The status quo solution is for farmers to keep voting for MAGAs or similar, and then, to expect to bail them out every couple of years or so, even as the world burns because of their rural old white guy choices, and EVEN THOUGH A LOT OF FARMS ARE NOW OWNED BY CONGLOMERATES and foreign interests.
You're saying utilitarianism obligates us to keep bailing them out. But can we at least be pissed off by those socialism-for-me-but-shit-sandwich-for-thee folks?
And don’t get me started on factory farming. The pork and chicken CAFOs in the Midwest are an environmental & public health time bomb that’s not a question of if it goes off, but when.
But the farmers are such crack business geniuses that they're putting themselves out of business, even with all the subsidies. Then large ag corporations (or with ag as a side gig) take over, and then THEY get the subsidies. If you want bananas and coffee, you'd better make a trip to Latin America.
I get it, Steve. You’re preaching to the choir here. I spent the first 35 years of my life in Iowa and Illinois. It’s not pretty.
Then I don't need to tell you about the ironic effects of the tariffs. Sayonara, Nebraska soybean farmers.
No, I’m up to speed on all that. Also that the meat packing industry is probably going to collapse shortly if the deportations continue, although ICE has certainly made a point of avoiding it up to now.
It's hard to blame the rural farm family kids for wanting no part of that.
Oh for fucks’ sake yes! I lived around these people 30 years ago, they’re unreasonable, stupid, bigoted, & totally willing to use issues to their own sleazy advantage. Not defending them, I’d love to see them pay the cost for their actions. Unfortunately they have a commodity we all die without.
And yet, with all the subsidies and all the bailouts, they're still going under and their land goes to conglomerates or overseas financiers. Sometimes their fertile fields become housing tracts. You get scammers like former Rep. Devin Nunes, a "farmer" scamming the system, and many more of his ilk.
You don’t have to tell me. I live a couple hundred miles from Nunez’s former district in CA, & also strangely have family in NW Iowa where his family relocated to dodge the heat from his congressional terms. They’re scum. All of them. The Nunez family relocated to very near Chuck Grassley’s farm. 🤔
I seriously doubt that Nunez has the slightest idea how to milk a cow, much less, crank up the machinery. He's a purebred scammer.
Now some are ready to bail out of farming because they have to get up to milk the cows and feed the chickens and shovel the shit, work they see as beneath them and their white asses, because now they can't hire "illegals" to do the hard jobs, with long hours, for lousy pay. Who's picking the fruit?