that harm?

> Some might say you're rewarding that behavior by turning up to vote for them anyway,

I understand your frustration with the party, but you don't have to vote for them either. You can write in someone else. You can write "Fuck all of you" in capitol letters across the entire ballot. That at least would be a protest! If you don't even show up you're not saying anything except that you're fine with them doing whatever they want with you.

I mean, pardon the analogy, but if I were locked in a room with two rapists who wanted to fuck me in the ass, I like to think I'd at least make some effort to defend myself. If I couldn't or failed do that I'd hope that I'd at least voice my displeasure. I sure wouldn't silently bend over and present my asshole willingly to the meanest rapist in the room because I didn't want to "reward" the gentler one. I wouldn't just close my eyes and open up for whoever got there first. That's just giving up.

> Millions stayed home in 2024 because they were offered nothing. That's the only power voters had and they exercised it.

That wasn't an act of power, it was the opposite. The only power voters have is their vote, and everyone who stayed at home didn't even make an effort to use it. They gave up the only power they had leaving themselves powerless. If I were some evil fascist trying to rule over a population it's pretty much the best outcome I could hope for. It'd be the people giving me their permission to do anything I wanted because nobody even cares what I do. An actual vote for me in one election is a vote I could lose in the future. No vote at all would mean I'd already won.

> And I said at the time that the Democratic Party will learn nothing and change nothing as a result of a devastating loss in the easiest lay up of all time.

Which only shows how stupid the "do nothing" strategy is. Why should they change anything if no one cares about the outcome anyway? You can't make the democratic party be what you want them to be by letting the country get destroyed out of spite. Maybe you can't change them at all, but if you have any chance to do it, it'll be by voting for people in that party who most represents what you want it to be. It's either that or enough people have to vote outside of the party and we know the obstacles to that.

Democracy in the US has been a joke. It's a two party system where both options suck. There is a massive amount of voter suppression. There is open corruption and bribery by the rich and by corporations. Inaction isn't going to fix any of those problems. Voting actually could.

When Trump ran for president, nobody wanted him in power. The republicans didn't want him. They had their own preferred candidates. They didn't want him so much that they pretty much got everybody they could think of to run against him. The wealthy didn't want him either. They'd been making money hand over fist and they liked things the way they were. Trump threatened to mess with the system they'd built for themselves.

Everybody pretty much saw him as a clown. They weren't even wrong about that really, but in the end he got the votes. Maybe that wouldn't have happened if so many on the left didn't just stay home, but because it did we know that (at least back then anyway) voters in America actually had the power to change things. The ones who used that power were not the ones who stayed at home and pouted. The powerful establishment lost because people voted for something different. Something stupid, yes, but different and the result was (and has been) chaos. In my opinion Sanders should have been the left's trump. It was working too, although he was being actively undermined by the party. Today, it's candidates like Mamdani who I'm interested in watching. It doesn't matter if it has to start more locally than nationally, as long as the "fascists" getting votes get gentler and gentler.

There's a non-zero chance that America gave up the power to vote by electing a dictator. That's always been an option after all. Freedom means having enough rope to hang yourself with, but if the USA is lucky enough to still have the option to vote for who ends up in power I strongly suggest that people take it.

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.

> 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.

[delayed]

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.

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.

How would they do that if housing is plentiful?

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?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

>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.

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.

> 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.

Paying double for food is a great idea until you realize that now we need to subsidize everyone else just so they can eat.

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).

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?

Which patents in particular are you concerned about?

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.

The New York Drought is real.

> 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.

Oh yup, you're right on that. I guess my point still stands as Bayer and BASF kind of fit the bill as well.

There’s only two meat packers… two. Where are the cattle farmers to go? It’s like this across the industry thanks to monopolies like ConAgra, Tyson’s, etc.

Breaking up monopolies and giving farm workers strong unions would go a long way to improving the situation.

There are many many meat packers, or you just mean two big ones?

“The U.S. meatpacking industry is dominated by the "Big Four"—Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef—which control 80-85% of the beef market and significant portions of poultry and pork”

It's so much worse for poultry. My state and the bordering states represent more than half of US production and there's exactly one USDA facility available to independent producers. They're quite small and the cost approaches today's retail price for a whole Tyson chicken.

There are USDA exemptions for tiny producers (up to 20K/yr vs 150K+ for a single modern broiler house) to slaughter and package themselves for in-state sales but anyone operating under one of those exemptions won't be able to grow that business large enough to self-finance constructing their own USDA-monitored facility.

Canada has a thing called "Supply Management". It means that for some agricultural industries, we limit how many people can produce, for example, milk.

This restriction keeps the price of milk stable, and high enough that farmers can make a profit. It may seem strange to some, but the goal is to ensure that we don't have to bail out our farmers.

The alternative is as in the US, where anyone can produce milk, and the price craters, and farmers need to be constantly bailed out.

Canadians watch crazy things like for example the US Federal government buying millions and millions of gallons of milk, making cheese, and storing it for decades. All to reduce supply/create demand, and keep the price artificially high. I suppose one bonus is the US government gives some of this cheese to the poor.

The other crazy part is the US federal government has repeatedly bought dairy farms out, to reduce supply. Literally bought entire farms, and closed them down.

Canada wants a stable supply of milk. We don't want to rely upon a foreign power for basic food-stuffs. And we don't want to spend untold billions. Thus, supply management.

Meanwhile, the US runs around saying we're crazy commies because we have price and supply control, says free market is perfect, then spends endless billions over decades to pretend the market works.

Oh and also, the US screams about how our market isn't "open", how we unfairly manipulate the market, then... wants to inject super cheap, underpriced milk, all of the result of US federal tax dollars spending billions.

Finally, it is illegal to use growth hormones in Canada on cattle. Not so in the US. With the excess supply issues in dairy in the US, maybe the US should do the same?

Ok great, now do maple syrup

https://www.canada.ca/en/agriculture-agri-food/news/2024/04/...

https://ppaq.ca/en/sale-purchase-maple-syrup/worlds-only-res...

> The alternative is as in the US, where anyone can produce milk, and the price craters, and farmers need to be constantly bailed out.

Do you have references to bailouts specifically for dairy farms? The big bailouts recently were due to reciprocal tariffs. There is the Milk Loss Program but that is limited to 30 days of production per year. I would also classify this more of an insurance program than bailout.

Examples:

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/23/nyregion/us-offers-dairym...

https://www.fsa.usda.gov/Internet/FSA_File/1_2_overview_brow...

The PDF has some data showing how much post-market intervention costs.

It's particularly infuriating how US politicians will stated "we have a free market". whilst intervention happens, and then get upset that Canada does it differently.

Even more bizarre, is Canada has only 1/10th the population of the US. Both countries carve out exclusions, but the US side goes bananas that we don't have completely open markets on the agricultural side. So? We can both exclude each others markets, for agriculture, who cares?

With 1/10th of the population, if you manages to get 10% of the Canadian market, that's one hundredth of the whole US market. It's such a tiny amount.

Everyone here suspects the US just wants to drive all Canadian agriculture to bankruptcy, making us entirely dependent upon the US. No way. Not going to happen. That's madness.

In terms of market intervention, we can't afford to do it the way the US does. We don't have billions to buy up excess milk, or buy out farmers to reduce supply. It's immensely wasteful to the taxpayer.

Which is very strange, because it's often parties on the right in the US, which do buyouts.

Canada dumps good milk down the drain while people go hungry and suffer high food prices. The supply management system is not perfect.

You can't produce an exact amount of food. It isn't an assembly line, it's farming, it's biological.

You need to aim for excess, to ensure enough is produced during drought, animal sickness, and other variability.

What Canada does is ensure there is excess, but not crazy amounts. It also ensures the market price is fair to farmers.

What you call "high food price" we call "farmers not going bankrupt".

And while nothing is perfect, supply management is far better than the alternatives.

> supply management is far better than the alternatives.

Why, then, only dairy, poultry, eggs, and — at least until 2007 when the government bought back the quota — tobacco production? If the farmers growing the foods that are actually deemed important in a healthy diet end up bankrupt, no big deal?

> It also ensures the market price is fair to farmers.

Well, it creates a two-tier system where the 'blessed' farmers who are born into it (or born into a European farm that can be sold at a high enough price to buy a farmer in Canada out) have artificially high incomes to spend on land, equipment, etc. at inflated prices. It is hard to think that is fair to all the other farmers who have to compete against the farmers of the world when selling their product but have to pay supply managed farmer prices for inputs.

I suppose everything is in the eye of the beholder. I'll grant you that all the other farmers' retirement plan is to sell off their land to a supply managed farmer who will pay way more than it is worth. That keeps the peace. Bit sad to see everything go to those producers who get special treatment, though.

Supply management does have its problems, but given the involvement of imperfect humans nothing will be without problems. Canadian pork, beef, and vegetable farmers that I personally know also complain that they can't enact supply management for their sector. They also envy the appearance of high profits, an easy life, and government subsidies & bailouts (yes, Canadian dairy farmers still receive those) for those in a supply managed sector.

At the end of the day, consumers get stable and somewhat realistic prices and supply, while farmers also get stable income.

> consumers get stable and somewhat realistic prices [...] while farmers also get stable income.

Which? You can't have both. Input costs are subject to the whims of non-supply managed markets. When, say, input costs rise either the farmer has to absorb that cost (unstable income), or the cost has to be passed on to the customer (unstable consumer price).

> and supply

Oh? https://www.ctvnews.ca/atlantic/article/some-maritime-grocer..., https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/cana..., https://farmersforum.com/cracks-in-supply-management/

> > consumers get stable and somewhat realistic prices [...] while farmers also get stable income.

> Which? You can't have both

Maybe not in USA. Looks like another problem that only one developed country says is impossible to solve.

But it is solved here, its whats happening.

Food prices are mostly stable (relatively speaking)

> Maybe not in USA.

Maybe not. I grew up on a Canadian dairy farm, and have continued to farm in Canada ever since, so that is beyond my expertise. I have not participated in US-based farming. I can only meaningfully speak to Canadian agriculture.

A connection to the USA is interesting, but what you are trying to get across is not entirely understood on my end. Perhaps not having ties to the USA means I don't have an implied context? Fill me in. I am curious.

>Canada dumps good milk down the drain while people go hungry and suffer high food prices

I'm not sure if you realise this, but the exact same thing happens in the US.

Mildly surprised that this domain belongs to the Farm Bureau. Maybe they should sell it to Meta and donate the proceeds to the money-losing farms...

Because*

This is a result of subsidies distorting market prices and encouraging malinvestment.

Good. Actions have consequences it seems

Strangely no mention of the climate crisis.

Thankfully (smug response)

Not every topic needs to discuss every tangent problem.

Oddly enough the way to help is to removing the subsidies. Exploiting famers, using them as a middleman to the American taxpayer, is extremely lucrative.

Some subsidies are useful. Some aren't. The trick is to stop the ones that aren't helping without collapsing our food supply.

Of course, I'm sure a temporary one might be useful once a decade or century.

My point is this exactly mirrors the situation in health insurance, university degree prices, and many other industries we permanent subsidize. Companies create machines to use people to access the nearly unlimited pool of money available.

would this actually be enough such that farmers have to sell their land and new small family farmers cam get started?

or only a new set of bankruptcies and the same farmers stay on?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xon9A5_4tQw&pp=ygUKZmFybSB0YWJ... was very illuminating

It’s likely the land would be far more valuable as something else.

Small family farms, while romanticized, have all the problems of any small business competing with larger professionalized businesses; consistency in operations, consistency in output quality, access to resources - including people and machines.

Additionally, for their own operational simplicity big buyers prefer interacting with as few suppliers as possible - so, market forces have been driving consolidation for decades.

It really depends on the farm, unlikely it will be used for anything else.

90% likely what would happen is an adjacent farmer would buy the land. You want all your land to be near each other, like defragementing a hard drive ;)

I am told that farms are optimized for labor efficiency rather than profits. These farmers often have a second job when they're not out there farming.

With a low tax on land, we may not actually be encouraging the most efficient use of farmlands.

Given that people are loathed to sell their land for any reason, this makes it impossible for farmers to start new farm, leading to a gradual depopulation and collapse of rural economies.

Small farmers are not good policy despite the romance. A large farmer can afford soil investments that small ones cannot

This video is very liberal but does a good job of explaining which companies and industries pay for breaks and which don't. And uses soy bean farmers as a prominent example of a group who haven't been giving Trump bribes https://youtu.be/RPzcGeiNYvk?si=bfy_5KEo_ZUxOBHu

I wonder if at some point before large corporations finish buying up the last of the family farms in America, if rural America will figure out Trump and his maga republicans were never their friends.

I don’t think it would. Humans really like to blame other people for things they inflict on themselves. This is less painful than learning self-awareness.

The current Republican Party blatantly preys on this weakness and gives people an enemy to hate so they can keep fleecing them.

This is different than the Democrats, who can’t get their shit together and have a common goal.

Don't you worry, deposed farmers (those farmers squeezed between their mega-size suppliers and mega-size customers who had to sell their farms) voted for Trump last year.

They described a lot of data. Then, toward the end, they say:

"These loss estimates reflect national averages; actual costs of production and returns vary by region, management decisions and ownership structure. For example, producers who own their farmland may face lower total costs by avoiding cash rental expenses, resulting in higher returns."

So, can we trust this to say what it appears to be saying? Or might it be meaningless like many broad averages, and we should use more specific data that includes supplier behaviors?

I watched a YouTube video that made me really worried about this, hopefully there are smart people on here that can see a bigger picture.

https://www.fb.org/news-release/agricultural-groups-sound-al...

Quite surprised there wasn't mention of the Trump tariffs on China causing the collapse of China imports of US soybeans, which by the way, has persisted even though the original tariffs were reduced, causing lasting damage to farmers.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenroberts/2026/01/17/china-pur...

Almost 78% of farmers voted for Trump [1]. These are the guys that got Trump elected. Polls show that support for President Trump among farmers remains high, hovering around 50-60%. That means these are the guys that are keeping Trump in power. When support among farmers drops to 20% level GOP legislators will feel emboldened to remove Trump from power.

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-farmers-voted-trump-feeling-210...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjedvwed1xgo

It's just shocking to me how certain demographics are so eager to vote against their own interests.

I mean, name one thing that Trump has done to help farmers more than he hurt them with the tariffs? (Subsidies they already had, regardless of the party in power.)

What are they getting in return for their vote? The safety of knowing that trans athletes are banned and some Guatemalans in far away "liberal" cities have been "gotten rid of"? None of those benefit them in any way. I still can't quite understand.

GOP has long pursued a strategy of getting rural whites to vote against their self interest. This is why they play up cultural issues such as trans people using women's bathrooms and such other topics that uneducated people can readily grasp.

It’s easy to say that. I grew up in a dairy county in upstate ny. Solid democrats. The board room of the local farm bureau had photos of FDR on the wall.

The party really abandoned rural voters and farmers. Money in politics didn’t just affect Republicans — the democrats abandoned the traditional party structures and followed the money. There’s no more democratic picnics, etc.

I’m not defending the GOP. They’ve embraced evil imo. But people followed their message because nobody else is talking to them.

> The party really abandoned rural voters and farmers.

Not to defend the Dem party (only the lesser of two evils, at least lately), but in what way? Because farm subsidies seem fairly consistent regardless of which party was in power[0]

[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-commodity-...

There's literally zero platform coverage for rural issues. The hotbeds of liberal politics weren't NYC and Boston 50 years ago -- it was Iowa and Wisconsin. Subsidies today are mostly about stabilizing a few commodities.

Dairy is the best example, it's an industry that scales down just fine with a regulated market. That was thrown away and massive dairy producers have literally destroyed the supply side of the market. 90% of dairy operations in New York have shut down since 1980. I worked on a farm as a teenager in the 90s that has been in continuous operation since the Dutch colonial period in the 1600s. Almost 200 years of that was significant dairy operations. They probably had 50-100 cows in the 1970s, but that business was gone by 1990-1992. Today, the family boards horses to pay their taxes and work for the government.

Dairy is important because it supports a large ecosystem of business. Vet practices. Laborers. Dairy processing and cheese making. The remaining producers in New York are usually captive producers for vertically integrated businesses like convenience stores, co-ops or scaled operations in Western NY. All of that is dead, and that pattern repeats everywhere.

Even in big agriculture states like say Iowa, the "farmers" are mostly tenants and employees now. All of these Trumper idiots who are going bankrupt will have their land purchased by PE, foreign capital or other funds and will become workers.

Can urban liberals please tell us how to vote? You can come and help our fingers push the buttons.

Seriously, do you think this works? Do you think urban people living in poverty vote against their interests as well?

You should read "What's the Matter with Kansas?" by Thomas Frank [1] that discusses this topic at length. Yes, I do think it works: It is possible to persuade people to vote against their material or economic self-interest by inflaming passions around simple, emotionally charged "hot-button" topics that are easy for most voters to understand and react to instinctively.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Matter-Kansas-Conservatives-Ame...

I suppose they've successfully instilled the fear that "our way of life" will be destroyed if they don't vote for Trump, despite 1) being a lie, and 2) a vote that will make things worse for them. It's amazing how powerful these relatively minor cultural issues can be. It certainly makes for interesting case studies for future political science and sociology university (if the humanities survive).

> instilled the fear that "our way of life" will be destroyed if they don't vote for Trump, despite 1) being a lie

You may find this hard to believe, but there are a lot of people old enough to see how rapidly "our way of life" has gone down the toilet. It's not a myth, it's happening.

Are you talking about manufacturing jobs going away, or something else?

> It's just shocking to me how certain demographics are so eager to vote against their own interests.

Something that's been made very clear over the last few election cycles is that a lot of voters will go against their own interests, as long as it hurts their perceived "enemy" more than themselves.

Right. This article discusses how race plays a central role in the opposition to universal health care policies like Obamacare, particularly focusing on how some of the resistance in the South is due to white populations not wanting Black Americans to receive free care: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/univ...

I live in a a rural farm land area, the only time I hear racist remarks of any kind is online, usually towards white cis men.

Just an anecdote, but IMO progressive liberals are some of the most racist people I've encountered.

I have family members who didn't like Obama at all, not one of them would ever comment on color, it was his policies.

But only one side does this?

> It's just shocking to me how certain demographics are so eager to vote against their own interests.

Nobody votes against their own interests. That is something that only stupid caricatures do, not actual people. If it seems that way to you, that should be a very strong signal to reevaluate your understanding of the situation. Most likely, that means either nobody is representing their interests or you have misunderstood what their interests are.

That's like saying nobody ever gets swindled. If you think someone got swindled that should be a strong signal to reevaluate your understanding of how they wanted to spend their money.

You are wasting your time I think. The people here know who the right people to vote for are, anyone who thinks otherwise is voting against their interests.

There is only one comment above that says that both rural and urban people do the same thing, it is all boiling down to everyone should be voting one party.

I don't really like Trump, but to be fair here, China does things like this all the time. They did the same thing in Canada, because we didn't want their spy-cars in our country.

We'd really be better off if we had zero trade with them. They're poison.

It's so obvious why. Money is created by governments and banks and it goes right back to them. Money doesn't stay in the system for too long because it's taxed each time it hops between people/companies. If you assume a 30% tax each time a dollar moves from one person to another, after just 6 hops, almost 90% of that dollar is gone... So people who are just 6 steps removed from the money printers live in a monetary environment where a dollar is 10 times rarer! That's not even factoring in inflationary Cantillon effects... It's Cantillon effects on crack...

Most independent farmers live in remote areas, far from money printers; they exist in a scarce monetary environment. It's hard to compete when your big corporate competitors exist in an environment where money is more abundant.

Capitalism. The problem is capitalism.

Any handouts for farmers go straight into the coffers of multinationals to pay for farm equipment, support for the locked down farm equipment, the patented seeds, the pesticides for the patented seeds and so on. The entire subsdization model is a profit opportunity for agricultural companies.

And what do those companies wnat to do? Buy up the farms and run them themselves for more profit. Because they don't have to charge the same amount to their own farms of course.

It's also why the wealthy and big companies like illegal immigration. It's an endless supply of underpaid workers who can be exploited for even more profits. Document these people and everybody's wages go up.

The only country I can think of that is really effectively managing its agriculture and food supply is of course China. China had some food shortages in the late 20th century and a result food security became a primary concern of the CCP. China has to feed 20% of the world's population and decided that food need to be plentiful and affordable. There were a seris of agricultural reforms through the 1970s to 1990s and then China used its increasing wealth to pay farmers when they had to and subsidize food when they had to to manage the supply. It's managed to the highest levels of China's government [1].

Here we have rent-seeking corporations and billionaires (eg the Resnicks [2]) where subsidies are just a wealth transfer to the already wealthy. food prices are out of control. But nobody cares because the profits have to keep going up.

[1]: https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-food-security-key-chall...

[2]: https://perfectunion.us/how-this-billionaire-couple-stole-ca...

Ok, another capitalism bad post, great.

What is your solution then? Explain how that happens/migrates to, in the US?

The US also took food security seriously after WW2. Now it's all devolved into HFCS.

Or they exported the good food, because they could get a better price for it.

When i want real quality food for a good price in my own country, i have to go to another country to actually get it.

Again, i can't condemn them for trying to make more profit, but somewhere in the line it gets pretty weird and annoying.

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This isn't reddit.