Rural America Doesn’t Have to Starve to Death

https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/big-agribusiness-finance-farming/

by lazerpants • 6 years ago

20 11 6 years ago

This article suggests that the answer is to regulate/break up Big Finance and then the farming problems will just take care of themselves, and farmers will stop doing "unsavory" things like voting for Donald Trump. Right.

downerending• 6 years ago

Despite the clickbait title (no, no one is starving), makes some good points.

SQueeeeeL• 6 years ago

This seems like the same Grapes of Wrath style argument we've been seeing since the 50s. Except the author re-frames it as if the CAFOs, greedy banks, and tax havens are completely to blame for the collapse of small farmers. But to me this seems like an inevitability of the market; these small farmers are operating inefficiently, that's why they can't compete with the factory farm prices...

alfromspace2• 6 years ago

Nothing is inevitable. We're not slaves to the market. If the market means small farmers can never be as efficient as factory farms and finance, and may not have any place in the economy at all without contracting out all aspects of their farms and losing their standards of living - then F the market.

Sometimes we need to step back from these abstract principles and ask ourselves if we want to live in that kind of world. I'd rather have a country where normal people can farm, animals can live good lives, and we have values other than prostrating ourselves before the altar of GDP.

gizmo6863• 6 years ago

Why should the rest of the country subsidize people who want to live the farming lifestyle?

Btw, hobby farms are a thing. If you want people to be able to pursue hobbies in liu of work, you need a UBI. (Although, a smaller UBI would be suffient to allow for nearly viable hobbies like farming)

michaelbrave• 6 years ago

I've lived in small towns most of my life, I know more farmers and ranchers than anyone, and in short there isn't much that can be done. They vote for politics that support large corporations and deregulation which allows them to be beat up by larger conglomorates. They fight innovation to the point that new technology isn't adopted till a son takes over. But most of all, the one thing that would likely make them more profitable would be to go towards a higher quality but lower quanity crop (like going organic) but they fight that too.

Right now rural america is basically subsidised by the cities and has 3x the voting power of those who live in them. This model isn't sustainable unless the three things listed above start to change. But they won't.

pyuser583• 6 years ago

Politically, the solution is to offer them candidates who are are conservative on all issues except corporate regulations.

This is what FDR did: went left on economic issues, and right on everything else: law and order, pro-military, anti-civil rights, etc. His “brain trust” and bureaucratic supporters came from the upper class (something rural citizens support).

Rural America Doesn’t Have to Starve to Death

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