[1]https://www.uspresidentialelectionnews.com/2024-primary-sche... [2]https://www.cropprophet.com/us-corn-production-by-state/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(book) Yes, it's a book. Highly worth the time it takes to read to make the point in full.
(Not an expert, just a resident)
New Hampshire has the first primary. It's a state law.
Iowa's own laws have screwed Iowa. State law mandates the caucus occur at least eight days prior to any other state's proceedings (similarly, NH law mandates they be the first primary election). The DNC and RNC might also like it that way, but both states are complicit.
You'd be wrong. Farm subsidies exist in several forms, but one is for letting fields that could produce x lying unused. Some "farmers" just sign up for that program every year and havent planted anything since they inherited the farm.
is growing corn a destructive activity on net? If it is, then we shouldn't just be cutting subsidies, we should be banning it outright. As it relates to this discussion (ie. "are republicans hypocrites because they're anti individual welfare but pro agricultural welfare"), we can safely assume that republicans don't think that and therefore aren't hypocrites. This is not to say whether growing corn is actually destructive or not, only that the republican view is at least self-consistent.
This farmer faked his paperwork and got $1.6 million in illegal farm subsidies.
https://thecounter.org/man-found-guilty-stealing-1-3-million...
I am a rare Iowan in that I recognize that this system is dumb, and bad for the country. It's great for me - I have had the privilege of hearing in person in a small group setting every Democratic president since Jimmy Carter. I've talked with a couple of them. I can tell you from personal experience that Joe Biden's reputation as a "hands on" or "physical" campaigner was spot on - he embraced me as firmly and as intimately as any man every has (I am very rural looking, white male nearly his age, for the record). But for all that, the circus that is the Iowa caucuses is a stupid way to start the candidate selection process. I'd be happy to see the back of it.
The influence of big states within the party because of electoral votes is pretty small. The state's electoral votes are applied by the citizens of the state. I mean, yeah if you could get 50+% of Texas's voters to credibly promise to vote for the presidential candidate of the party that had an earlier Texas primary they would compete hard for it. But in reality, they're going to vote for the republican nominee. Same logic for California but for the democratic nominee.
Imagine if South Carolina was pushed to this one delegate system in 2020. Bernie Sanders was nearly the nominee and South Carolina began his death spiral. If South Carolina was taken out of play by activists in the state, then either the party would have to forgo its own rules or accept that Bernie would have continued his massive momentum coming out of Nevada.
Likewise if on Super Tuesday Buttigieg and Klobachar would not have dropped out at (supposedly) Obama's instance and backed Biden, then Bernie would have emerged much stronger. One way they could have blunted his momentum is if they saw polling early enough that Bernie was going to take a big state like California, we can't rule out the California machine pushing itself to lose the electoral votes in an effort to stop Bernie and then maybe change back its timeline after the election.
Rule 12 Timing of the Delegate Selection Process
No meetings, caucuses, conventions or primaries which constitute the first determining stage in the presidential nomination process (the date of the primary in primary states, and the date of the first tier caucus in caucus states) may be held prior to the first Tuesday in March or after the second Tuesday in June in the calendar year of the national convention. Provided, however, that the Iowa precinct caucuses may be held no earlier than 29 days before the first Tuesday in March; that the New Hampshire primary may be held no earlier than 21 days before the first Tuesday in March; that the Nevada first-tier caucuses may be held no earlier than 10 days before the first Tuesday in March; and that the South Carolina primary may be held no earlier than 3 days before the first Tuesday in March.
This is what created "Super Tuesday", which is evidence of a race to the bottom that has gone as far down as it can go. It also shows that 4 states were carved out probably as favors (does anyone know more here?). In order to change this, probably a bunch of people who are being treated favorably now will get upset at losing their privilege, and no one in leadership wants to crack that egg. Seeing as that South Carolina, one of the favored states anointed to hold a primary before before Super Tuesday, played such a decisive role in the nomination of Joe Biden, I think the practice of keeping these states first is going to continue for the foreseeable future.
Jim Clyburn of S. Carolina is widely credited of resuscitating Joe Biden's candidacy after his sad start in IA, NH, and NV. He placed a distant 4th in IA, 5th in NH, and Bernie blew out NV with 40% of the vote. At that point, Clyburn endorsed Biden, and Biden ended up winning SC. Then a bunch of candidates dropped out of the race before Super Tuesday (some who were doing much better than Biden overall) and support coalesced behind Biden.
If anything, the slow roll of IA, NH, SC and NV allows the party to calibrate the primary process. If things start going a way they don't like, they can make quick changes like asking a bunch of candidates to drop out of the race (I'm not saying Bernie would have won had they not done this, I'm just pointing out it was obviously done, and what enabled them to do this was the fact that all primaries are not held on the same day).
Probably not favors but codifying the status quo to get their endorsement on the rule. That said, I agree that it gives some states more power, but isn't completely useless. It allows the party to test how good candidates are at getting out the vote And adds some option for course correction.
Farm subsidies take various forms such as tax preferences, import tariffs, and a USDA organization specifically tasked with manipulating crop prices. https://www.usda.gov/ccc
There is nothing wrong with “factory”, “industrially”, or “sustainably” farmed corn either. Farming at scale is the only thing that allows all 8 billion people to eat.
Peasant farms were labor intensive, disease ridden, high risk, low reward businesses that shortened lives and ruined families. But somehow for a lot of people this episode in the history of farming is seen as the optimal blueprint for sustainable farming. They ignore the fact that all "successful" examples of small scale circular farming are making their revenue from donations, venues and from "selling" the model. Not from produce.
By the way, not all children's books are equally naive. We've recently found a nice one [1] (in German) which shows small- and large-scale farms side-by-side, in a brutally honest way (including butchering).
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Wo-kommt-unser-Essen-her/dp/340775816...
In case you just want to practice German with media for children, I always recommend "Die Sendung mit der Maus" [1]. It's a mix of short animated stories with "how it's made" features, where they go filming in factories etc.
Markets are cyclic. When demand is higher than supply, prices go up, companies profit more and there's incentive for investment. Within time supply exceeds demand and prices go down, so companies barely make enough to pay off and those which are inefficient go broken and are sold, hopefully, to better managers.
This is generally a good thing but, of course, food/farming is of public interest. If prices go up those with lower income might struggle to feed themselves. And if prices go down poor farmers might struggle to survive and be forced into selling their land. Thus government intervenes.
The issue with farm subsidies is they don’t actually change profitability long term, they simply result in over production. It’s vastly more efficient to build up a long term storage of surplus say 2 years of corn per American stored at -40C which should last ~100 years. Then let huge swaths of American farmers go bankrupt as you scale back production. This was the basic model hundreds of years ago, they still had famines.
Alternatively you can push productivity while paying pay farmers not to produce anything on their land. This keeps them from going bankrupt and requires fewer resources than excess production. We used to do this, it reduces the risk of famine because productivity can be scaled up quickly.
Finally you can just massively subsidize production and dump the excess on foreign markets, this is really bad for other countries and costs insane amounts of money and still results in excess production even as everyone gets fat. This is where bio fuels come in.
PS: There are also secondary effects as subsidizing farm insurance etc, keeps incompetent farmers in business.
Any data to back that up? If you're incompetent and your crops repeatedly, then you're not going to be reimbursed enough to make it.
"It’s vastly more efficient to build up a long term storage of surplus say 2 years of corn per American stored at -40C which should last ~100 years."
Any data to back this up? This is a huge volume. Freezers capable of those temperatures are expensive and consume a lot of energy.
"The issue with farm subsidies is they don’t actually change profitability long term, they simply result in over production."
I think farm subsidies need to be changed or reduced, but for a slightly different reason. We are basically subsidizing other countries. A lot of our grains get exported, basically sending the fruits of those tax dollars overseas.
It’s not that people are completely incompetent it’s that some people are better at getting subsidies vs growing food. Essentially subsidies add a parallel skill set which becomes valuable but reduces the impact of being an inefficient farmer. I don’t have hard data, but have been told about people who are better at one side or the other.
> Any data to back this up.
The freezing thing was actually from a study I read. Ultra large freezers are very energy efficient via classic square vs cube scaling. The freezer loses energy on the surface and needs insulation along the surface while it and stores inside the volume. Energy costs of shipping vs colder climate etc.
The idea was a FIFO system along a circular storage system, but I don’t recall all the details.
Commercial freezers are also frequently built with vacuum-insulated panels[1] which have very low thermal conductivity.
It's not crazy to build something very large, like a grain silo, to hold dried grain at a low temperature. That seems fairly plausible as a way to reliably "turn off" subsidies over time.
It sort of reminds me of the strategic oil reserve[2] in the US. Similar idea (boring holes in the earth cheaply via using water to etch into giant salt deposits)
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-area-to-volume_ratio
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_insulated_panel
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U...
A bushel of corn is 56 pounds. Assuming a very high 1lb of corn per person per day only gives 2 * 365 * 330 million / 56 * 1.25 = 5.4 billion cubic feet.
Which still sounds insane except AT&T Stadium in Dallas is 0.1 billion cubic feet and cost only 1.3 billion to construct while including all sorts of stuff we don’t need. So roughly one building that size per state. Even if it was almost that expensive vs a more realistic 1/10th, the cost of corn + ethical subsides would hit that in roughly a decade and we would could then spend a 1 billion a year cooling the things while saving money.
PS: Having just one building would look cool but would be a massive single point of failure. Also, you can store dry corn for quite a while even in non cryogenic conditions.
If all food trucks and restaurants disappeared off the face of the earth, people would mostly be able to feed themselves. The same is not true for farms.
We can't? Where's the famine? News to me. Last I checked we still have way more food than we know what to do with (massive worldwide fertilizer shortages and inflation notwithstanding).
Because people at the top need other people making them money rather than revolting.
Either way, we have several examples of local "peasant" farms, some organic, that do well.
Don't get me wrong - small farms are a lot of work. For the most part, at least one member of the family has to have an outside job with benefits just due to healthcare costs. But it can make some money.
I hope to have a small farm as a "retirement" plan. It would mostly be an apiary for the commercial portion, maybe with some log and block grown mushrooms. Then the rest would likely be for personal use. Obviously the major costs like the initial land and health insurance would come from savings, so it would be mostly supplemental income to an already solid retirement plan. I don't think it will happen though.
I assume the biggest draw is the lifestyle ideals. It seems a common dream on this community. Maybe because we're tired of building some intangible thing or some app that nobody really needs, and want to have a physical job with meaningful produce.
A lot of people who have never physically worked a day in their life like the idea of hard labor. After a week of hard labor, they would decide to take up woodworking instead.
Hehe reminds me of a volunteer day I set up for our team. They wanted to work on a farm that's part of the food bank. We spent maybe a half a day picking greens and squash. Most of them couldn't believe how "physical" it was - commenting about it being a workout or being tired.
Or until they stop producing and need to become beef in order to make room for the next generation of milk producers.
Not really, there are different levels of profitable. Some extremely efficient operations can be profitable at scale, but no one is getting rich.
The places like you describe (have half a cow from one in my freezer now, from just outside Chicago) operate on marketing to upscale customers via advertising/co-marketing deals at fancy/local restaurants.
They also operate a number of farmers markets booths at about a half dozen markets in the city each weekend, and that is both a marketing and sales angle. This is where they pick up a large amount of their weekly subscriptions, and folks like me who order half a cow each year.
> I assume the biggest draw is the lifestyle ideals. It seems a common dream on this community.
I agree the idyllic dream sounds pretty great. However I'd suggest trying to not jump feet first into it. My parents were organic market garden farmers (one of their specialities was mushrooms), and if you need to at least break even your job will look far more like marketing/sales with a bunch of back-breaking physical labor in between than farming or gardening. Animal husbandry is just as involved with the bonus of random emergencies popping up at inconvenient times.
The successful farms in the space tend to focus their time on the "business side" of the operation, and have the standard hired help the large farms have to actually run most of the farm itself. If you've ever visited a "small farm" that did weekend tours this is typically the model they are utilizing.
At "hobby farm" level it can be pretty relaxing if you have no need for the income itself, and don't mind putting good money after bad towards equipment to make your life easier. I've seen these operations work out, but lots of times these folks have an extremely hard time integrating into their new community and tend to move on in a few years.
Just trying to provide a different perspective. Farm life is hard, and involves long hours for very little financial remuneration. I'd only even consider doing it as an absurdly over capitalized hobby.
As a retirement "job", it could provide supplemental income. That's my goal.
If I'm not doing that, then what am I doing? I hate my job and don't see anything better. At least I could be physical rather than squander my health like my job requires now. Maybe make some money to cover hobby expenses, or use the land to save money by growing stuff for myself. Otherwise, I might as well sit in front of a TV in some suburban house while eating myself to death.
I don't doubt it is a big drive, but wouldn't the military take the biggest portion of that cake?
False; you can feed 8 billion people using small scale / non-industrial farming as well, it just means more people would be working in the farming industry and the cost might go up. But industrial farming is not to provide food, but to provide raw resources - I mean this very article is about growing corn to turn into bioethanol to mix in fuel for cars.
You say that like it's a small thing. Keeping most of the population out agriculture and allowing them to produce other goods and services is the primary benefit of the agriculture industry.
> But industrial farming is not to provide food, but to provide raw resources - I mean this very article is about growing corn to turn into bioethanol to mix in fuel for cars.
Less than half of the corn produced in the US goes to ethanol production. Most of it goes towards feeding people - either directly or indirectly. If we include other produce, then the vast majority of the agriculture industry's output becomes food.
The idea that e.g. hybrid rice is going to solve world hunger is absurd.
I thought that was only true in poor and developing countries but that large industrial farms in highly developed nations produced way more than everybody else. Have you a source you could share as this is a very interesting point?
[0] https://grist.org/food/do-industrial-agricultural-methods-ac...
We could contribute a great deal more to feeding the world, and doing less damage to the environment and our health, but alternative uses for much of the land that is in corn in the US.
Sustainable farming is good, but I don't think we do very much of it. I wonder if there's any evidence that we can sustainably support 8 billion people.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/12/kansas-aqu...
it depends on the type of lifestyle you're willing to have and how much % of the GDP you're willing to pour into it. I'm sure you can sustainably feed all 8 billion people if we poured 50% of our GDP into food production and we only ate rice and beans.
Not just oneself, but entire nations. Scarcity of resources have historically been a major cause of wars. I don't see the world coming to a consensus on lifestyle any time soon.
Conventionally, talking heads seem to indicate the right way forward is to use tech and industrial agriculture to support 20bn+ on the planet. Seems totally doable, but at the cost of losing the natural environment as well as more natural food sources altogether.
Anyway, I say get us back to around 5bn people and keep it there.
Sure anything can be done "democratically." But politics is the art of the possible...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
(Not to say it's only Africa by any means, but you do have to go quite a ways down the list before you hit a non-African country).
Malthusians in 200 years will say 50 billion.
Because it gets taxpayer money for no reason
https://twitter.com/swiftonsecurity/status/10748100434957967...
Sugarcane is the opposite, it grows easily (too easy in fact, it has tendency to spread in an unwanted way), doesn't require too much diesel to produce, and it makes a fantastic amount of ethanol when pressed.
"Just because you've always done things this way does not mean it is not incredibly stupid."
So, yes change is hard. But we need to change and this is kind of an obvious change to make. If we wait for the FDA to conclude that corn syrup is bad for you, we can indeed wait a long time.
So, don't wait for them and adjust their priorities at the federal level. That's what governments are for. You can't expect these agencies to do reasonable things by themselves when they are obviously stuck protecting the very unreasonable status quo. Bloat is the problem both in these agencies and the obese citizens whose interests they are supposed to protect.
They didn't.
> corn syrup to be universally bad
The research is still out about whether HFC is processed differently in the body. What isn't really up for debate is the pervasiveness of HFC in everything. Because it's subsidized and so cheap, it excess has made it a cheap raw material that's found in just about everything from Tomato Sauce to Bread.
Too much sugar in your diet is bad, and so it isn't much of a stretch to say that having a ridiculously cheap source of sugar that's being added as filler to every imaginable product is probably not great for us.
> and for some reason declaring that "organic" whatever that means today, makes something better somehow
I think the op was trying to say that corn is a hearty crop that grows fine on it's own without a lot of petrochemical fertilizers.
You're jumping to a lot of conclusions.
Like what? The article says that the land would otherwise be conserved, ie not productive. Some of it might even be developed.
Do that, though, and you can run a turbocharged engine at much higher levels of boost and create much more power than you would be able to do with anything short of race gas or even more exotic and dangerous fuels.
For you, maybe. Not for the millions of rural Americans whose livelihood depends on agriculture subsidies. There's a reason why we have the Senate, a place where Nebraska has the same power as California. It's exactly for situations like this. The US is a massive country full of competing interests, and our founders knew that eventually the urban population would massively outnumber the rural population, leading to a tyranny through rule of the majority. So states were put on equal footing in the Senate to give the rural populations a voice. And because of that, the Senate will never ever allow these subsidies to be cut. There's simply too much support for it among the rural states.
The defense industry would like to have a word with you. There are certain industries that the government props up solely to maintain the capability in times of crisis. I would argue that ensuring an adequate capacity to generate a self sufficient food supply is important enough to meet that bar.
Also, there is no way the US subsidies of food and billion pounds of cheese in cold storage etc etc have anything to do with a defence justification, it is pure corruption and zombie subsidies top to bottom.
Thinking about the geopolitical strategic layer of ag policy is fascinating!
Curious, what is the signifier of "organically farmed" here - what benefits does it provide, how does its usage significantly differ of "non-organically farmed" corn?
So once we've put all the farmers out of work and declared success, what do you suggest they do that is "more productive"? Should they lease their corn fields to crypto bros?
I don't know about the current landscape, as it has been years since I've lived in the states, let alone mingled with farmers in the US, but at one point, they would pay farmers to allow a field to be unplanted. I find this to be a viable option when mixed with the above and the farmers I knew didn't complain either.
*Corn and soybeans are generally grown together, generally (but not always) in alternating years. Corn tends to deplete nutrients in soil, soy puts them back.
So what you’re saying is that the market doesn’t work?
I definitely do not back unregulated markets, and in general, do not think markets for food work. It isn't just food, but other things that are general necessities for the modern times. Utilities, roads, and medical care are other examples.
I don't think anyone arguing that subsidies in general are bad, just that subsidising corn is bad...
I have seen farms near me do Corn, Corn, Corn, Soy, Corn based on whatever they think will be most profitable.
This amount of corn is simply not needed and it never was. It only exists because of the subsidies. So, maybe grow stuff that is not contributing to destroying our planet and is actually worth something without a lot of subsidies. Organic farming seems pretty lucrative lately. Iowa has plenty of that happening already. There are plenty of things farmers can do that are actually needed that are much less harmful.
It doesn't have to be some extreme shut down, it can be a transition to something better for society.
The Dutch government is actually paying farmers to stop farming. Nitrogen emissions are a big problem in densely populated areas and cattle farming is a known big contributor to that. So, they are paying farmers to get out of the business of converting subsidies into manure. The main point is not to keep them farming but to stop them from doing harmful things. If they can farm other things in a less harmful way; great. But otherwise, things like forests, nature reserves, etc. are also valuable to have. Nothing wrong with subsidizing farmers to create those.
And "better for society" is... well, not a given. I don't know enough about farming to know what sorts of beneficial crops can be grown where corn/soybeans grow well and I'm not optimistic enough to think we won't just use the "new and improved" crop in much of the same abusive ways that we use the corn crops. I'm going to guess that we could make animal feed for confinement farming out of something that isn't corn We could probably make a sweet syrup out of it, too, and I'm guessing the main benefit to people is that they've made corn syrup the absolute villian and swept away nuance surrounding it, and would welcome the new replacement without much though.
We just need society to be a bit better, I suppose. Quit confinement farming livestock and have better animal welfare laws, for example. Make healthy eating very cheap (and easy with premade food too), have a sugar tax of sorts and food laws to keep sugar out of unexpected places and reduce sugar some other context. Oh, and probably expand public transport exponentially. Feed, corn syrup, and biofuel dependence should drop.
The rest, which would be usage for e.g. corn bread or other staples of North American cuisine, is of course fine. Nothing wrong with e.g. organically farmed corn. It's a crop that does well under a wide range of circumstances and popular for that reason all over the world. And as a grain, it's an important part of food production.
So, why does this exist? Very simple, federal subsidies to states that have become very dependent on that. Kill the subsidies and that whole industry slowly dies. That would be a good thing. Maybe repurpose the subsidies to have those farmers do something that actually is more productive and less harmful.