# first.items[].content
17/🧵

<💬>
three types of people whose livelihoods could be most vulnerable: farmers who grow soy and corn for animal feed, contract farmers who grow pork or poultry for Big Meat, and meatpacking plant workers.
</💬>

I mentioned farmers above. The feed growers angle is nonsense. The authors there from BI are simply focusing on "business as usual"; like I said, they want change without change, so that means keeping the small players doing the same thing so that the big players are unaffected.

Due to the monopolistic tendencies of the big players, small farmers have little choice, and that is a problem that can be fixed by helping them go bankrupt cleanly or upgrading and getting out of debt. Both feed crop farmers and "contract animal farmers" are contract farmers in this sense, as they tend to limited list of clients to sell to. Some of them have pointed out that this is similar to the plantation model, and this misses that point that it's exactly the same model! And it's way more common. The plantation model is the foundational model for capitalist agriculture. It's even older than capitalism, the Romans called it Latifundium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latifund ium . What they actually want to imply is that the the farmers should be the bosses and it's weird that they're the serfs, since the promises for *entrepreneurship* is to be your own boss. And, yes, it's bad. They are also small business owners who compete with other small business owners instead of creating cooperatives, and they're acting as pro-business agents usually (deregulation, no taxes on capital and so on). That's a problem. A class problem.

<💬>
Their position is not unlike what coal miners and oil workers faced a couple of decades ago before natural gas, wind energy, and solar power took over a big chunk of the market. In more recent years, some have trained to become wind farm technicians or to install solar panels, while others have been unable to find work in the renewable energy sector.
</💬>

Sure. Eventually we'll have to talk about people having a some kind of foundation of welfare, because that's where this is headed, especially with more automation - which is also coming to agriculture (Ag^4.0). Otherwise, all this talk of precious jobs implies a certain proposition: "work or die". Thus, in Europe, with its conservative capitalist culture, the idea of "welfare" tends to be popular only in terms of creating jobs, often bullshit jobs. Jobs as welfare.

<💬>
Meatpacking workers (although probably fewer of them) can pack plant-based burgers or nuggets.
</💬>

And there would be way less slashing and bleeding.

<💬>
If companies like Impossible and Rebellyous continue to scale up their production and steal market share from Big Meat, that could mean a steady hold in demand for soy and wheat, which would be good news for growers.
</💬>

The authors are thinking of it as a "sink" for grains. I don't think that it will work to just swap things as animal farming consumes a lot more and thus wastes a lot more. Again, overall quantity can be reduced, but that requires increasing standards and regulations across the board to get everyone to do it. Food crops already have better standards, so there's room, but this obsession with maximizing quantity needs to end.

<💬>
Jorgensen has seen a few nimble farmers find new business opportunities, and he thinks their success could encourage other farmers to follow in their footsteps. “The early adopters in any new field are always the ones who are the most flexible,” he said.
</💬>

Flexible means a more generic machinery base and not being overleveraged. This is perhaps the main problem. A lot of anguish for farmers is from investing borrowed money into expensive equipment and means that promised to increase production ($$$). This is a bubble.

<💬>
Agricultural commodities are any crop that can be traded at a financial marketplace, like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, for example. Because the farmer has no say in the price, Tucker had been captive to the price set by the market.
</💬>

One of the most disturbing things on the planet is food is a trade commodity. As in... there are investors that make more money the more the prices of grains go up. This became a problem in 2008, if anyone remembers. I remember. Investors were causing rising famine conditions just by speculating and driving up the prices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_world_food_price_crisis

Food is perhaps something that needs to be decommodified first. That would be a very big change, but also worthy and a good adaptation for the chaos that climate change will be bringing.

Here's some reading on food decommodification:

https://www. resilience.org/stories/2020-01-24/to-feed-or-to-profit-to-eat-or-to-consume/

https://one-handed-economist.com/?p=37 81

https://www. nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00933-5

Remember, going local isn't going to work out. It's not just because most people's local is insufficient, but also because there are a lot of people. Anyone promoting "locavore" better be promoting immigration too, at the very least, otherwise this quest for localism or autarky implies that anyone who doesn't live next to land that can be used for food *dies*. If you've been reading international news in recent years, you may have noticed the effect of cessation of grain exports from Ukraine (for example) on various countries that were relying on food aid and cheap grain imports. It turns out that the distance from "local is better" to "cleanse the land of those other people" is very short (ecofascism).

It's very simple: either people go to the food, or the food comes to people. Anyone who stands in between that is promoting famine.

OK, back to the article...

<💬>
Tucker says he’ll get some curious farming neighbors asking what he’s growing. “I tell him it’s chickpeas, and I make more money off that deal with chickpeas than I do anything else, and then, you know, that kind of piques their interest,” he told me.
</💬>

Good. The issue is with the overleveraged farmers. They're trapped by debt. I'm sure you, whoever is reading, have some idea of what that's like. So we need debt relief, debt forgiveness, and the bank and their investors to eat it. There's an economist who speaks clearly on this: https://jacobin.com/2021/12/michael-hu dson-interview-debt-forgiveness-cancellation-ancient-rome-christianity (in general)

I'm not really a fan of only reforms, and this kind of thing would be reformist, but it would be a decent reform.

It is important to make sure that mistakes don't repeat, and that needs to be part of the debt forgiveness plan. As an analogy, if someone decides to build a mansion in a wetland next to the rising oceans, and they're in debt for it and screwed by storms and flooding, there needs to be a way to both fix that and prevent it from repeating. And I don't mean insurance, that's going to fail in the face of the kind of risks that are increasing.

<💬>
There’s also the question of whether these farmers will want to grow for the plant-based industry at all. Farmers are an older population
</💬>

Which is why the animal industry subsidies need to end. If they don't want to grow what's necessary, fine, keep the land fallow. If not, they'll sell or their kids will.

The attitude of the writers stinks of undemocratic will, like when only land owners are allowed to vote.

<💬>
Plus, farmers face geographical constraints. While field peas do grow in parts of the Midwest, they’re grown in very small amounts as compared to soy and corn. Water-intensive crops like almonds, the most popular base for plant-based milk, only grow in much warmer climates like Southern California and Florida.
</💬>

See? This is what I mean by "keeping things the same". These clowns can't imagine it and don't want anyone else to try to imagine it. Gotta keep that Capitalist Realism going.

<💬>
Most contract farmers don’t have hundreds or thousands of acres of land like animal feed farmers, but instead own large, climate-controlled steel barns in which they raise their chickens or pigs. This severely limits what they can pivot to growing instead.
</💬>

I mentioned them previously. They're most likely fucked. These are the #CAFO operators. They were always going to be fucked, the whole thing is unsustainable. The amount of sympathy I can muster for them is coalesced into the requirement for a basic welfare floor. Let them fail and learn to do something else, but they don't need to die of poverty.

<💬>
One option could be to continue to raise animals but in higher-welfare conditions — sourcing “heritage” breed animals that weren’t bred to grow so big and fast, and retrofitting barns to give them sunlight, more space, and access to the outdoors.
</💬>

Of course, this is the "free range" grift. This is who they are. CAFO-light. It doesn't matter anyway, it's a grift. The whole point of CAFO is the efficiency is greater than that of the extensive pre-industrial animal raising method revolving around herding and open fields. The only good thing the animal welfarists are doing is pushing the standards enough to cause a few of these contractors to fold.

<💬>
Another is to turn away from animals altogether. Some growers have moved from meat, real and imitation, and started growing things like mushrooms, hydroponic microgreens, and industrial hemp plants.
</💬>

It's certainly a learning curve in such cases. "industrial hemp" heh.

...continued 18...

# first.items[].contentMap.en
17/🧵

<💬>
three types of people whose livelihoods could be most vulnerable: farmers who grow soy and corn for animal feed, contract farmers who grow pork or poultry for Big Meat, and meatpacking plant workers.
</💬>

I mentioned farmers above. The feed growers angle is nonsense. The authors there from BI are simply focusing on "business as usual"; like I said, they want change without change, so that means keeping the small players doing the same thing so that the big players are unaffected.

Due to the monopolistic tendencies of the big players, small farmers have little choice, and that is a problem that can be fixed by helping them go bankrupt cleanly or upgrading and getting out of debt. Both feed crop farmers and "contract animal farmers" are contract farmers in this sense, as they tend to limited list of clients to sell to. Some of them have pointed out that this is similar to the plantation model, and this misses that point that it's exactly the same model! And it's way more common. The plantation model is the foundational model for capitalist agriculture. It's even older than capitalism, the Romans called it Latifundium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latifund ium . What they actually want to imply is that the the farmers should be the bosses and it's weird that they're the serfs, since the promises for *entrepreneurship* is to be your own boss. And, yes, it's bad. They are also small business owners who compete with other small business owners instead of creating cooperatives, and they're acting as pro-business agents usually (deregulation, no taxes on capital and so on). That's a problem. A class problem.

<💬>
Their position is not unlike what coal miners and oil workers faced a couple of decades ago before natural gas, wind energy, and solar power took over a big chunk of the market. In more recent years, some have trained to become wind farm technicians or to install solar panels, while others have been unable to find work in the renewable energy sector.
</💬>

Sure. Eventually we'll have to talk about people having a some kind of foundation of welfare, because that's where this is headed, especially with more automation - which is also coming to agriculture (Ag^4.0). Otherwise, all this talk of precious jobs implies a certain proposition: "work or die". Thus, in Europe, with its conservative capitalist culture, the idea of "welfare" tends to be popular only in terms of creating jobs, often bullshit jobs. Jobs as welfare.

<💬>
Meatpacking workers (although probably fewer of them) can pack plant-based burgers or nuggets.
</💬>

And there would be way less slashing and bleeding.

<💬>
If companies like Impossible and Rebellyous continue to scale up their production and steal market share from Big Meat, that could mean a steady hold in demand for soy and wheat, which would be good news for growers.
</💬>

The authors are thinking of it as a "sink" for grains. I don't think that it will work to just swap things as animal farming consumes a lot more and thus wastes a lot more. Again, overall quantity can be reduced, but that requires increasing standards and regulations across the board to get everyone to do it. Food crops already have better standards, so there's room, but this obsession with maximizing quantity needs to end.

<💬>
Jorgensen has seen a few nimble farmers find new business opportunities, and he thinks their success could encourage other farmers to follow in their footsteps. “The early adopters in any new field are always the ones who are the most flexible,” he said.
</💬>

Flexible means a more generic machinery base and not being overleveraged. This is perhaps the main problem. A lot of anguish for farmers is from investing borrowed money into expensive equipment and means that promised to increase production ($$$). This is a bubble.

<💬>
Agricultural commodities are any crop that can be traded at a financial marketplace, like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, for example. Because the farmer has no say in the price, Tucker had been captive to the price set by the market.
</💬>

One of the most disturbing things on the planet is food is a trade commodity. As in... there are investors that make more money the more the prices of grains go up. This became a problem in 2008, if anyone remembers. I remember. Investors were causing rising famine conditions just by speculating and driving up the prices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_world_food_price_crisis

Food is perhaps something that needs to be decommodified first. That would be a very big change, but also worthy and a good adaptation for the chaos that climate change will be bringing.

Here's some reading on food decommodification:

https://www. resilience.org/stories/2020-01-24/to-feed-or-to-profit-to-eat-or-to-consume/

https://one-handed-economist.com/?p=37 81

https://www. nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00933-5

Remember, going local isn't going to work out. It's not just because most people's local is insufficient, but also because there are a lot of people. Anyone promoting "locavore" better be promoting immigration too, at the very least, otherwise this quest for localism or autarky implies that anyone who doesn't live next to land that can be used for food *dies*. If you've been reading international news in recent years, you may have noticed the effect of cessation of grain exports from Ukraine (for example) on various countries that were relying on food aid and cheap grain imports. It turns out that the distance from "local is better" to "cleanse the land of those other people" is very short (ecofascism).

It's very simple: either people go to the food, or the food comes to people. Anyone who stands in between that is promoting famine.

OK, back to the article...

<💬>
Tucker says he’ll get some curious farming neighbors asking what he’s growing. “I tell him it’s chickpeas, and I make more money off that deal with chickpeas than I do anything else, and then, you know, that kind of piques their interest,” he told me.
</💬>

Good. The issue is with the overleveraged farmers. They're trapped by debt. I'm sure you, whoever is reading, have some idea of what that's like. So we need debt relief, debt forgiveness, and the bank and their investors to eat it. There's an economist who speaks clearly on this: https://jacobin.com/2021/12/michael-hu dson-interview-debt-forgiveness-cancellation-ancient-rome-christianity (in general)

I'm not really a fan of only reforms, and this kind of thing would be reformist, but it would be a decent reform.

It is important to make sure that mistakes don't repeat, and that needs to be part of the debt forgiveness plan. As an analogy, if someone decides to build a mansion in a wetland next to the rising oceans, and they're in debt for it and screwed by storms and flooding, there needs to be a way to both fix that and prevent it from repeating. And I don't mean insurance, that's going to fail in the face of the kind of risks that are increasing.

<💬>
There’s also the question of whether these farmers will want to grow for the plant-based industry at all. Farmers are an older population
</💬>

Which is why the animal industry subsidies need to end. If they don't want to grow what's necessary, fine, keep the land fallow. If not, they'll sell or their kids will.

The attitude of the writers stinks of undemocratic will, like when only land owners are allowed to vote.

<💬>
Plus, farmers face geographical constraints. While field peas do grow in parts of the Midwest, they’re grown in very small amounts as compared to soy and corn. Water-intensive crops like almonds, the most popular base for plant-based milk, only grow in much warmer climates like Southern California and Florida.
</💬>

See? This is what I mean by "keeping things the same". These clowns can't imagine it and don't want anyone else to try to imagine it. Gotta keep that Capitalist Realism going.

<💬>
Most contract farmers don’t have hundreds or thousands of acres of land like animal feed farmers, but instead own large, climate-controlled steel barns in which they raise their chickens or pigs. This severely limits what they can pivot to growing instead.
</💬>

I mentioned them previously. They're most likely fucked. These are the #CAFO operators. They were always going to be fucked, the whole thing is unsustainable. The amount of sympathy I can muster for them is coalesced into the requirement for a basic welfare floor. Let them fail and learn to do something else, but they don't need to die of poverty.

<💬>
One option could be to continue to raise animals but in higher-welfare conditions — sourcing “heritage” breed animals that weren’t bred to grow so big and fast, and retrofitting barns to give them sunlight, more space, and access to the outdoors.
</💬>

Of course, this is the "free range" grift. This is who they are. CAFO-light. It doesn't matter anyway, it's a grift. The whole point of CAFO is the efficiency is greater than that of the extensive pre-industrial animal raising method revolving around herding and open fields. The only good thing the animal welfarists are doing is pushing the standards enough to cause a few of these contractors to fold.

<💬>
Another is to turn away from animals altogether. Some growers have moved from meat, real and imitation, and started growing things like mushrooms, hydroponic microgreens, and industrial hemp plants.
</💬>

It's certainly a learning curve in such cases. "industrial hemp" heh.

...continued 18...