I buy all this, and I think your analysis is spot on. There's z log of cognitive dissonance going on here.

>> One common theme has been that farmers are by necessity highly independent.

I think they like to think of themselves as highly independent. But in truth of course they are highly dependent, on city customers for their product, on foreign countries for exports, on federal govt for subsidies (both direct and indirect), on suppliers for machinery, seed and fertilizer, and in some cases on immigrant labor.

Just as we are dependent on farmers. It's all interconnected.

Ironically they may tolerate local govt, and had federal govt, but they are most dependent on fed govt policies.

They do of course have many legitimate grievances, but I'm not sure that voting for the party that seems to hate them is a winning strategy.

▲ modo_mario 5 hours ago | parent [-]

>and in some cases on immigrant labor.

Why tho do you feel the need to defend big agri businesses skirting employment law and pressuring wages downward by bringing in illegal people? I find it a bit weird looking at the US how they seem to kneejerk into different camps depending on what the other side does with some old outliers like bernie who retain their line.

>Ironically they may tolerate local govt, and had federal govt, but they are most dependent on fed govt policies.

I live in a much smaller country but here there's similar pressures at play. I feel like a more nuanced take that farmers either don't voice or don't voice well here is that the federal and EU gov has benefited these big corporate farms they compete with because they're by far the best at siphoning off these various subsidies that farmers supposedly depend on. At the same time gov requirements make it almost impossible to run an smaller independent farm or one that doesn't depend on one of these middlemen to an extreme degree.

I worked for a meat conglomerate here in belgium and plenty of the farmers they dealt with didn't own their own cows (and plenty went under). They essentially rented their business to the company which owned the animals on their land, provided the calf feed made by their subsidiary, employed a load of vets, had an international transport company, had me and others writing software that would automate the mindbogglingly stupid forms and rules for transport (which were interpreted comically differently by regional departments of the federal food safety agency so depending on the jurisdiction you had to do radically different things).

Just the paperwork to run a competitive farm was/would have been impossible to deal with for many of these people and it was so clearly made up by people who never had to deal with the consequences directly.

On the other hand there's also plenty of examples of things like the gov rugpulling with environmental legislation in the netherlands.

Things like caping farms at past nitrogen emissions (benefiting the big ones) after first encouraging farmers to take loans and invest insane amounts into equipment to reduce those emissions.

▲ throwaway2037 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

    > Why tho do you feel the need to defend big agri businesses skirting employment law and pressuring wages downward by bringing in illegal people?

It is interesting that you immediately jumped to "illegal people". When I read it, I thought about the US H-2A via for temp farm hands. This page: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-d... ... says 385,000 visa holders in 2024. That is a lot!

Since you are based in Belgium, how many native-born Belgians are still performing low-skill manual labour on a farm? Probably very few. Most of them are probably from the poorest parts of EU or some kind of temp farm hand visa. Specifically: Fruits and vegetables require lots of low-skill manual labor for harvest and packing.

    > At the same time gov requirements make it almost impossible to run an smaller independent farm

Call me cynical, but I am not nostalgic for the "smaller independent farm". If farms want to be smaller and independent in the 21st century, they need to distinguish themselves with product (usually: organic or "free range"), branding, and value add (example: create a cheese brand that only uses your special organic cow's milk). If they cannot or will not, then they will need to sell their business to the mega agg corps.

▲ rob74 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Why tho do you feel the need to defend big agri businesses skirting employment law and pressuring wages downward by bringing in illegal people?

Not sure if they (no matter if big business or small farm) could find enough American citizens to do those jobs, even if they were better paid...

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Obscurity4340 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Shouldnt they at least have to try? Who else gets to throw up their hands before even trying to raise wages and offer an attractve (as much as is possible) employment offer to domestic labor before they get to skip all that to get to the good stuff where they get to pay even shittier wages, afford less rights or access to judicial review for their workers, and basically totally control them thru deportation threats should they get to uppity on Freedom Land's supply?

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ben_w 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You can try, but the unemployment levels in the USA have not generally been low enough to find enough workers in total in recent decades. Worse, even the last few % of unemployment is a deliberate policy choice to prevent a rapid cycle of wage inflation as everyone competes for a limited supply of workers:

The farmers would have to pay enough for "seasonal work spending all day doing manual labour in the sun without any AC" to compete with "year round work spending all day stacking shelves in supermarket where the temperature is at consistently in the range that doesn't put off the customers". And if the farmers got the former shelf stackers, then the supermarkets need to find more people to do the stacking. Food prices go up, both wholesale (because the farmers have to pay workers more) and retail beyond that (because so do the supermarkets).

I keep seeing stories about poorer Americans struggling with food prices even without this kind of cycle; but it doesn't end with just those two examples, it's all the low-pay jobs that are inherently more comfortable than farm labour, and if they find themselves short of labour and raise wages they too have to raise prices to balance their books, and whichever professions they in turn get labour from have the same choices, it ripples across the entire economy. Which may be good or bad for other reasons, but it's a massive impact across the entire economy, not something which is an easy one-liner.

Also, despite all those issues, look at this from the point of view of those workers: They've got seasonal work that pays them somewhat more than they'd earn in their home countries, and until very recently that work would not have come with a risk of being deported to a completely different country than they'd come from.

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modo_mario 31 minutes ago | parent [-]

>not something which is an easy one-liner.

It seems to me like it would initially make inflation spike a lot if applied abruptly but regardless of the timeline would also increase the standing of the lower classes doing menial work substantially. This also has an effect on those other cushier low wage jobs as they then have to compete with the previously unattractive fieldwork. And they bloody well have to compete because food prices would rise and people are sensitive to that.

There's more to it of course and maybe it's in some way good but there's no way the current way of doing things with half or more of farmhands being illegally employed does not provide downward wage pressure for americans. We don't have to be wishy washy about that bit.

>look at this from the point of view of those workers

The government has no mandate to benefit them over it's own citizens beyond the obvious (foreign aid, disaster relief, etc) though.

	▲	ben_w 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> The government has no mandate to benefit them over it's own citizens beyond the obvious (foreign aid, disaster relief, etc) though. Yes, absolutely, I'm just pushing back there against "basically totally control them thru deportation threats should they get to uppity on Freedom Land's supply"; this was, previously, a mutually beneficial relationship despite being… I was about to write "second class citizen", but no, less than citizen even then. That said, current regime clearly regards foreign aid, disaster relief as not worth supplying, they either don't understand the soft-power benefits to the USA or don't care.

▲ nehal3m 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Why tho do you feel the need to defend big agri businesses skirting employment law and pressuring wages downward by bringing in illegal people?

They said immigrant. Why do you feel the need to equate that term to illegals? They are not the same thing.

	▲	ben_w 15 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> They said immigrant. Why do you feel the need to equate that term to illegals? They are not the same thing. While true, the estimates are that about half of agricultural workers in the USA are undocumented (AKA "illegal").
	▲	modo_mario an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Because their (in)dependence was questioned on various fronts in the context of the american bipartisan system and more specifically the republican party and it's policies aka "the party that hates them". Wrt the subsidies, consumer market and all that i don't have much to add but wrt the migrant workers the point of contention to my knowledge is mostly illegals (regardless of the actual number deported, the perhaps brutal way in which this is done, etc), ICE, etc. It's also my understanding that illegals are far far more present in farm work and a few other industries in the US (and to lesser extent in europe) to the extreme extent that those without legal work authorisation make up nearly half or more of the farmhands. (USDA estomated 42% few years ago but others had good reason to suspect between 50 & 60% or a even more) So yeah there's no real way to not think of illegal farm work there. In that context and the opposition there's some elements like Bernie that seem to stick to their line and call this kind of faux open borders a right wing position whilst the rest of the democrats and their base seem to kneejerk the other way in response to recent events and republican standpoints and suddenly seem to have started supporting illegal entry, employment, etc

▲ formerly_proven 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Just the paperwork to run a competitive farm was/would have been impossible to deal with for many of these people and it was so clearly made up by people who never had to deal with the consequences directly.

You are assuming this is an unintended effect, but it is very much the intended effect of bureaucratic rules and the reason large companies and conglomerates constantly lobby for them: they can afford the overhead costs (until the inevitable external disruptor comes around and totally eats their lunch, see europe) and smaller players cannot. These rules are moats built by big companies.

Doubly so for subsidies tied to complex filing and reporting requirements: large companies easily do this (they have department(s) just for handling these larger than whatever department in the government is handling the paperwork), small players can't and miss out.