So God Made A Farmer

[Kralizec]

Farming is heavily subsidized in virtually all industrialized countries. And yet, when they still fail to make ends meet, they urge society to cough up even more money, or insist on government mandated pricing. Entiry industries have been uprooted because they're outmoded, mines have been closed, millions of people have lost their jobs throughout the centuries because their livelyhood is no longer viable. But that shouldn't happen to farmers, god forbid.

Stalin had the right idea when he sent them all to starve in Siberia.

[gaelic cowboy]

@ Strike your video link also annoys me greatly too.

there is no at mention of the massive pressure by supermarket multiples to drive prices down year on year.

No mention of the fact if your vegetables are on some kind of special two for one deal it was the farmer who paid for the free one.

I could go on but I think I will stop now


@ Horetore and Kralizec actually whats wrong is thinking that food should be cheap.

You all the lot of you want cheap/safe/nutricious/tasty and visually appealling food well go an grow it yourselves.

The word cheap at the front of there means the sentence should read cheap/safe/nutricious/tasty and visually appealling food.

As we have all seen it wasn't the family farm that stuck horse in EU foodstuffs but it will be the family farm that suffers the consequences later on.

[Lemur]

A discrediting lack of crystal meth in that video.

[The Lurker Below]

A discrediting lack of crystal meth in that video.

you should remake the video, using the same voice, but throw in lots of scenes from the movie Winter's Bone.

Strike, aren't beeves at an all time high right now?

[HoreTore]

@ Horetore and Kralizec actually whats wrong is thinking that food should be cheap.

You all the lot of you want cheap/safe/nutricious/tasty and visually appealling food well go an grow it yourselves.

The word cheap at the front of there means the sentence should read cheap/safe/nutricious/tasty and visually appealling food.

As we have all seen it wasn't the family farm that stuck horse in EU foodstuffs but it will be the family farm that suffers the consequences later on.

Barking up the wrong tree there, GC... Haven't we discussed farming enough here for you to know that I am fully aware that farming subsidies is mostly a subsidy of the consumer, not the farmer?

Still, the idea that a farm is something that should belong in one family, tradition and all that, is poison to effective and proper handling of a business. That should still be gone.

Beyond that, rest assured I am still a socialist, and thus very much fond of import tolls, subsidies and so on. I just object to three things: that a farm should belong to a family over the generations, that an independent farmer is a goal and that agriculture deserves a special place above other businesses. Scrap those three things, and I'll happily shower the lot of you with tax money I've taken from someone else!

[HoreTore]

If you're gonna go Socialist, why allow Agriculture in the hands of business at all? One might say its the most important state resource.

Because this isn't 1896?

[Beskar]

Industrial Agriculture is obviously the way to go about it. I build a lot of Bio-Farms in Tropico 4, they are clearly the best option.

[HoreTore]

Industrial Agriculture is obviously the way to go about it. I build a lot of Bio-Farms in Tropico 4, they are clearly the best option.

Agriculture is already industrialized everywhere except Africa...

Every other business here has had to team up with others to create bigger businesses, I see no reason whatsoever why farmers shouldn't do the same. Further, they have already done so with food processing. If it works for making cheese, it works for milking the cow for that cheese.

[gaelic cowboy]

Agriculture is already industrialized everywhere except Africa...

Every other business here has had to team up with others to create bigger businesses, I see no reason whatsoever why farmers shouldn't do the same. Further, they have already done so with food processing. If it works for making cheese, it works for milking the cow for that cheese.

we can outsource food preparation but we cannot outsource the actual land.

[a completely inoffensive name]

@ Horetore and Kralizec actually whats wrong is thinking that food should be cheap.

You all the lot of you want cheap/safe/nutricious/tasty and visually appealling food well go an grow it yourselves.

To be honest, not to be disrespectful, but that is such a bull****statement. It takes a lot of balls for a 1st world citizen living in the land pf plenty to suggest that we need to stop making so much food/stop subsidizing it.

It is because of subsidies and large scale corporate agro-business that much of food science, including genetic modification, has come about, providing vast improvements in the lives of non 1st world citizens. Cases like golden rice make me extremely hopeful for the future of food. Sooner or later, subsidies which led to our current problem of HFCS and cheap garbage food will provide a path for more nutritional foodstuffs becoming harvested on a more economic scale, likely due to clever genetic modifications.

I find it funny that we have this idealized version of the family farmer that would never serve horse meat. As if economic incentives only caused perverse results in large scale companies and not for Joe farmer who is trying to make his own payments for the next month.

[gaelic cowboy]

To be honest, not to be disrespectful, but that is such a bull****statement. It takes a lot of balls for a 1st world citizen living in the land pf plenty to suggest that we need to stop making so much food/stop subsidizing it.

It is because of subsidies and large scale corporate agro-business that much of food science, including genetic modification, has come about, providing vast improvements in the lives of non 1st world citizens. Cases like golden rice make me extremely hopeful for the future of food. Sooner or later, subsidies which led to our current problem of HFCS and cheap garbage food will provide a path for more nutritional foodstuffs becoming harvested on a more economic scale, likely due to clever genetic modifications.

I find it funny that we have this idealized version of the family farmer that would never serve horse meat. As if economic incentives only caused perverse results in large scale companies and not for Joe farmer who is trying to make his own payments for the next month.

Rubbish I didn't say we should reduce food production or discard science.

You can have cheap if you want but you have to discard other notions as a result.

Genetic modification will merely reduce a products input cost, but with populations rising in size and income it wont reduce the cost in your supermarket trolley. Also it would be naive to think agribusiness wont force unfavourable contracts on the growers of these wonder foods in the future.




My gripe is about unrealistic goals of extremely cheap food regardless of the consequences.

[Sarmatian]

Farming is heavily subsidized in virtually all industrialized countries. And yet, when they still fail to make ends meet, they urge society to cough up even more money, or insist on government mandated pricing. Entiry industries have been uprooted because they're outmoded, mines have been closed, millions of people have lost their jobs throughout the centuries because their livelyhood is no longer viable. But that shouldn't happen to farmers, god forbid.

Stalin had the right idea when he sent them all to starve in Siberia.

Food is immensely important strategically. That's why all industrialized countries subsidize food production - imagine if US depended on food produced in USSR.

Subsidizing is required because otherwise food production would shift to third world or developing countries, where labour price is much lower. In food production there's a lot of work that needs to be done manually, regardless of mechanization degree.
At the moment, Netherlands probably produces two times more wheat per ha than Vojvodina (northern province of Serbia, almost the size of Netherlands). Vojvodina probably has the most fertile soil in Europe, more fertile than Netherlands. If the technological advances from Netherlands were applied to Vojvodina, much better output of wheat per ha would be achieved, and would much lower labour cost to boot. What would stop a company from Netherlands to simply move their production to Serbia? Only subsidizing. Ok, wheat production is mostly mechanized, with very little manual labour required, but vegetables, on the other hand, require much more.

Additionally, subsidizing agriculture also provide incentive for families to remain in the country, instead of abandoning it and moving to the cities.

So, there's absolutely zero chances farming subsidizing will stop in the foreseeable future.

[TinCow]

So, there's absolutely zero chances farming subsidizing will stop in the foreseeable future.

It might if a EU-US free trade agreement is reached, though for that reason the agreement itself still seems unlikely.

This post brought to you by Monsanto. All quotations of this post, and references to this post, remain the property of Monsanto.

[Beskar]

It might if a EU-US free trade agreement is reached, though for that reason the agreement itself still seems unlikely.

That will bring around the UWT, 'United Western Territories'. Bringing about the Deuro single-currency, single space-agency, NATO becomes the new singular armed forces, .... !

[Kralizec]

Food is immensely important strategically. That's why all industrialized countries subsidize food production - imagine if US depended on food produced in USSR.

Subsidizing is required because otherwise food production would shift to third world or developing countries, where labour price is much lower. In food production there's a lot of work that needs to be done manually, regardless of mechanization degree.
At the moment, Netherlands probably produces two times more wheat per ha than Vojvodina (northern province of Serbia, almost the size of Netherlands). Vojvodina probably has the most fertile soil in Europe, more fertile than Netherlands. If the technological advances from Netherlands were applied to Vojvodina, much better output of wheat per ha would be achieved, and would much lower labour cost to boot. What would stop a company from Netherlands to simply move their production to Serbia? Only subsidizing. Ok, wheat production is mostly mechanized, with very little manual labour required, but vegetables, on the other hand, require much more.

Additionally, subsidizing agriculture also provide incentive for families to remain in the country, instead of abandoning it and moving to the cities.

So, there's absolutely zero chances farming subsidizing will stop in the foreseeable future.

That's true, and in fact this is the main rationale that was used to justify the CAP since the beginning.

However, and I don't have any figures at hand, it's well known that Europe produces far more food than it consumes. The continent has consistently been a net exporter. Of course there needs to be a buffer; i.e. enough capacity even in cases of severe draught. But even so the current CAP goes far beyond this goal.

By the way, I know you are speaking hypothetically about the US vs. USSR, but it was in fact the other way around. Russia had traditionally been a grain exporter, but the crop yields became increasingly insufficient because collectivisation was far less successful than anticipated and because of scientific misconceptions, courtousy of Lysenko. The USA, among others, exported vast quantities of wheat to the USSR.

I recognise that there needs to be some form of agricultural policy, probably including subsidies, to maintain a minimum capacity to feed our (European) population. But the CAP needs to be reformed to be just that not more; and it would be fairer if the member states themselves footed most of the bill. At the moment countries like France benefit disproportionally from the CAP and as a result have a far lower net contribution to the EU budget than countries like the UK or the Netherlands.

What really grinds my gears is this. Agricultural subsidies might be a necessity, to a degree. But farmers talk and act as though they, personally, deserve them. They feel they should be excempt from the normal rules of supply and demand and that they're entitled to the financial wellbeing they have, and that subsidies should be increased if the situation changes. Quite frankly, they can all go to hell Siberia the northern, barren regions of Finland.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Well there's a funny thing with farmers, at least in the Netherlands. On the one hand they are by the world's standards very, very efficient and their production capacity is essentially far larger than what the domestic market needs. Therefore if they were left to compete in an open market they ought to do relatively well because on a global scale there is more demand for cheap food with decent quality than production capacity. (Think China and their on-off food scandals.) On the other hand they always have financial difficulties, in part because they can't sell excess production, have to deal with artificial limits and it all ends up being very much a buyer's market.

...

Anyway the video is perhaps cute, but also quite delusional. Like the toddler who says she wants to be a policeman later when she grows up.