The key sentence being: English farmers aren’t alone — people are struggling to grow crops worldwide because of extreme weather.
Keep in mind, though, that farmers pretty much always complain. If harvest is bad, they want more subsidies or guaranteed prices, if harvest is good, they almost die because of all the regulations that keep them from earning even more.
To add to that, most farms are basically industrial enterprises, these days. People are sentimental about farming because they have a completely wrong idea of how modern farming works.
The modern system of Big Food makes it more or less impossible for any other type of farming operation to exist. There are about 2 million farms in the US with an average size around 500 acres. For the most part, they are money-losing enterprises run by suffering families from which one of a tiny handful of food conglomerates is attempting to wring every possible abusive penny, with a good deal of success. John Oliver did a show about it, and Joel Salatin has written quite a few excellent books about the tragicomic experience of trying to run a non-industrialized farming operation in the modern United States and what an inevitably difficult clusterfuck it is on several different levels.
And yet people cling to this romantic notion of the family farm.
I’ll only speak for myself. I don’t think anything “romantic” about the medium-scale farming operations that in the modern day grow most of the food; I think that a lot of them probably fuck over the actual farmworkers, and I don’t imagine them as a little 10-acre farm operated by a happy rosy-cheeked couple.
At the same time, I do think that the people who run those operations deserve justice and protection against the behemoths who actually keep all the money and ruin the food supply, and that we should change the system so that small farming operations can exist in the modern day without having to become industrialized whether they want to or not. The food has to come from somewhere.
I uhhh… Those are the kind I’ve seen. The kind I’ve literally lived on… I grew up around Mercer/Auglaize county in Ohio.
Those damn entitled farmers; what have they ever done for us
You know exactly that this is not what I wrote or implied.
So why do you think this crap brings anything to the table? Do you need this to feel alive?
What did you mean, then?
It’s two very different things, agribusiness and actual farmers. Agribusiness is the source of a lot of suffering in the world, and no small part of it gets heaped directly on the farmers who actually make the food which they monopolize and sell. I actually think a lot of your comment is extremely accurate when applied to agribusiness.
You didn’t say agribusiness, though, you said farmers. And you brought up a comparison of farmers’ complaints about failing harvests to agribusiness’s complaints about regulation or subsidies. I don’t think it’s sensible to minimize complaints about failing harvests and I don’t think the comparison you made between the two things was reasonable.
Does that seem fair? If I’ve misunderstood something then you can always clarify, but I reread it and my reaction is exactly the same the second time around. What did you mean; who are some examples of some of these farmers who always complain? When you talk about wanting guaranteed prices, for example, I instantly think of people wanting to be able to paid a sustainable rate for the food they grow, instead of a barely-subsistence rate with the conglomerate that buys their produce keeping 110% of the profit and exposing them to the full brunt of the marketplace risk. Seems pretty reasonable to me. No?
