If we develop all agricultural land while chasing dollars it cannot end well.

Of course we won't develop everything, but I'm not sure the monetary value of the land adequately prices the value of being able to grow crops. I won't pretend to have a plan, but watching very productive cropland get converted into lawns and warehouses makes me leery of how ag land is dealt with.

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runako a day ago | parent | next [-]

Here, we are basically talking about people who grow export products, not food eaten by Americans. My understanding is we could take most of these farms completely offline without much impact to US food supply (I could be wrong on this).

There appears to be a dichotomy right now between commodity farmers whose export markets have collapsed due to national policy and those who grow food for American consumption, who are not having that problem. I'm trying to gauge how important the former is to those of us who do not work on those farms.

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throwup238 a day ago | parent [-]

Only about 20% of corn and 40-45% of wheat is exported. Since a lot of the rest goes to animal feed either directly or as distillers grains (waste product from ethanol/biofuel production that is still edible), it could definitely impact food security here in the US.

The complicating factor is that those grains are the feed for the last stage in beef production, with about half of all US agricultural land going to pasture for the previous stage. Eliminating those grains could significantly impact how much food the rest of the land can actually produce.

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runako a day ago | parent [-]

Those are big percentages of export. You also raise the point that there are other categories of domestic use that also are not food (distillation, biofuels).

But again, we're not necessarily talking about farms literally closing. This is mostly about which rich person gets to operate a given plot of land. If a farmer goes under and sells to another farmer, at the margin why should we care? I still have yet to see a good answer as to why we should care which millionaire operates these farms.

	▲	9rx a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Those are big percentages of export. Until you have a bad crop year. That's when you are glad you are in the habit of massively overproducing for seemingly unnecessary reasons. Like we saw glimmers of during the 2022 global food crises, those exports (and other uses, like biofuels) start to wind down when the locals begin to worry about going hungry. > If a farmer goes under and sells to another farmer, at the margin why should we care? We don't — unless many farmers are all at risk of going under at the exact same time. That's when disruptions become realistic. That concern isn't limited to farming. 2008 and 2020 showed great examples of where we feared many players in other industries all going under at the same time and did what we could to prevent that from happening for much the same reasons.
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brewdad a day ago | parent | prev [-]

One approach I've seen, aside from zoning related laws, is to give ag land huge property tax breaks. Want to convert it to some other use? Expect a 90% increase in property taxes.

It's far from perfect since some large landowners run "hobby" farms to get the tax break while producing nothing of significance for the greater society. Other developers take the bet that they can get the land developed and sold before the biggest bills come due and it will be someone else's problem.