> if big ag subsidies were phased out, small local farms would have a better chance of being viable.
Maybe. The subsidies that we always hear about is a portion of insurance premiums paid by the government. Presumably if the government pulled out of the subsidy, the risk/reward of insurance would tilt towards not having it. Many farmers already forego having insurance even with the reduced price.
Which would mean nothing until something bad happens. But when something does happen, that means some big farms could collapse. But it would also mean small farms are just as likely to collapse right beside.
I expect you are ultimately right: That once the collapses occur, it would be hard to rebuild a large farm before it ends up collapsing once more, leaving farms unable to ever grow beyond being small again. But is that what you imagine for small farms?
Of course, that's all theoretical. In the real world, the government wouldn't let the food supply fall apart like that. If farms didn't have insurance, it would simply come in and bail them out when destructive events occur. It is a lot simpler, and no doubt cheaper (the subsidy is offered on the condition of being willing to give production data back in return), to implement a solution ahead of time rather than panicking later.
If you have a fertile abundant landscape covered in old growth forests and marshes, and then cut all the forests, put roads everywhere, and plough up the marshes for farming, the landscape then holds a lot less water and the weather becomes less stable, which can exacerbate natural fluctuations in rainfall and temperature making droughts more common and more severe.
This is effectively what happened to large parts of the middle east that were once fertile and lush. It's a trend all over the world really.
There are many ways humans can work the opposite direction to increase the ability of the land to stabilize the weather and increase hydrological robustness to mitigate droughts, e.g. regenerative agriculture or projects in asia and africa to green the desert, I don't know enough about them but it's a good idea and I hope it's executed well.
The idea that California is now "free of drought" is funny, it may be technically correct by the way the word drought is used, but it doesn't mean the underlying factors that contributed to the likelihood and severity of recent decades of drought have improved - it just means we got a lot of precipitation now, but another dry year and we'll be back in drought again.
If you have a fertile abundant landscape covered in old growth forests and marshes, and then cut all the forests, put roads everywhere, and plough up the marshes for farming, the landscape then holds a lot less water and the weather becomes less stable, which can exacerbate natural fluctuations in rainfall and temperature making droughts more common and more severe.
This is effectively what happened to large parts of the middle east that were once fertile and lush. It's a trend all over the world really.
There are many ways humans can work the opposite direction to increase the ability of the land to stabilize the weather and increase hydrological robustness to mitigate droughts, e.g. regenerative agriculture or projects in asia and africa to green the desert, I don't know enough about them but it's a good idea and I hope it's executed well.
All I'm saying is that people or no people, wet or dry, there is an actual calculation and a drought scale. The conversation seems to be wanting to place 'blame', but you can have droughts anywhere, under a lot of conditions (like people moved in) for lots of reasons.
I looked it up
Calculating drought involves comparing current conditions (precipitation, temperature, soil moisture, water levels) to historical norms using standardized indices like the Palmer Drought Index (PDSI) or the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), which measure water supply/demand imbalances over short or long periods to assign severity levels (e.g., D0 Abnormally Dry to D4 Exceptional Drought).
A common method uses indices that turn negative as drought intensifies, with thresholds indicating different drought stages, often combined with expert analysis for the official U.S. Drought Monitor.
Common Drought Indices
Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI):
Uses precipitation, temperature, and soil moisture.
Calculates water supply and demand.
Values: Below -0.5 indicates drought; below -2.0 is moderate.
Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI):
Focuses on precipitation deficits at various timescales (e.g., 1, 3, 6 months).
Classifies drought: e.g., -1.0 to -1.49 is Moderate, -2.0 or less is Extreme.
The OP and the farmer are people who coded in the past. There can be a big difference between someone who understands how computers and code work generally, and someone who doesn't.
I was a software engineer up till about 8 years ago. I still dabbled in scripts here and there for things I needed since then. LLMs have proved hugely useful for me to do a wide variety of things that wouldn't have been worth bothering with before. The biggest barrier that LLMs overcome for me is being able to quickly find and adapt to different tools, libraries, languages, etc. But it does help immensely to understand how software works to some degree for being able to approach the problem in the first place. I think the two factors multiply together.
I imagine if I want to I could get back into real software engineering much easier and faster than I could have a few years ago, because I still understand how things work fundamentally, I'm just out of date on what's changed in libraries and systems and languages in the last 8 years.
It's also useful for working with spreadsheets and databases.
Anyway I don't mean to shill for LLMs, I hate where this all is taking civilization in general but I'll still use it where it helps me accomplish things I do value.
Right, which is why it's so strange to suddenly see every other readme and blog post that gets shared on this site speaking with the same tone of voice. Dead Internet theory finally came here.
Partisan spite does cut both ways and should be seen as such and ignored on either side.
Regarding fat I think "eat real whole unprocessed food" is a simple way to cover it. These guideliness recommend using less added fat including avoiding deep frying, and if one must use fat to use a minimally processed (i.e. pressed or rendered) form like olive oil or coconut oil or butter or animal fat. Though they failed to mention the distinction between refined and unrefined olive oil - today much of it is refined i.e. highly processed.
Some of us do want to live near where our food comes from and eat it fresh. I haven't seen anyone advocating that pasteurization should be banned, just that raw milk should be un-banned.
Cellulose is one of the main constituant of plants and as a fiber, great for your gut:
> In human nutrition, cellulose is a non-digestible constituent of insoluble dietary fiber, acting as a hydrophilic bulking agent for feces and potentially aiding in defecation.
I'm dubious about the idea that the cellulose additive is no different than eating plants. The forms that are used in food are refined / modified, i.e. not the same thing that I eat when I eat plants. I know a few people who react very badly to this added cellulose but don't have issues eating plants.
I guess you could say this raises prices, but on the flip side, small farm prices could start to come down if they were more viable.
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