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“Farms are becoming economically unviable even while driving up prices” is a pretty scary sentence. I wonder if they will get massive goverment bailouts, but I have a feeling that won’t happen because it’s not a trendy new billion-dollar buzzword, just “some farmers”.
I mean, you reap what you sow. The rest of my life will probably massively suck, but the fact that the people who are archetypally climate-change deniers and voted the people unwilling to start doing anything about it into office are both a) prone to anger that consumes their whole life and b) lower income, so it will hit them first, is a little bit of shadenfreude solace.
Not much, though, I’m not that unempathic. But a tiiiiny little bit.
you reap what you sow
Or not, if you’re farming in a world where we’ve cocked up the ecosystem and climate.
If there’s one area where I don’t mind government bailouts, it’s domestic food production.
What I DO mind is bailouts where the giant megafarmcorps are still allowed to keep their profits, give out dividends, do share buybacks, etc and then not lower prices (and probably ask for another bailout)
Oh, definitely agree with that. But for some reason I just feel like that’s unlikely to happen, I just can’t imagine a goverment doing something like this. It’s just doesn’t feel like something plausible, for some reason.
But yeah, even if it did happen, it’s probably going to be the second option you mentioned at this point.
It’ll depend on how much they think they can count on getting those heartland voters, I suppose. Also whether people will be too hungry to riot or not.
If you can’t imagine a government doing things that might structurally help, then maybe we need to stop having those.
Dude, the average US farmer sits comfortably in the top few percent. Something about having millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars in assets makes you not poor.
Plus, there’s always crop insurance fraud to help make ends meet. Just gotta go to the store, buy some ice, and have someone walk through the fields and chuck ice cubes at plants. Boom, hailstorm just killed your crop.
But Look at all that beautiful data centers!!
Doesn’t take a genius to see what is around you isn’t quite right
This isn’t a problem that’s going to go away in the next few decades. If we stop belching CO2 into the atmosphere today (which we also need to do) we’ll still have novel, highly erratic weather patterns over the next century or so that growers will need to be able to account for.
We need a better way of creating and distributing adaptable farming methods. No more of this taking out a six- or seven-figure loan for a piece of equipment designed to do the same job for the same crop for decades and hoping it eventually breaks even. Farmers need to be able to adapt their crops and tooling much more quickly and efficiently as we figure out how to feed ourselves and each other in climates that previous generations never anticipated. The better we can do that, the fewer people are going to starve.
Not only farmers. Consumers as well. Farmers can only grow those crops for which there exists a buyer. In many areas, even in farm dense Europe, you can physically only sell like 3-6 crops in bulk. Now a farmer can sell directly to consumers but then that farmer runs a shop business next to his farming business and that’s not realistic for everyone. Especially if you grow over a thousand tonnes of a certain grain.
It may well be that, for example, sorghum or millet is a much better climate adapted crop to a certain region than bread wheat. But that won’t matter at all if there is no local buyer of those crops. In my own country for example we have successfully shown that quinoa is excellent to grow here because the Andes mountains and Sweden surprisingly have similar climates. But if you go into a shop you can still only buy Peruvian quinoa. No local buyer exists and local consumer demand is too low for an infrastructure to be built up around it.
So I say don’t put all the pressure on the farmers themselves. They are working in a system that forces them to grow certain things a certain way.
So I’m normally not a market person, but I think if you’re starving you’ll eat what you can fucking find.
That is a problem. I generally deal with small local buyers, but it’s easier when they have relatively stable needs and expect to be able to buy more or less the same product at more or less the same price, year after year. I think that’s going to be less viable as the effects of climate change continue to unfold. What worked ten years ago won’t work today, and what works today may not work ten years from now.
Something I’ve been thinking about is how to have an internet farmers’ market that doesn’t suck. It’s a logistical nightmare even before getting to things like food safety and disease tracking. Since cyclospora has been in the news I’ve been wondering how to have a better food distribution network that large-scale and small-scale buyers can get local produce from, and hopefully, with enough small-ish producers distributed over a wide area, the product offerings will be stable enough to attract enough buyers to cover the overhead of storage and distribution, quality and safety controls, etc.
But I do think there will have to be a cultural shift. There will still be staple crops, but I think which staples grow where is going to change and keep changing, as will which staples are the most economical for people in a given area. I think that’s a mindset shift that will be hard to pull off as long as we keep treating this like a problem we can address tomorrow, because acknowledging that I need to change my eating habits is an acknowledgement that it’s a big problem and it’s here today. It’ll happen eventually as staple prices get more and more unmoored from their historical patterns, but the sooner we can build a climate-change-acknowledging food infrastructure system, and get people on board with it, the blunter the impact will be.
Two of the places I’ve lived (US) have had awesome co-op distribution systems for local farmers to distribute food. The first was in Tennessee in a suburbanish area. A nonprofit coordinated pickups from farms in the area and rented a small storefront in the historic downtown with fridges. Weekly you could shop online for local produce, dairy, meat, and even some baked goods. I was a student and was grateful they took food stamps!
I’ve found a similar situation where I am now (big city). Another farm co-op where a non-profit facilitates the transportation and storefront, but this one only offers produce. Instead of picking up at a central location the food is dropped off at host houses locally for pickup.
For years I’ve had the looming suspicion that a thoughtfully engineered logistics logic could make a huge difference in grassroots organizing for food security. We need logistics that connect resources to need. We need it to be well organized and easy to contribute to with well defined roles whether it be by committing to grow food, lending equipment for transportation, or driving goods from A to B. Current logistics logic caters to giant factory farms and mega corps.
That’s pretty cool. Do you remember the name of the one in TN? That’s where I am and I’d love to talk with them. I know a few growers’ co-ops and farmers’ markets, but nothing like that. Would be cool to get involved.
I agree, I think logistics is something that benefits from scale and it’s a small part of what makes megafarms able to outcompete a more diverse field of small producers. And regardless of scale, it’s just something that’s hard to reason about and a lot of farmers are bad at it. If I can put together a model distribution cooperative that allows farmers to filter in, and up, and out of the industry as they age, and doesn’t just entrench a new power structure that’s just as bad as the one it meant to replace, I think we as a species will be a lot better able to weather what’s coming.
Stones River Market, out of Murfreesboro! I think they’re still up and running.
Hopefully with enough of us thinking about these things the dots will eventually connect.
Thanks! Looks like they are still going, I’ll check 'em out.
I would gladly turn up and by grains from a big heap if it was a reliable and reasonably affordable option. I would even bring my own sacks. My bike should be able to store around 70L of grain, more if I get a trailer. Which if this became a reliable option I would possibly consider doing.
Very brief look suggests £200/ton or 20p/kg for oats as what a farmer gets paid. I would happily pay double that to have a pile I can bag up myself.
Unfortunately raw grain can be surprisingly hard to make edible. For oats for example every single individual oat has a shell that’s inedible. This is different from the bran that is edible. You would have to ground the oats up and sift away the bran. And then you are left with oat flour and not rolled oats. I would say rolled oats are impossible to make at home.
Most people want to buy pasta, bread, white rice, not raw grain. Unfortunately for the farmers the processing of grain is a more profitable business than actually growing the grain.
Suprised you didn’t choose another grain as an example, Barley_Man. :)
Oats have been grown and eaten by families in Scotland for centuries and there’s plenty of established ways to deal with it. John Gerard’s Great Herball, or, Generall Historie of Plantes (1597) discusses the selection process for hulless oat varieties. For hulled oats, there are a variety of mechanical ways to deal with it and/or you can heat the groats up in the oven to crack the outer husk before winnowing.
Rolled oats can be made at home using the traditional method of simply soaking then steaming and rolling them in a grain mill before drying. You can get a hand-cranked grain mill for AU$300 that can also make flakes and flours of most grains or legumes. Those prices are for fancy brand equipment for people who are into making their own flour and flakes as a hobby, but in a widespread, ongoing food security crisis, equipment to make a variety of food more edible would probably become more of a commodity item itself.
You can do it but the effort is tremendous for very little food. First off finding a way to dehull would be mandatory as hulless varieties only exist for a few heritage varieties. Pretty much no farmer is growing that anymore. For the rolled oats you would have to soak in water, steam, hand crank to roll them and then dry them? And dry them where? Not many kgs of rolled oats would fit in a normal dehydrator.
That’s why the toasting in the oven process is by far one of the best traditional methods. We have, probably independently, invented that method here where it’s called skrädmjöl and in Finland where it’s called talkkuna. Not only do you get a kind of cooked flour that can be eaten raw with milk or yoghurt/fil, the toasting process itself dries out the grain and if you had grain that was too wet for storage this would make it fit for storage. However the result is a very peculiar product. It has a unique taste that could be an acquired taste for some people. Also how it traditionally is eaten results in a brown paste. I like it but I grew up eating it during yearly vacations to Finland. It’s not suitable for baking as it’s already cooked as a flour. It’s like trying to bake bread with bread crumbs instead of flour.
But of course in a survival situation all methods to survive are worth it. But here we talked about a farmer selling raw grain direct to consumers. And I would imagine very few are ready to get through all this to save a bit of money on their carb source, the cheapest part of most people’s grocery shopping.
I would be fine with oat flour. They could place a small dehuller there next to the heap of oats. As farm equipment goes that would be almost free.
Okay but we need to be able to to that under capitalism without too much radical change. So…
I think we can stop at “Okay but we need to be able to do that”. Capitalism, radical change, those are challenges for sure but the alternative is death. I assume, if I ever get anything off the ground, somebody with a megaphone is going to find a way to have a problem with it, either because they have their own sinister goals, or they are genuinely misguided, or perhaps they have a valid point and I really did miss something. In any case, I think the best approach is to assume what is necessary is possible and try to jump the hurdles as we get to them.
The problem is the capitalists are more concerned with their share of the pie than there ever being pie again.
They need to die for us to live. Thoroughly and with sloppily. Every one. It fucking sucks. I hate the amount of ways we’ve trapped ourselves in necessarily violent situations where we just don’t escape without bloodshed.
Ok, well, that sounds dire, but I don’t think “they need to die for us to live” was ever said by anyone who cared much about who lives. I’m gonna keep working on my thing, good luck with your crusade or whatever it is.
Farming union owns and rents out the equipment? Already got the union, make it more useful. Might make smaller farms more practical too.
I think it would. I would love to have a coop tool library / repair shop / design shop. Something I want to get into is open-source ag hardware, and a co-op shop would be a good place to pilot designs without one individual having to sink hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into making a piece of equipment that may or may not work. Even without designing new stuff though, a shared equipment library would be nice.
The downside is that sometimes, people borrow equipment without knowing how to use it, and if you use farming equipment without knowing how to use it, you can destroy thousands of dollars worth of gear and/or get people killed. This happens occasionally even with informal loans among acquaintences, I’ve had my own close shaves. Almost literally, I’ve had equipment break and send pieces of metal flying right next to my head. I don’t know how I would go about sending out that kind of equipment confident that the users were equipped to use it safely.
As you wouldn’t want equipment damaged you could have a training/certification scheme. Realistically a deposit too.
That’s kind of what I’m thinking. As for deposits, I think there would need to be an agreement that part of membership dues goes toward maintenance and schedulable repairs like replacing wear parts, as well as a pool for mitigating catastrophic damage to equipment. I’m not sure how I would determine “fault” for a piece that broke in someone’s field, that seems like getting into insurance territory and I really don’t want to model a coop off an insurance company. But I’m stumped as to what the alternative is.
The thing about dangerous equipment certification is, and this is something I grit my teeth at, that it really does need to have some kind of large institutional if not government oversight. I take safety… pretty seriously, and I don’t trust me to make the call on whether or not someone can safely operate a machine. That’s why I don’t let other people operate my tractor. I don’t really know how that works in larger ag communities, but in my experience it’s just farmers letting farmers borrow tools off the books, and any damages are handled case-by-case. I know deaths and injuries happen because of this but I’ve never dealt with them firsthand, thankfully. I would love to have the means of producing accurate, helpful safety training material. Based on the farmers I’ve met, we could use it, though I don’t know if most of us would. A lot of farmers take pride in their risk-taking, which I do sympathize with, though I think most farmers are pretty bad at some kinds of risk assessment and a lot of the living ones are coasting on luck.
Reparations.
