Every day I find a brand-new little horror that's been happening in US agriculture. After a lifetime of collecting ag horrors. ok throw it on the video essay pile with the other 200 that are waiting I guess
Anyway here's today's fresh horror! I think you will like it!
The US is becoming a net importer of food.
Which is wild, because the US has probably the most high-quality farmland per person of any country on the planet. WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE FOLKS???
And why?
Most people who are talking about this blame it on either trade policy, "too many regulations," or both. US farms & food companies just can't compete, you see. Therefore we must have trade barriers to food imports and drop labor & environmental protections.
The thing is... none of that is true.
I'm a logistics consultant for farms & food facilities. And I'm telling you making food is VERY profitable! Already!
So what's the real problem?
People who have the land & capital to make food would rather be real estate developers.
That's it. That's the whole problem.
"So development must be more profitable than food & farming, right?"
Not necessarily! Well run farms should make 5-10% annual profit when you average out good & bad years. That can be less than real estate (10-15%). But it's a hedge against recession in a way that building homes isn't.
5-10% avg annual return for farms isn't a hard & fast rule either.
Here's someone complaining on how poor lil Great Plains wheat farms, notoriously spotty on profit, "only" made 11.8% avg annual returns for 10 years.
That's competitive with housing development! Why are we complaining?
So the problem with farms & food isn't profit.
It's that you gotta work. Every year you have to just keep running that farm or food handling facility.
And to run a farm or food facility at profit, you have to know what you're doing.
Farms & food is a real job! That's the problem!
Meanwhile putting in the work every day & knowing wtf you're doing, those aren't as much of a barrier in real estate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway, I'm thinking a lot about how foodies spent the last 30 years lecturing poor people on "making wise choices with their food dollars."
They should have been counseling landowners on making wise choices with their property.
And I want to be clear, this problem doesn't have to be permanent.
We still have PLENTY of farmland, knowledgeable people, & capital to grow a lot of the things that we import right now. And yes! We can do it competitively!
The real question "Can we be bothered?"
I proudly pay my Washtenaw county taxes that go towards paying farmers to keep their farmlands as farmlands.
@MCDuncanLab Soooooo the thing about those programs is they sound nice, but they actually make this problem worse.
In a functional food system, farmland near cities grows perishable, high-$/A things like fruits & veggies. But those are lots of work! So US farmers avoid them!
Conservation free farmland from the burden of having to make a profit. So its owners usually keep growing cheap commodity crops instead of food. So we have to import even more fruit & veg. It just makes this problem worse!
Is that true? It's a one-time payment to the farmer to prevent them or whoever they sell to from selling to a developer. Does the one-time windfall discourage later profit farming? I'm not an economist or a social scientist, so I don't know the answer to that.
In our area, which is just outside of the Detroit metro area, the farmland just gets converted into suburban sprawl that is inaccessible by public transit, so for that reason alone, I think it's a useful investment.
@MCDuncanLab Yes it's true, that's why I said it? The post above explains why conservation easements don't work as intended. And yes, I mean the type you're describing.
Have also run into farmers who got a conservation easement, but they'd never built a viable business on their land, so they still had to sell it even after getting the easement. The only buyers wound up being a hedge fund.
So all that conservation easement did was make large-scale farming even more lucrative for hedge funds. 
I'm listening. Tell me what I can do to help improve things in Washtenaw county-or any other county.
How do we work with farmers so they will grow more profitable foods and not take the easy out by selling to the Ridge Run etc developers or big ag?
@sarahtaber Huh. I’ve only worked in dairy, and the numbers I know said dairy really ISN’T profitable on a commodity level (when we stopped shipping to DFA, we were netting 50¢/hundredweight which was considered an above average profit for the industry and… for that to be real profit, you need a LOT of hundredweights).
I’d assumed it was the same for crop/veg/meat but sounds like I should adjust my assumptions.
(The farming is too much work part, less of a surprise : P)
@katfeete Yes dairy is absolutely not profitable as a commodity.
That's why we need more value-added processing capacity. The US hasn't really invested in that in the way we need to, at the farm or co-op level. That's... the problem I'm describing in this thread
@sarahtaber 
. I listen to Europeans talk about “our village dairy plant” and I have absolute SEIZURES of envy.
(Family farm does value added and we turn a very solid profit most years! It works! But… god, the systematic support is SO not there. Every time we have to dump milk because of a seasonal problem or a sales problem or, yanno, a pandemic, I think about those Europeans and have those seizures again.)
I think it also depends on whether a farmer is willing to take those risks, year over year.
An average farm is ~400 acres. 10% net profit on a 400 acre wheat crop is $10-$15k. Variety veg crops take more effort, and expertise. Assuming every year is great for an entire decade, that is about $100k+. Climate change is impacting this.
A 400 acre housing development, with a generous 3 plots per acre, will turn a net 10% profit of ~$4.65m. The cost of buying the land from the farmer is included as a cost before profits are calculated. So, the farmer may only make a one time percentage on nearly $50m, but the money is guaranteed, and can easily exceed profits 10 stellar years of crop growth by an order of magnitude (minimum). Climate change is increasing perceived housing demand (with almost no change in the housing models that create these issues).
The issue may have more to do with housing/urban development policy and taxation than farming policy, but if I were inheriting a farm today, I might seriously consider selling if a good offer was made. Unless I had a lock on specific crops that had a more dependable rate and/or higher returns for less effort.
My personal preference would be more varieties of farming, and denser home development coupled with urban re-use. But that has to come with changes in taxation and other policy shifts.
@sarahtaber you're supposed to say "nobody wants to really work anymore" about the poors, not the landed gentry.
@sarahtaber Is there a possibility for the emergence of large-scale, nonprofit, food producing collectives in this industry?
@sarahtaber Genuinely curious where you’ve seen this. I may not be in the right circles to encounter it, but this is news to me.
@b_cavello USDA publishes the data. Do a search there are several available documents, some detailed, others overviews. @sarahtaber
@RegGuy @b_cavello @sarahtaber fwiw, if you click/tap on the post, you see a direct line backwards from that post (and then any replies to the post below).
@b_cavello The cool thing about Mastodon is it piles all replies up at the bottom of the thread, so I have no idea what post this is in response to :_)
@sarahtaber Oh no! Sorry about that 
This was re: the “foodies telling poor people to make better choices” comment
@b_cavello Yeah that's ... like... Michael Pollan, Joel Salatin, Alice Waters, Wendell Berry's entire schtick. It's telling people "you have to eat better to save farms!" And US demographics being what they are, that boils down to lecturing poor people about how they eat.
Meanwhile it never occurred to any of these luminaries that farmers (who are a lot wealthier & higher income than the median American) might have any agency in how their own businesses perform
@sarahtaber A food card I get from my health insurance gives a monthly allowance for food, but only "healthy food". Puts me in a state of concern on if my choices as being healthy are actually healthy and thus paid for.
@sarahtaber That’s a comparable rate to my moderate-risk retirement portfolio.
We have a serious problem that goes all the way back to the mythology of “shall have dominion over the land….”.
I wish real estate were not a thing.
@sarahtaber Obviously European cities have different density histories, but but something that struck me when I went to Germany last year and got to go to France this year was seeing the amount of farms right outside of cities. I don’t know a whole lot about it, but seeing the sprawl on takeoff in the US by comparison is really something.
@b_cavello @sarahtaber i think it's a weird irony that old cities will often have formed where there is highly productive agriculture capable of supporting the city; and then in the subsequent centuries, expands so as to bury that productive agricultural land under wood, stone and concrete, as well as tainting it with various run-offs and the over-accumulation of waste and effluent.
@GeneralStrike @b_cavello @sarahtaber Yes, and naming the developments “Strawberry Fields”, “Green Valley”, “Paradise Ranch”…
@PFox @b_cavello @sarahtaber Well, that sounds like a distinctly American lack of taste - although we do have Chalk Farm in London...
Eternal expansion is required because the suburban land use pattern is economically insolvent. Economic activity is thinly spread out compared to mixed use..
The brief summary: housing development is a heavily subsidized, but 25 years later, maintenance costs kick in for the infrastructure. The tax base is insufficient. The Ponzi scheme can only be papered over with further development.
Strongtowns.org addresses this issue.
@sarahtaber Not in disagreement but something noteworthy about this:
Most of the YIMBYs out here much prefer making housing denser within existing city footprints rather than sprawling out.
That is, many folks you see demanding more housing online are wildly different from developers that want to turn farms into subdivisions. Good land use policies for urban and rural land potentially fit together really well.
@rf Yes I've been making this argument as well
@sarahtaber Does that profit require that the farmers rely on underpaid exploited migrant labor? Or can it work with ppl paid a living wage?
@sarahtaber I have my finger poised on the "Land value tax solves this" button I've installed at my desk.
I am standing by waiting for anyone to ask about truly community-controlled community land trusts as well.
Basically, suburban brawl, plus cash crops, like corn, soya or wheat?
I think also a good deal of cash crops are simply fodder foods. They go to supply livestock targeted for export.
Alfalfa is also a notorious crop for instance. It is extremely water, thirsty, and highly profitable.
@sarahtaber as a Canadian, I can blame the pre-Trump downward trend of your exports on lack of trust in US food as regulations in the US are undercut and reporting is reduced and its become more and more obvious that FDA folks are being paid off to look the other way as more food additives and pesticides are used.
Overall US sourced food products are becoming easily recognizable as lower quality and higher risk than pretty much any other countries import.