And this can't be entirely restored.. since when water is removed, the cavities in the dirt/rock that held the water collapse, and they can't be refilled (for example).
Making the midwest more sustainable would be a good thing.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/201...
There's still a ways to go though, we've seen a massive movement towards dairy conversions which is predicated on free water, cheap electricity and the government not pricing externalities like lowland river pollution.
There is certainly room for improvement but while I would like it to be cheaper I don't want the country flooded with the kind of race to the bottom crap that depresses wages in other countries.
It probably works here because we have few very large farms and strict, and strictly enforced, environmental legislation.
This is only the last step. Most of the animal feed is bought outside of Norway and from the wheat we do produce only 15% is of high enough quality to be used for humans [1], the rest is animal feed. The wheat that is used for humans have to be treated since it's too moist.
Norway is _far_ from self sufficient and will never be. The farmers (5% of the population) have received subsidies that are equivalent to the deposits to the sovereign wealth fund since the fund was started, that is to say if we didn't subsidise them we could have had a fund that was twice the size.
The general quality of the food in the stores is also very bad compared to other countries with the exception of pork and sheep meat.
There is nothing to gain as a nation from subsidising our farms the way we do except for the 5% that actually receive all this money. It would be much better for the society to let countries that have areas that can produce food properly do that and just buy it from them instead.
All in all I wish we went the NZ route, let the farms go bankrupt if they can't produce something that people want at the price they will pay it and restore the land to the nature.
[0] Norwegian Bureau of Statistics, 06.08.2019, https://www.ssb.no/en/priser-og-prisindekser/artikler-og-pub...
The variety/selection is poor, prices are high, but the quality is better than the average in much of Europe. Including Germany and very much all of Eastern Europe. Gastritis is mostly unheard of in Norway.
Lidl went bust here trying to sell their crap they can do away with elsewhere, even at bottom prices.
And then you have your whole nation dependent on Foreign Policy. I think we need tech to improve local food production to a level that is at least self sustainable ( so their citizen don't starve ) and have extras either produced local or imported.
As a foreigner living in Norway, I can say the food in the supermarkets is quite bad compared to what you get elsewhere. And while the onions, cabbage and root vegetables that are in the shelves are produced in Norway, most of the other products actually come from elsewhere, mainly from the Netherlands and from Spain. Just check the country of origin labels next time you do shopping. I know I am often wrong in my assumptions of where food is coming from.
This isn't how economics works. higher demand for foreign food raises wages in foreign countries. When the US and European protected agriculture sector floods international markets with cheap, subsidized goods that is what destroys the livelihoods in developing countries A small historical lesson:
https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/september-2002/how...
"Agricultural subsidies in developed countries reduce world prices, and thus the incomes of African farmers. World Bank studies suggest that US subsidies alone reduce West Africa's annual revenue from cotton exports by $250 mn a year. The EU also heavily subsidizes its farmers. The EU, which by the dictates of comparative advantage would be a net importer of many agricultural products, is the second largest exporter (after the US) of agricultural produce."
Depends on the product. Our manufacturing base has been gutted by laissez-faire capitalism (Mondelez and the Cadbury factory being a recent example https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/103965900/popular-dunedin-a...), so most heavily processed foods are imported from Australia.
And 1 of the 2 supermarket chains (Progressive Enterprises) in our cosy duopoly will import other foods from Australia as suits them - but that's because they're an Australian firm and offload excess stock to the NZ market.
In terms of vegetables, fruit, meat, dairy products etc., they're only imported when there's a margin in doing so - for example, we used to have a lot of cheap pork from overseas countries that didn't have to adhere to the same animal welfare practises as local pork producers.
You referring to Fonterra?
Natural, self-correcting famine maybe, but all the same allowing it to occur is understandably undesirable.
It's effectively a subsidy, but the subsidy is provided by the actual consumers of the goods (via government price fixing) rather than out of the general revenue pot. Individual farmers get grouchy that they're no allowed to have more cattle than their quota, but the reality is that those limitations protect a commons— if there were no restrictions and every farmer took on a few more cattle, there'd be oversupply, the price would crash, and they'd all be headed to Ottawa for a bailout. Yay free markets.
Note that this whole system is an interesting bit of political football in Canada, because the party that you'd expect to oppose it ideologically (the Conservatives) in fact do not, because their support base includes the rural farmers who benefit from it. The farmers are also well organized and well funded in terms of their lobbying operation. There was a recent mini-scandal about their presence at the Conservative party's national convention, see: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/full-text-the-dairy-lob...
The position of Iowa in the Presidential nominating system constrains the Democrats fairly severely too.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/us/elections/2020-p...
This is effectively a regressive tax. A tax that disproportionately impacts those with young children. Largely a tax on parents.
I don't think their lobby is that powerful. There aren't that many dairy farmers, but millions that would love cheaper dairy. I wish croissants made with butter weren't so hard to find.
And as long as a substantial fraction of the customers keep buying the inferior product there will be no incentive for the introduction or wider marketing of the better one.
So stop buying crap food and tell all your family and friends to do the same.
A croissant without butter is not really a croissant in my opinion and as far as I can tell they all have butter here (Norway), here's an example: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https... (they come from the Netherlands).
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-wine/food-tren...
It’s a good thing the government of Canada do not suggest you give dairy products to your children anymore then :-)
The lack of butter croissants has nothing to do with it, as an aside. We simply have a mediocre croissant palate in Canada, so the general market variety are horrendous.
It has everything to do with a centralized marketer that can put out any grade product it wants, and consumers can either buy it at the price they say or switch to margarine/vegoil.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-wine/food-tren...
Expensive inputs further encourages substitutions, especially when the expensive input wasn’t great.
Individual people may not respond well to incentives, but industrial buyers sure do.
Further it isn't expensive. Large quantity butters purchases, including special higher fat versions that aren't generally on grocery stores, are an insubstantial percentage of the cost of making a croissant.
https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/canadian-croissant-...
But again, the reason croissants are generally horrendous in Canada is because people just don't care. If people don't care you end up with the weird bready-things that are marketed as croissants. This is a bit of a personal peeve having just gotten back from Belgium/France a couple of months ago, and being spoiled by every hotel having extremely good croissants.
The debate over supply management is revisited at every election, and overwhelmingly Canadians buy into the notion that supply management has benefits in certain industries.
As an aside -- it's cheaper to buy milk and butter in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and virtually every other urban center in Canada than in San Francisco, NYC, LA, or any other large US center. US dairy dumps their excess on secondary markets like Detroit, and it's always the "Windsor versus Detroit" sort of comparison that we hear parroted.
That's an interesting way to cherry-pick a statistic and ignore a genocide (I'll give you a hint: 1840's).
If Ireland had closed her ports, I wonder how much England would have felt the tighter food supply.
Is the current situation unusual, or is it SNAFU?
Although the English had all sorts of high minded idealism about the potential for creating dependency amounts the Irish, they supervised the genocide in Ireland.
You ever seen the graph of foxes and bunnies? Where all the foxes starve when they kill all the bunnies?
That's what happens IRL, too many food producers go bust, the stored glut gets used, and suddenly you're not producing enough and people die.
Of course, you wouldn't switch to this all at once. You'd announce that you are gradually cutting farm subsidies over the next ten years. The least profitable (efficient) operations would close. This would also develop slack in the form of unused land, which could be held in reserve in case of a supply shock like the one you're hypothesizing.
I don’t think I can give a response to this that’s acceptable on HN, but wow.
Managing the food supply to make sure there's always a healthy surplus makes a lot of sense to me. The problem with holding land in reserve, as you're suggesting, is that it takes at least an entire growing season to start producing from that land. That might be too long in the case of a famine.
Our food reserves are huge.
> And panic buying also isn't a thing.
Panic buying can only eat up a tiny little fraction of a year's food supply.
> [just insults]
Maybe that happened in pre-industrial societies, but that isn't what happens today. Today, when things go wrong, prices of some products go up a bit (e.g., meat), and people buy less of it, replacing those calories with cheaper ones (e.g., rice, corn).
The beauty of a well functioning market is that it's not centralized, things don't go wrong all at once, they happen on a gradual scale and folks can adjust.
(Or, to riff off of what vcf1 said, then you have to spend less of it feeding cattle, and more of it feeding people. That's survivable, at least.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_...
Additionally, the farmland and farm equipment that was owned by bankrupt producers will still be able to produce food after new ownership.
It's also the case that a medium sized garden doesn't produce much calories.
The gardener is doing it wrong if this is their result.
When I say "medium", I mean something that is still a modest hobby, and when I say "much calories", I mean at least a few months of food for several people.
Food is a global commodity and is largely fungible. If every farmer in the US went bankrupt overnight we could easily sustain ourselves by importing food from everywhere else.
Famine is really only a possibility in crushingly impoverished (much of Africa) or criminally mismanaged (Venezuela) economies. The potato blight was a secondary cause of the Irish potato famine, the primary causes were poverty and (English) government incompetence. (or malice, if you prefer) The United States has nothing to worry about.
We don't need to go full libertarian on these farms. We just need to stop growing so much junk.
[1] https://www.livemint.com/news/india/india-wins-solar-case-ag... [2] https://www.news18.com/news/world/will-leave-if-we-have-to-i...
At least since NAFTA: 25 years now.
If you look at this map [2] is the stuff colored in green. Most of it can be found in the US Great Plains, and the second such zone comprises South-Eastern Romania + most of Ukraine + the plains North of the Caucasus (which are part of Russia). Making money out of Romania is easy, we are already a NATO and UE member, but the great stake for companies like Cargill is to be able to invest and take money out of Ukraine's plains, I think there are hundreds of billions to be made out there, not to speak of the strategic advantage of having Tsarist Russia's former bread-basket under your economic control.
Can you supply some citations for that statement?
[edit] Wikipedia would indicate Non-family corporate farms account for 1.36 percent of US farmland area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_farming#North_Americ... [/edit]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill
https://newfoodeconomy.org/who-really-owns-american-farmland...
The article actually says United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that at least 30 percent of American farmland is owned by non-operators who lease it out to farmers. Yeah, that is a common arrangement that's been with us for decades.
Also, in some states, such as North Dakota, corporate farms are illegal http://inthesetimes.com/rural-america/entry/19224/north-dako...
1) although I content the six foot drone the folks here were playing with has a bit of a fun factor too in addition to mapping the fields for their crop forecasts and planning.
No, they aren't. Seed companies like Monsanto don't generally own commercial farms. Most farms buy seed from a small set of firms like Monsanto (well, Bayer), and sell to a small set of firms (I think Cargill and ADM are in this group.)
I know I shouldn’t care, but it’s comments like this that irritate me. Inaccurate to the point of being silly.
(P.S. I work for one UN food organization especially funded for that purpose :D)
US policy is driving the small producers out of business. We will see prices go up in a few years as farming gets bigger and manufactured product controlled by a few big companies replaces the real thing.
We may need more consolidation in these food production. As in by nature of business cycles.
Avoiding bread riots is why every single developed nation on Earth heavily subsidizes its farmers, even when they produce at a loss. The ones that didn't got regime changed by hungry, angry people.
Optimized systems tend to become non-resilient - fragile to external shocks. The last thing I want is a fragile system of food production and distribution.
It's better to pay extra into an inefficient system than deal with famines.
No one wants just-in-time, no-redundancies production of critical-to-life resources. You would be willing to subsidize a healthcare market to ensure hospitals didn’t have the exact supply of antibiotics on hand required “on average.” You wouldn’t want water purification plants to produce a market-optimum amount of water with no room for variation.
Why would you want that for your food supply?
Don’t get me wrong, there are other issues on hand - lack of diversification, oligopoly, etc. but the fundamental argument of “we subsidize critical resources because people die if there’s a shortage” isn’t a terrible idea.
That's not the argument, though. Government subsidies are intended as welfare programs for farmers. Far more food is currently produced than would ever be needed in the case of a shortage. We could produce a lot less and still be fine.
Also, 51.5 days of excess stocks is not 51.5 days of food on hand.
Would there be a benefit if we could support and subsidize commercial farms up to a certain size, and no larger, removing the compulsion for ultra-large, mass-industrialization of our agriculture industries?
I like it a lot. We might add a bit of an incentive for non-monoculture agriculture - different strains of wheat, for example. (There's some of that already, and we don't want all the smaller farms to do that, but some doing it might be a good idea.)
The modern American life is very strongly predicated on cheap, abundant supply of _some_ kinds of nutrition (unhealthy for most, but still, something that prevents starvation even if it increases the chances of heart disease etc.)
If is the key point here. We've never been anywhere close to a famine despite our farmers operating in an unprotected market.
Edit: Answered. Corn is used as a cattle feed and hence beef prices will be impacted. It will have a chain reaction pulling down just corn subsidies.
Tangent: India used to have famines and import grains until Punjab ushered a green revolution with record wheat and rice harvests in 1960s. My grandma told me how before wheat barley used to be the nutritional source, and I for nostalgia sake asked for a barley dish. Nearly threw up.
I like it as well, nevertheless.
2. Driving without a seatbelt, or car insurance works, until it doesn't.
3. You'd probably be producing even more food/person, and be more resilient to market failure/drought/crop failures/etc were it subsidized.
1. According to my googling, the USA has 0.38 hectares of arable land per person, NZ has 0.14 per person.
You're aware only 2% of our land is arable compared to the USA's 16% right? Lots of mountains and hill country here.
The way this is done in other industries, except for farming, is that half of the producers go bankrupt, production is reduced, and the survivors are able to be self-sustaining and profitable. We really do not need this much soy/corn. The market is screaming "stop making it" and perhaps it is time we listen.