Re:Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
by eranima on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @03:21PM
(#21456245)
I'm from upstate NY, and the loss of "breadbasket" status was great for the local ecology. When we were the breadbasket of the country (when the country was much younger), all the forests were cut down and erosion and water quality were a much bigger issue.
Re:Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
by megablast on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @09:49PM
(#21459294)
Did that just move the same problems somewhere else?
Re:Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
by eranima on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @03:35PM
(#21466923)
Kinda. The breadbasket became the Great Plains, which resulted in the destruction of that habitat. The question is, is it worse to replace forest with farmland or plains with farmland?
Re:Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
by CalRobert on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @04:03PM
(#21456656)
An illustrative discussion of the death of small dairy : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19368542
Re:Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
by skokage on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @01:42AM
(#21460268)
Boy was that a depressing article to read. I felt bad for the individual farmers who go out of business and lose their livelihoods, the towns which suffer as more means of production are lost to either globalization or big business, the animals who likely suffer at factory farms far more than they did in small-scale farms, and at how an entire way of life is being lost in a few short generations.
Re:Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
by somatic on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @07:33PM
(#21458549)
It wasn't so much "gave up on" as it was "deliberately destroyed".
Since the late 1800's, the banks and the governments have pursued a continuous policy of economic centralization and integration, and key to that policy has been the gradual ratchet of making farms unprofitable and uneconomical.
We could have a thriving agricultural economy — just change the policymakers.
Re:Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
by zokier on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @04:25PM
(#21456870)
> We gave up on farms in the 80s.
1880s or 1980s?
Re:Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
by kkarakk on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @12:23PM
(#21454440)
I really do think automation and the logical efficiences of getting a robot to transport produce from 200 miles away vs 20000 miles away will fix this problem.
Farms will come back, they will just be run by corporations instead.
Re:Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there
by archgoon on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @07:41PM
(#21458600)
> Farms will come back, they will just be run by corporations instead.
I believe that is already the case.
https://www.cnbc.com/2014/05/06/state-of-american-farming-bi...
Since we subsidize growing vegetables in the desert and abroad, the market for stuff like vegetables, dairy and meats is hyper-consolidates. There are viable farms on the fringes, but they cannot get capital to grow and cannot compete.
I grew up in an area of upstate NY that was a breadbasket at one time, with a rich, diverse agriculture market that is dead. If you're a baseball fan and drive to Cooperstown on US Route 20, you can see the communities that you drive through rot away a little more every year.
In my town, 12 dairy farms operated in the late 90s (down from 30+ in the 60s). One remains today. Across New York, 60-70% of remaining farms will be bankrupt in the next couple of year.
The farm I worked on as a teen was about 750 acres and operated continuously and profitably since an ancestor received a land grant from the Dutch colonial government in the 1600s. Today, they were forced to be hobby farmers -- they board horses and hay to pay the property taxes and work elsewhere. (Due to limited water table, they can't subdivide the property enough to make enough money on the land)