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The burden does not fall only on farming, its society itself. We need huge farming fields to satisfy the market, aka our bellies, clothing needs, etc…
How does this have so many upvotes in a science-based community? Behind everything that destroys the ecosystem it is big faceless corporations, not individual people wanting to make profit. This is like accusing your local pharmacy employee of hiking cost of medicines.
Corporate farmers are still farmers. They still live out in farm towns and go to the pub and do the full farmer routine.
!memes@slrpnk.net would be a better fit.
Actual farmers are usually held hostage by the agro-giants who buy their product. In most markets there’s a Monoposony - like a monopoly but a single buyer who can set prices and terms, rather than a single seller.
Industry behavior is driven by these companies who have all the power. They leave farmers with all of the risk and take all the profit for themselves.
Also, agriculture is awful… You can’t make a living unless you have a lot of product to sell. You can’t have a lot of product to sell unless you mechanize. The equipment is prohibitively expensive, so it’s only worth doing it if you have a lot of land. And even then, to get decent yields, you need to sow at a specific time, harvest at a specific time, use expensive fertilizers, use expensive machines that can reduce wasting seed or fertilizer.
Even worse, you are at the mercy of wheather. Which, lately, has been shit. And everyone is trying to fuck you, from assholes controlling the markets, the assholes who make and fix the equipment (like John Deere), the asshole neighbor who let their animals escape, and mother nature with pests, diseases, and bad weather.
Every mistake can be costly. Broken equipment is expensive to repair. You might need to build expensive silos to store your product and sell it when the market is more favorable. Expensive because they have to keep things dry and free of pests, mice and rats love cereals. Harvesting when the cereals are too wet is bad, because it can rot and grow into plants, and drying is expensive (but you might be forced to do it because the weather is bad and you want to avoid a complete loss).
My uncle was a small-herd fairy farmer my entire life. Never had more than a couple dozen cows at a time, always knew all of them by name. He kept on getting squeezed out by larger and larger operations. He eventually went grass-fed organic to try and stay competitive. Then he told me that the large operations have organic mini-farms that they operate. The cows there are kept organic… but only so long as they remain in perfect health. The instant one gets sick, she gets moved over to the bigger factory operation and is pumped full of all the antibiotics that all the rest are kept on.
So, while my uncle is keeping a small herd and who has both financial and moral reasons for wanting to maintain his cows that way, a large factory farm can maintain a nominal organic operation, undercutting small fries like my uncle, but actually only keeping their cows organic for exactly as long as it’s convenient, and not a moment longer.
My uncle is retired now, but it hurt me to hear him tell that story. We ought to care about small family farms, but we keep letting capitalist “efficiency” turn every aspect of life on Earth into a market-optimized hellscape.
To be fair, giving a cow antibiotics when a vet says she needs it is humane.
Keeping them on antibiotics because you’re too cheap to have a vet check all your cows is cruel and breeds super-germs.
It would help if farmers would vote for the party that is for more regulation around these things. As well as being willing to vocalize these things through the media outlets. The rugged individualists are easily exploited by the capitalists.
The Netherlands in a nutshell.
My cousin is fighting that fight too. He had to scale up to compete. It’s still a “small” herd, just not as small as it used to be. No way to stay in business without going bigger. Luckily, he has so far managed to expand into dairy products successfully rather than only milk. Local made butter, cheese, etc. It sells well enough, and at a decent enough price to give cushion when one of the cows gets sick so that he can just pull them over to his “retired” cows.
My buddy has been fighting that fight for a while. He is “lucky” that he has an extra few grand a month because he’s got 100% disability through the military (another whole ass fight that someone who came back missing one leg and with a bunch of psychiatric conditions shouldn’t have to fight). He barely breaks even but he loves raising cattle.
Monoposony - like a monopoly but a single buyer who can set prices and terms, rather than a single seller.
I went looking for more information about that term and wasn’t finding anything. But then the dictionary suggested Monopsony, which I figure is what you meant?
Yeah I thought it was monopsony but my autocorrect gave me that incorrect spelling and I didn’t bother to double check.
And banks
I can’t speak for farmers, but the rednecks in my area love to say they’re conservationists while throwing their garbage out of the driver’s side window.
And burning their trash
The individual farmers didnt do it, industrial scale farming did
That’s probably someone hired to work the farm by the multinational who owns the wheat field, the pesticide, the fertilizer, and the genes of the wheat they’re growing.
Humans all the way down.
They’re all ultimately working for big tumor.
People, what a bunch of bastards
The worst.
It’s capitalism, not humans exactly.
“Capitalism” isn’t some self aware entity that you can blame all evils on. It’s humans all the way down. And it’s not even the cartoon evil type of humans; those are rare. Everyone responsible at each step of the way is terrifyingly ordinary.
Right, they act the way they do under specific material conditions and environments. Those can change.
If you just looked at prisoners and concluded humans are highly prone to violence, you would be missing the point.
Pretty sure we invented capitalism
Systems develop independence in a sense. It needs to be accounted for because while better people can make things better, its harm reduction not problem solving. The destructive systems need altered or replaced
And I still can’t survive without government handouts
But at least we now have thousands of individual humans who’re as wealthy as whole countries! Truly an achievement. Now keep working, slave.
🫡
