[HN Gopher] The last days of a 350-year-old family farm
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       The last days of a 350-year-old family farm
        
       Author : ilamont
       Score  : 41 points
       Date   : 2023-05-09 22:08 UTC (51 minutes ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
        
       | kasey_junk wrote:
       | It's important to remember that this was a specific policy
       | decision. Earl Butz[1] famously said to our farmers "Get big or
       | get out".
       | 
       | I don't have the background or inclination to prove it but my
       | conviction is the death of the small town, and the ancillary
       | costs like the meth and opioid epidemics can be traced directly
       | to the "fence row to fence row" approach he pushed forward and
       | still exists today.
        
         | nickt wrote:
         | [1] Earl Butz - Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents
         | Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (1971 - 1976)
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz
        
         | toomuchtodo wrote:
         | How much farming do you need if you cut out biofuels and some
         | feed corn for industrial scale meat production? Lots of poor ag
         | policy decisions over the last century, but also I think a a
         | bit of make work in certain circumstances.
         | 
         | When speaking to opponents of utility scale solar on vast
         | tracts of farmland, you see this when they're upset about the
         | land no longer being used to farm, but the farmer can make more
         | from solar or wind than farming. Lots of emotion from tradition
         | and history to make peace with.
        
       | m463 wrote:
       | This is sort of sad, because - 350 years!
       | 
       | I think the other side of the coin is the places stagnation and
       | outright decay have set in, like many inner cities or rustbelt
       | regions that have not thrived. The opposite would be places like
       | tokyo where everything is turned over rapidly and the new is
       | ousted to be almost immediately replaced by the newer and newest.
        
         | thelastparadise wrote:
         | It's interesting to see that the same thing has been happening
         | on the other side of the Atlantic. I grew up in a farming
         | community in County Clare, Ireland (~1980 - 1999) and many
         | farms there have been abandoned due to the low returns from
         | agriculture.
        
         | samstave wrote:
         | Thanks for introducing me to that concept, enjoyed that.
         | 
         | We need a new New Deal w/ UBI and just invest in ourselves.
        
         | bredren wrote:
         | * * *
        
       | dauertewigkeit wrote:
       | From an economic standpoint, there is no sense in small scale
       | farming.
       | 
       | From a personal standpoint, the sensible thing to do is to scale
       | it down to subsistence gardening for yourself and your family.
       | That is what my family does. I remember, when I was still young,
       | they still used to sell some produce. Nowadays it is entirely
       | consumed by the family or gifted out. The benefit of this, is
       | that you are free from economic demand. You grow whatever you
       | please, because you want to have it at the dinner table.
        
       | zwieback wrote:
       | It's hard to support the idea of inefficient farming just out of
       | pure nostalgia but I think there's something else lost when these
       | small family farms die out. I imagine large commercial farms
       | aren't going to experiment as much or adapt to changing
       | conditions.
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-09 23:00 UTC)