Isolation, financial pressure, lack of control, fear of being the generation that fails.
Almost impossible to buy your way into farming as an individual business strategy (10k/acre in the midwest, need ~500 acres to support a family).
So chances are if you farm your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. did to. There's immense pressure on each generation to not be the one that lets the family legacy die.
Our fields are named after the previous families that owned them. Most failed because someone died unexpectedly without putting their land in a trust, or the next generation simply doesn't want to farm (for good reason).
Those that do survive are very game of thrones. "That field belongs to the Dicksons, that one is the Hoechs - they have 2 sons working with them now". Land auctions/purchases go through a lot of backroom dealing where patriarchs from various families horse trade. It's a very interesting subculture of the midwest.
The thing your post made me think about is that it seems like all of the professions that are actually critical for society (e.g. farming, teaching, construction, fishing, etc. - all of the "essential worker" type jobs) are actually the most punishingly difficult with the worst pay.
Meanwhile I'm changing some text for an A/B test and posting on HN and making bank.
Not sure what my point is here, other than this just feels wrong in some respect.
The obvious counterpoint / explanation is that <<insert a few paragraphs about markets and the role of feedback loops in dynamics systems>>, therefore what you're being paid is, by definition, how much people in aggregate value your contribution.
(<<insert a text that counters the usual objections by pointing out that you're taking an integral over society, so lots of people paying little individually still adds up to a huge number>>)
This explanation is elegant. There's nothing obviously wrong with it, and I challenge you to find an alternative that's at least as fair, and that can actually work with real humans in real life.
And yet, decade by decade, it's becoming blindingly clear that this system is totally bonkers, and allocates rewards pretty much exactly backwards. It's like, holy shit, how much worse does it have to get before some philosophers or economists or mathematicians figure out a viable alternative that ranks occupations correctly?
Of course it's wrong. We are able to do easy work with flexible hours for high pay, while more important professions can barely scrape by.
That injustice stems from a system that we cannot meaningfully change, though. Our cages are larger and more comfortable, but people making 6-7 figures are not policymakers or influential voices.
Having realized that, are you ready to walk away from Omelas today?
I have a theory most people have very low opinion of coding as a profession. To them, it must look like the most dry and boring kind of work, even worse than accounting. That's why they don't flood our field by the millions, even after hearing hear how much we make and how cushy our jobs are.
I'm not a dumb person - I like to think at least - and am able to work complex software, run linux (arch) and use powershell quite often.
I have no idea how to work in programming, and the environnement that is shown (non stop meetings, pointless hours of work wasted, weeks of crunch) is very very unattractive to me.
I think it's just too weird still - unless you had an oportunity fall onto your lap to learn it, or went into CS in school, I doubt most see a way in or are not interested in the work environnement.
Some of those are, "do it because you love it" jobs - teachers, counselors, nurses.
Others are, "do it because you have no other options" jobs. Low-level construction and farming falls into that. Keep in mind that, historically speaking, large-scale farming has been done by the lowest rung of society. Kids fleeing the farms to the city in search of wealth and opportunity is a tale as old as civilization.
It feels wrong because it is wrong on some level - but the flip side, good wages for these workers makes food less affordable for people, causing another kind of suffering. However, the solution to the human suffering component of these jobs (automation) also destroys all competition except the top rungs of the industry.
If this were an easy problem to solve, humans wouldn't have so many different philosophies on dealing with this.
It definitely often feels like the value capitalism places on certain skillsets is out of sync with the true intrinsic societal value. It ultimately boils down to the law of supply and demand, a brutally unemotional, uncaring concept.
At least in part it's not just supply and demand, but what capital owners have deemed your value is worth, and how much value you can produce for them given your role. A programmer at a big co can take that 300-500K/year you pay them and multiply it 10x, creating a lot of "value" due to far reaching impact at scale.
That is still supply and demand. The "demand" part comes from what you wrote about - how profitable the capital holders believe their tech ventures will be - this sets the ceiling for tech salaries. Currently, the capital holders are still very optimistic, which makes us in this profession still in very high demand.
It's not just supply and demand. Many farmers effectively price their own labor below the market rate. They are essentially subsidizing their customers by continuing to farm out of habit or tradition or love even when when it doesn't make sense from a purely financial standpoint. The rest of us get artificially cheap food so we don't look too hard at the situation, but it probably isn't sustainable.
Tale as old as time, frankly. Someone creates a surplus, another wants that surplus for himself. First we have warring tribes. Then we have warring cities. Then we have warring kings. Then we have warring nations. Then we have warring empires.
Throughout we have various forms of serfdom/slavery/etc. when there's not enough war.
Then we have colonialism, or in Joseph Conrad's words "civilized pillaging and raping."
Today we have capitalism, or just colonialism without the raping.
Monkey see, monkey want, monkey kill and brutalize to get.
If animals could make full use of their environments, I'm sure they would be greedy too. It's just an innate part of living things.
I would not be sure about lack of raping part... At the top it seems somewhat common and mostly hidden... Occasionally it comes to light, but even then people involved go away...
And the personality that farming attracts... it would literally destroy my Dad to fail at something he set out to do.
There was a rumor that my grandfather killed himself. He had car trouble, and had crawled under the car to fix it. But somehow the jack slipped, and the car pushed a screwdriver into his heart as it fell.
He was alone about 5 miles from the home place -- on a road where someone other than his family would find him.
He was in his 70s... old for ranchers in the 1960s. Old for ranchers today. Bills were due, and his sons were all drafted into the military.
But... once he died, 2 of his sons were able to get out of military service in order to come home and help take care of the ranch. Not everyone made it back, but those 2 did.
And the life insurance paid off a lot of their debts that they had no other way of paying. (So now he's got a pasture named after him!)
Anyway it's always been a hard life. They don't need a shrink, they need things to be just a little more fair. They don't need huge wins, but they need the ability to provide for the ones they love.
Bankers, and re-sellers make money. Ranchers and farmers do not. It's a rigged system.
> Almost impossible to buy your way into farming as an individual business strategy (10k/acre in the midwest, need ~500 acres to support a family).
Can anyone explain to me why farmland in developed countries is so expensive? It sounds like a terrible investment to buy it at such prices, and yet somebody's doing it.
The prices are set by large farmers adding acres and acres available for sale are relatively scarce.
When you consider the people doing the buying are at scale (thousands of acres) and can spread the cost of very expensive equipment over many acres it starts to make sense. The marginal cost of farming another 80 acres in terms of time and equipment is quite low.
lots of foreign corporations buying it to secure food production and during the 0% interest rate days post 2008 lots of hedge funds and investors who just needed a place to throw money, similar to VCs investing in any random startup they could find. Worst case scenario the investors lose money on farmland and use it to offset taxes on a different investment. Losers are the local people who can't get land because some investor from California or New York buying via online auction
Also, a growing dependency on a constantly increasing amount of input costs - fertilizer, engineered seeds, pesticides, etc. Input costs keep going up, while yields are slowing down, and the prices are already pretty much rock bottom. Hard to see a lot of hope for the future in the situation.
Just making it more competitive. Yield on corn 50 years ago was half what it is today, which is good for a growing population.
Our neck of the woods in the 70s used to have 25 farms where now 1 family farms the entirety. If you're good at what you do (to the degree you can control), you'll survive and keep growing.
Biggest issues are your kids getting taxed to oblivion on land they inherit (this kills the farm) and outside investors bidding land way above where it reasonably cashflows because it's "cheap".
But don't feel bad for farmers. To inherit $10 million+ in land because your family's had it 100 years is a blessing most people don't get in life.
> But don't feel bad for farmers. To inherit $10 million+ in land because your family's had it 100 years is a blessing most people don't get in life.
... I still think this is pretty sad. I married into family involved with farming and seeing this dilemma is not heartening. One of my in-laws is currently in farming proto-retirement (renting out land now and not actively farming), and I can vividly see how selling out is basically not an option for him. If you spend a lifetime cultivating practices of living modestly and working towards the ideal of the small family farm, a big pile of money:
1) does not interest you very much, since you've built your life around hobbies like going to the bar and socializing with a dwindling crowd of other people who have your lifestyle. Nouveau rich family farmers seldom seem to do much better with a windfall than lottery winners.
2) further, selling out really is the antithesis to what you spent your life doing. Basically you're saying that your lifestyle has outlived it's usefulness in the spirit of "Death of a Salesman" is worth more dead than alive.
I'm probably being overly harsh sounding because I'm not an expert and I've been exposed to the idealist perspective in person quite a bit. But I do have pity for those who have been put in a hard place when they are suddenly surrounded by "game of thrones" and skepticism that massive consolidation will work out well in the long run.
edit: and yeah, I get that adapting is also an option but by definition it's an option for increasingly few.
It depends on the state, but even if you have a $5m exemption on inheritance, if you inherit $10m of farmland, you need cash to keep the land (or go into debt) or liquidate the land.
No federal estate tax on $10m of farm land (kicks in around $13m this year, from what I can tell—the so-called "death tax" is often framed as applying to a whole lot more people than it actually does). Further, I'm pretty sure there are ways to structure a business that'll prevent even amounts exceeding $13m from being affected—granted, that would require advance planning which may or may not have been done.
The rest would vary state by state and depend on the relation to the deceased, but I'm pretty sure it'd be $0 or negligible in most cases, on a $10m estate, for spouse or children at least, even with minimal advance preparation.
Yeah I'm not super sure of the specifics on "death tax", haven't spent time researching it enough. It's just a topic of conversation from time to time in the family.
But the general strategy today is set up a generation skipping trust so that in the event the gov't decides to enact strict step up basis laws it doesn't blow the whole thing up.
Not really. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of the concentration wealth. But an industry going from 90% of the population to 1%, even over a few hundred years, is going to have some bad effects.
It's one of the reasons I hate this push to get rid of cars and move everyone into cities.
It just increases the isolation of Farmers and other rural people. Strong Towns actually has a stated goal of reducing the interstate system! (Strong Towns, weak country, should be their new name.)
We need to reverse this trend - more people back into tiny cities, and yes, even suburbs.
Sure, looked at only from a money point of view, cities do a lot - but it's all services, and very little actual good people need in order to live. There's more to a strong country than just money.
I don't believe Strong Towns advocated for ending rural towns. Advice for improving cities doesn't say anything about people who don't live in cities. The closest I ever heard was that they should park their cars at the city border and go to the center by train.
>> So, basically, capitalism is killing the hand that feeds us
No no. It's all working to plan. Consolidation leads to bigger, more efficient farms. Or so the big land owners think... That much land requires ever more sophisticated technology, which big corporations are happy to provide and make people dependent on, all while collecting farm level data to allow someone to play the futures markets.
There is a pecking order. Whom do you serve and to what end?
And now I've reached my cynical threshold for the day and need to unplug and go outside ;-)
If you sell a commodity and your competitors are far more efficient, you will lose in the end. Change the commodity from wheat to mining silver and nobody has their heartstrings pulled for you.
Ultimately people aren’t siding with family farms for economics or fairness reasons - they are doing it to support the losing underdog or anti-modernism nostalgia.
Meaning it's a perishable good, it's a different market. It's good to have a lot of small farms to not have monopolies and as a stopgap to massive crop failures/blight or just bad management.
Like corn: the existence of extra corn (currently making ethanol) to turn into food in case of emergency/war, so it's subsidized.
And then if your farm is not as efficient as the big land owners think it should be, you lose everything you ever worked for or loved. It's no surprise some of these people kill themselves.
I see this critique all the time but never see anyone point to the ACTUAL problem: a lack of accountability.
Is anyone here old enough to remember that telecoms were a plurality? Now they are consolidated into a few, or couple, I haven't checked lately. When they wanted to merge or buyout it used to be big news and regularly got denied to protect the market. But the last few monumental mergers have largely gone under the radar, a series of boxes checked and completed forms, and they're done. It's because people friendly to the entities are in the positions of decision.
We know capitalism has flaws and is imperfect. It used to be our regulatory agencies would tell companies like Monsanto to take a hike. But now, they permit anything the corporations want to do. With that glaring of a problem, are we really talking about an economic framework called "capitalism"? No, we're not.
Were this a Communist country then the oligarchs would be friendly to the regulatory agencies. Same issue, different economic foundation. Do you see where the problem lies now? It's not "capitalism". That's a nonsensical critique parroted by consuming inflammatory rhetoric, a waltz down the sidewalk of extremism from hateful social and news spaces online. Stop it, please.
Capitalism is still feeding us. Farmers and their vendors are orders of magnitudes more efficient than centuries ago.
Family farming has always depended on cheap/free labor of children (and slaves / serfs / indentured servants / illegal immigrants). Corporate farming at least makes those transactions more honest and transparent.
Trust are good and even needed for the producers. Just look at OPEC... It would be lot worse for them if they did not manage supply. Same goes for farmers if they can't control the sell price.
I grew up in rural Maine and helped on several types of farms myself.
Isolation (rural, children leave), low or fluctuating profits (price of diesel, fertilizer, feed etc), high stress and working hours, disconnection and exploitation (industrial seed and fertilizer, predatory distributors or suppliers) in some practices. Not an easy profession or way of life unless it is a hobby.
I know a family from Oxford County that left around 1900. First lose the farm, move to the Coast, split up after that. My impression is that the fields are very low yield compared to the massive acres to the East. Once they were connected by rail, a lot of history stopped right there. I resent the word "hobby" though, since it is essentially living on the land in some way, with a time frame that allows for raising children. The urban centers are the end of the line even for modern people.
I grew up in Kansas and Nebraska, still have family in small towns there. In addition to the bleak outlook, high risk of failure, stress, physical labor, etc, I would submit this is ground zero for the phenomenon of cultural dispair. Americas secular ideals were Davy Crockett and Abe Lincoln: physically strong, white, male, working the land. Now's it a hipster with a MacBook repping for the right causes. That cosmopolitan knowledge economy may well be everyone's future, but it's not what they know, or something they even see a path too.
hipsters are not reproducing, and showing high levels of anxiety disorders here in the City, honestly. Not sure what to say about culture, America is having troubles that way. Social media has done a lot of self-inflicted harm on growing minds and bodies in the last 15 years, as is well-documented. Lastly, the effect of low-cost fossil fuel transport for ordinary daily items, cannot be overstated. Farms within 100 miles fail, while common fruits and vegetables can travel more than 1000 miles and somehow still be cheaper?
I wonder how much damage has been done in the name of upholding "rugged individualism". We willingly isolate ourselves and refuse to ask for help when we need it while the problem just sprirals.
article somewhat addressed it but I'd say demographics are the biggest factor, with an older male population and high gun ownership rate
The other issue is stress, family farmers are now competing directly with foreign government and hedge fund backed corporate farms, so it's almost impossible to compete when they can just write off losses. And getting squeezed by monopolies for seed production and selling to monopolies for meat processing and grain buying. Many are working on land owned for generations and feel the pressure to not fail, I know several who became alcoholics as a result of having to sell their land after going broke, you can tell they feel a lot of shame over it due to their identity being so tied to what they do
> article somewhat addressed it but I'd say demographics are the biggest factor, with an older male population and high gun ownership rate
Right, how much of this is explained simply by what we'd expect to see in a population of older men with a ~100% rate of easy access to firearms, compared with the rate of easy access in the general population of folks otherwise fitting that demographic?
[EDIT] For those not familiar with these kinds of areas, this isn't because farmers are especially likely to be "gun nuts" (maybe they are? I kinda doubt it though, probably not at a rate much higher than the general population, anyway) but because hunting and recreational shooting are more popular in rural areas (citation needed, but I'd be very surprised if that's not true) and because even farmers who don't engage in those hobbies tend to have one or more firearms for varmint control, protection from dangerous animals, or simply because they inherited or were gifted some, if nothing else. I'd expect that nearly 100% of US farmers could have a loaded firearm in-hand within an hour, if they wanted to, without having to put much thought into how to get it.
Good point, another common reason that slipped my mind. Dogs can get snake-bit or horribly mauled by any number of things, for farmers who don't even deal in livestock but do have dogs. Horses, obviously (though you don't necessarily shoot one just because it broke a leg, like in Hollywood westerns). Cows can get up to some really stupid shit. Wild animals can get hurt by machines, and getting close to them may be dangerous. Yeah, that's another big reason.
I think you're right about farmers' ownership and access to firearms, but I don't think it's that much greater than older men generally.
30% of US adults own a gun and another 11% live with someone who does.
39% of all men own a gun. 46% of all adults in rural areas own guns. 48% of white men own a gun.
Sure, those numbers drop a lot in the cities and heavily Democrat voting areas, but it's pretty easy to get a gun in those places, legally or not.
More than ownership or access, I think this is a mindset issue -- same as why rural areas have high rates of ownership and access to firearms, but don't experience the violent crime rates found in cities. It's not the guns, it's who has the guns.
> same as why rural areas have high rates of ownership and access to firearms, but don't experience the violent crime rates found in cities. It's not the guns, it's who has the guns.
You may be surprised about that, actually. Cities often make headlines or rankings under things like "Xth most violent US city" with some implicit assumption behind it that larger cities are more violent than rural areas, towns, or smaller cities under whatever threshold is being used in that analysis, but that's not actually true. Absolute numbers are high in big cities (they're denser—duh) but rates may surprise you.
[EDIT] This is a shitty site, but it's the general kind of thing you can expect to find, if you dig into this:
Highest-murder-rate counties yields about 60/40 small cities or rural, and the usual suspects for violent big cities (Baltimore, DC, STL, New Orleans—notably absent: Chicago, NYC, LA)
You'll see similar results for crime in general. Most big US cities aren't remarkably-horrible dens of crime—not relative to small cities and rural counties, anyway, and not when looking at the per-capita rate and including those lower-pop areas. The safer half or so of large US cities are safer than large swaths of rural and small-town/city America. Big-city doesn't necessarily equal higher crime, violence, or murder rate than small cities and rural counties. It only seems that way because, for some reason, crime in cities is usually highlighted and presented in ways that suggest that's true.
Because I have weird hobbies, I've spent a lot of time studying crime rates, particularly homicide, around the US. I'm very familiar with homicide rates and what drives them. (Hint: It isn't the guns.)
As a general statement, cities have much higher homicide rates than the suburbs, exurbs and rural areas.
If you zoom out too far, then the violent cities blend in with the less violent suburbs. For example, from the article you linked:
"From a county-based per capita county perspective, however, Cook County, Illinois had a lower homicide rate than many other counties in the United States. Between 2009 and 2015 there were 11 murders per 100,000 residents in Cook County."
That is about half of what the homicide rate was in the city of Chicago (the seat of Cook Co), so you can see that distortion when you're comparing counties rather than cities.
And since Chicago is in the news so often, let's use that as an anecdote: Chicago's homicide rate is more than 4x the national average, but it's _less than half_ of cities like Baltimore, Detroit, St Louis, New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
As a counter-example, NYC has a lower homicide rate than the US overall. This is awesome and a welcome change from the violence we saw in the 70s, 80s and early 90s. But NYC is also five counties, so you can see some real swings in crime rates from New York County to Bronx County, from Kings County to Richmond County, all in the same city.
Chicago's homicide rate is also very unevenly distributed, with about a half dozen or so neighborhoods accounting for the majority of homicides. This is true in many cities, which is why we want to zoom in rather than zoom out.
Are there violent rural areas? Of course. But I would be careful looking at rural, sparsely populated counties as counter-examples: the link you gave cited Coahoma Co, MS as number 2, with 37 homicides per 100k (7 times the then national rate but less than Baltimore etc.), however, Coahoma Co had a population of only 25k, which means there were about 9 homicides that year. Nine. Sure, the _rate_ is high but that could be skewed a single (awful) family murder-suicide.
> Most big US cities aren't remarkably-horrible dens of crime—not relative to small cities and rural counties, anyway, and not when looking at the per-capita rate and including those lower-pop areas.
First, your link didn't compare cities, it compared counties -- and it's easy for a low-pop county to skew statistics in a single year.
Second, I never claimed "horrible dens of crime", I claimed cities had higher violent crime rates than rural areas. Some cities are wonderfully safe. Some parts of Chicago are wonderfully safe. As a general statement, cities are more violent than rural areas.
Third, my main point was that it isn't the guns, it's who has the guns.
> The safer half or so of large US cities are safer than large swaths of rural and small-town/city America.
By population or square-miles? Coahoma Co may have had a homicide rate 7 times the national average, but it had the same number of murders in a year that Baton Rouge had in a month. That New Orleans had in two weeks. That St Louis had in two weeks. That Detroit had in a week and a half. That Baltimore had in a week. That Chicago had in a week.
We've got a problem with violence in the US. It isn't the guns.
Corporate farms seem inevitable, even if they aren't desirable. How does it make sense to put the burden of managing fluctuations in costs and yields on a single person or family, farming in a single area? The financial side alone must be complicated enough to be a full-time job. Then you have the questions of predicting demand for different crops, staying up-to-date with farming techniques for different crops, organic and other certifications, learning different techniques and products as the climate changes, hiring and managing labor, managing employee benefits, how could a single person do all that and still do a competitive job compared to a company with specialists handling all of those roles, not to mention that they can hedge against fluctuations in local conditions by diversifying across geographic areas?
Imagine trying to succeed as a one-person company against Google or Amazon in the production of a literal commodity.
> Then you have the questions of predicting demand for different crops, staying up-to-date with farming techniques for different crops, organic and other certifications, learning different techniques and products as the climate changes, hiring and managing labor, managing employee benefits, how could a single person do all that and still do a competitive job compared to a company with specialists handling all of those roles, not to mention that they can hedge against fluctuations in local conditions by diversifying across geographic areas?
Centralized planning of food production has never gone well in human history as far as I'm aware. I'm not certain I'd like 2 or 3 giant corporations deciding how much corn will be grown next season to maximize profits, each eroding those safety margins a couple percentage points ever year for decades until something unexpected happens.
50,000 smaller corporations, sure. But that's just another form of family farming.
> I'm not certain I'd like 2 or 3 giant corporations deciding how much corn will be grown next season to maximize profits,
There are several sectors of the agricultural industry that are monopolies/oligopolies. And those tend towards making more money via producing more rather than artificial scarcity. If orange prices rise too much, then some other commodity will replace it. So instead of artificially restricting orange supplies, the industry spends tons of money researching and bringing to market more products that use oranges. Diversity and vertical integration are the name of the game here.
Even the pervasive corn industry isn't immune to being replaced by competition if prices go up.
Usually just one kid will stay home and farm while the other head to cities. That kid will have to buy the others' share of the farm when the parents die, which puts them back in debt.
In my country, farmers (owners and workers) are twice as likely to kill themselves than the average citizen.
That said, their is some risk factors: if you're on a conventional farmhouse as either an employee or a small owner (less than 6 employees), and under a Fnsea-owned (or affiliated) 'co-operative', tough luck.
If you're working with an old co-op (family-owned) or one that work with traditional or conservative farming, you will survive the hard work.
I have family on all side on this (I think my mother inherited part of a wineyard exploited by cousins), and a lot of friends on the 'hippy farmer' side (with very different experience/exploitation for each one of them), and to me, the co-op is at least 50% of the issue. They are your coworkers, sometimes they own your debt, they are your point of contact to ask around for help when you have land-specific issues, or when you have to find parts for your pumps, engines or whatever. They can also push you to indebt yourself (to them) with their 'rentability' advices.
And BTW it's called co-op but it's rarely a worker's cooperative. When it is, you're in luck, but oftentimes it's a business.
I'm from rural Colorado and have known several farmers and ranchers that have died by suicide. Most were quite wealthy and very lonely. The inability to find a woman who is willing to be a farming/ranching wife has left them with no companionship and no heirs to their farms. I conjecture that is what brought on the despair.
Where did all the young women of the community go? To college, to get their art degrees and hang out in coffee shops. I don't blame the young women. Farming and ranching is a hard life and their wealthy farming/ranching daddy's can pay for it. But it leaves the one son who stayed on the farm lonely.
A few I know have resorted to mail-order brides from Asia, South America, or eastern Europe. Cross-cultural marriage is difficult but easier than being alone, I suppose.
Farming is a hard life. There are a lot of sources of stress:
Time - If something needs to be harvested immediately, it's not uncommon to work through the nights using the lights on the equipment. There's no such thing as set hours. You're constantly on the job.
Finances - Equipment is incredible expensive and is financed via debt but margins are low. You can end up just trying to pay off the loans. That's not even mentioning the land requirements (either owned or leased).
Uncertainty - You can't control the weather. You can't control the price of corn or soybeans. Equipment breaks down. These issues can easily snowball into affecting entire operations.
Hard to say without more of a time series, but the isolation idea makes a lot of sense to me, especially because the number of farmers/workers per acre has steadily dropped for decades.
So what was once a fairly communal occupation is now fairly isolated, so the financial pressures, etc are less shared.
But your point is valid. I have a cousin that farmed in the mid 20th century when they used chemicals like DDT on the farm. He is alive, but his body is falling apart. He is lucky that he switched to commercial/retail rather than trying to tough out a farmer’s life in his 80s.
The USA tends to assume everything is legal until there is evidence of harm. The EU tends to take a more precautionary stance and is more likely to claim harm with a lower barrier of proof.
Testing does happen, but the majority of it is done by the same corporations that have a financial interest in minimizing the negative results.
Round-up got caught in lawsuits mostly because they distribute to anyone, you think that amount of scrutiny is going toward every herbicide on this list? https://www.clemson.edu/cafls/research/weeds/management/herb...
I'm not prone to fear mongering, but I can't imagine companies like Dow chemical and Monsanto putting much cash into long term mental health effects of exposure to any of their huge library of agro chemicals.
That's not even considering all of the other social and health care factors, as mentioned in the article. Honestly I'm surprised the rate is only twice as high as the average occupation.
I play the game CyberPunk 2077 and wonder how many things I see in it will become a reality in the future. There are "farms" you can go to (technologically advanced and under corporate control) where you can see a farmer's commune surrounded by gravesites. Some farmers are seen mourning at the graves while others are living in squalor and desperation. Being totally disconnected from farming in the real world, the reality this article paints was very sobering.
It reminded me of other harrowing stories about our present-day food supply.
Slave labor, torture, and murder in the Thai seafood industry.
Instead of subsidizing agricultural production which causes weirdly imbalanced incentives we might try subsidizing the practice of keeping 1% of the land in a wild state to encourage ecological diversity. That would keep a small channel open for any big land holders which in many areas is mostly farmers. It would also help with the problems caused by large areas with monoculture agriculture and no wild places for animals to seek refuge.
Considering farming critical and having some kind of census like information gathering interface could be a way to indirectly offer mental health care services without the stigma.
I think it could be expanded with bipartisan support if they tied it to some of the climate change programs like carbon offsets. Pay people to plant trees on their land
My local hackspace got a call from a dating show (Farming for love), looking to see if anyone was interested. They were quite insistent, somehow figured out that there might be a lot of overlap (hacking, fixing things, etc)
Can't add much more than what's already been said here but I'm glad to see more presence of this on the internet. Grew up in IL, this was largely unspoken + alcohol and drug abuse.
This assumes that the suicide rate isn't increasing among a number of people in various different walks of life. Things are not going well people and farmers just know that all too we'll.
Almost impossible to buy your way into farming as an individual business strategy (10k/acre in the midwest, need ~500 acres to support a family).
So chances are if you farm your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. did to. There's immense pressure on each generation to not be the one that lets the family legacy die.
Our fields are named after the previous families that owned them. Most failed because someone died unexpectedly without putting their land in a trust, or the next generation simply doesn't want to farm (for good reason).
Those that do survive are very game of thrones. "That field belongs to the Dicksons, that one is the Hoechs - they have 2 sons working with them now". Land auctions/purchases go through a lot of backroom dealing where patriarchs from various families horse trade. It's a very interesting subculture of the midwest.