farming is hard.

around here, cities will buy up farms just for the water rights, so the land prices are so high, nobody sane would go into that business.

forget all the high tech AI laser weeding machines. those might add an edge to large, already successful operations.

Getting started or renewing a failed operation is a 24 hour per day job. Sure, it's a crisis

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larsiusprime 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Indeed. One of the chief causes of high land prices for farmland is unmet demand for housing in the urban core, so farm and ranch land gets bid up to development prices.

A lot of advocates of building restrictions did it in the name of preserving nature/farmland/greenspace, but in many ways it’s had the opposite effect:

https://youtu.be/-Qn4iZgQY8k?si=LFzuAdWgMxB1BpIG

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JamisonM a day ago | parent [-]

That doesn't really make sense, the vast, vast majority of farmland is not close enough to an urban area to be influenced by sprawl and get bid up to development prices.

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larsiusprime a day ago | parent | next [-]

All the subdivisions in Texas that have “ranch” in the name are that way for a reason

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DaveZale a day ago | parent | prev [-]

sure, but enough of it is close to urban areas

you never lived in California?

The urban sprawl there ate up all of the orange groves, for example... in Orange County!

	▲	JamisonM a day ago \| parent [-]
		Define "enough"? The article in question is about Arkansas and broad acre farming, there is 600+ million acres of farm in the midwest down to the delta 99% of which isn't close to a major population center. There is lots of pressure in areas of California and all up and down the west coast up to Vancouver.. but that is a trivial amount a farm land in the grand scheme of things (and specialized due to climate, water, and market access issues that don't apply to most farm land in the US or really anywhere)

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zdragnar 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Generations of family farms have been selling out over the course of my life due to the bad economics. Dairy farms consolidate, and fields are worth more for building houses on than for growing corn or soy or wheat.

It used to be at least one of the kids would take over the farm, but now as parents age out, there's simply too many better opportunities with less hard effort out there and fewer are interested in staying in the business.

	▲	duxup 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think there's a good argument that farming has always been difficult and the ideal of the quaint family farm was really not very pleasant in reality much of the time. A local university ran some numbers a while back and noted that the early farmstead plots in the US were not large enough to support a farm for long, even at that time.