> My family farm is small enough they alone cannot support a entire family upper-middle class lifestyle, but the land is still worth millions.
This makes no financial sense to me. I call this: "asset rich, but cash poor". It is like living in a house that you inherited worth "millions", but working a job that "alone cannot support a entire family upper-middle class lifestyle". Simple solution: Sell the house. Cash out and invest in the stock market or rental real estate. You should do the same. If what you say is really true, then call Dave Ramsey (or someone similar) and ask for their advice. They will say the same.
Small farmers are generally aware that this makes no financial sense. They're participating in a multigenerational family tradition. There are also typically relatives urging those still farming to sell the farm so they can get their share (which may not be that huge, when all is divvied up).
> Why tho do you feel the need to defend big agri businesses skirting employment law and pressuring wages downward by bringing in illegal people?
It is interesting that you immediately jumped to "illegal people". When I read it, I thought about the US H-2A via for temp farm hands. This page: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-d... ... says 385,000 visa holders in 2024. That is a lot!
Since you are based in Belgium, how many native-born Belgians are still performing low-skill manual labour on a farm? Probably very few. Most of them are probably from the poorest parts of EU or some kind of temp farm hand visa. Specifically: Fruits and vegetables require lots of low-skill manual labor for harvest and packing.
> At the same time gov requirements make it almost impossible to run an smaller independent farm
Call me cynical, but I am not nostalgic for the "smaller independent farm". If farms want to be smaller and independent in the 21st century, they need to distinguish themselves with product (usually: organic or "free range"), branding, and value add (example: create a cheese brand that only uses your special organic cow's milk). If they cannot or will not, then they will need to sell their business to the mega agg corps.
> It is interesting that you immediately jumped to "illegal people".
USDA estimated 42% of farm hands is doing illegal work few years ago. Other sources estimated to 50-60%. That is a fuckton and has an incredibly significant impact on wage pressures.
It was also brought up in the context of GOP policy "the party that hates them" which has focused heavily on illegals and caused quite the uproar. It's hard to not jump to it in that cotnext and also more than those "US H-2A via for temp farm hands" i believe.
>how many native-born Belgians are still performing low-skill manual labour on a farm?
It's mostly migrant work indeed same as in the meat industry I observed.
They proudly had giant old black and white wall covering pics of locals doing the work decades ago but now among more than a hundred there were maybe 2 belgians on the factory floor at any given moment.
That said here in belgium I suspect the amount of illegal work in agriculture is lower than in the US and places like Italy.
>Call me cynical, but I am not nostalgic for the "smaller independent farm". If farms want to be smaller and independent in the 21st century, they need to distinguish themselves with product (usually: organic or "free range"), branding, and value add (example: create a cheese brand that only uses your special organic cow's milk). If they cannot or will not, then they will need to sell their business to the mega agg corps.
Call me cynical as well but that doesn't help for the most part.
I follow some such farms that do exactly that.
2 examples from sweden I know jump trough hoops for those organic and "free range" labels.
Hoops that are made specifically for the massive operations. So the giant poultry halls get to add some square meters of semi outside space, pull in a big proportional subsidy and aquire the free range label whilst the guy trying to differentiate himself has to add elaborate construction to his chicken tractors for his free roaming chickens to follow the spirit of the law made for the massive operation.
I personally know and helped a peppers/tomatoes and respective seed operation. All heirloom, mostly organic and they too almost had to close their books because they suddenly needed seed passports and a load more paperwork and the legislators apparently hadn't considered that this was something that was also done by corporations that count with numbers smaller than 1mil. That's not me being hyperbolic. They straight up confirmed they hadn't thought it possible that someone might run an operation without boatloads of employees or an upstart.
Also small is relative in the context i described. Many of these were still big expensive operations making investments costing hundreds of thousands, operating a lot of land. Just run by a normal family rather than a big coporate structure.
Mind you the meat company i worked for was also a family operation but the family all drove Brabuses that cost more than my house and had spare money to invest in retirement homes, etc....Puts it a bit in perspective.
> If they cannot or will not, then they will need to sell their business to the mega agg corps.
I do not wish to live in a corporatocracy nor do i fancy a form of capitalism where healthy competition is impossible since nobody can enter or maintain in certain vital sectors.
> rich folk like the Treasury Secretary who maintain farms for ... financial benefits
This is incorrect. He divested. Google AI tells me:
> Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is an investor in North Dakota soybean farmland but has stated he has divested from his holdings to avoid conflicts of interest, addressing criticisms regarding his personal financial stake in agriculture.
>In truth, Bessent disclosed early in the Trump Administration that he owned several thousand acres of farm land in North Dakota through a limited liability partnership. He was supposed to divest those holdings 90 days after taking office, by April 28.
>In August, government ethics officials warned in a letter to the Senate Finance Committee that the secretary failed to comply with the rules and needed to sell the land. Bessent's Treasury ethics officials explained that the "assets are illiquid and not readily marketable."
>The August letter said Bessent "would be recused from particular matters affecting these assets." But that was just weeks before Bessent flew to Malaysia to meet with Chinese counterparts and hash out the framework of a deal that crucially included a commitment to buy American soybeans.
This is nonsense. The US has a 20B USD currency swap agreement with Argentina. Currency swaps aren't free money. It is basically a line of credit between central banks. When you use it, you pay interest on the borrowed money. You would be surprised how many of these exist with the Big Three (US/EU/JP) central banks with other, smaller central banks.
> In October 2025, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced U.S. financial support for Argentina, including a $20 billion currency swap line financed through the Treasury Department's Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF).
However, there is very little info about how and when Argentina used it. No tin foil hat here: I'm unsure if this lazy reporting, or lack of transparency (intentionally or accidental). Here is the best that I found: https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/economy/argentina-used-multi...
> Last Friday, Argentina fully repaid the US$2.5 billion it obtained from a US$20-billion swap line with the Trump administration
> “Our nation has been fully repaid while making tens of millions in USD profit for the American taxpayer,” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote in a Friday post on X.
Final point: It seems like everything I read about highly developed nations: All of them have massive gov't subsidies for agriculture which makes sense from a food security (+influence) perspective. Weirdly, it also seems like most people involved in farming are also fiscally conservative and probably vote right of center. Are there any countries where this isn't true? (I think of one -- NZ has little to no farming subsidies now.)
A currency swap absolutely isn't "basically a line of credit". Any swap is a credit agreement insofar as each party is committing to future possible liabilities, but a currency swap is a very standard instrument which is part of central banks' monetary policy toolkit and helps them in their mandate to ensure currency stability. Swaps can be extremely flexible so the terms differ wildly, but they're not generally a line of credit that can be drawn from, they're an agreement to pay or receive amounts based on future movements of some underlying rates.
So what is a currency swap. Well any swap is an agreement with at least two legs, a pay leg and a receive leg. The normal type of swap is a interest rate swap so say I agree to pay you every month 3% fixed interest on 10m USD and you agree to pay me some floating rate (say 3m usd libor + 100bps) interest on the same amount. So every month we do a calculation where if libor+100 is greater than 3 then I pay you otherwise you pay me. We might do this to hedge our interest rate exposure. Like say you're a bank and I'm a bank and most of my borrowers are fixed rate mortgages and most of my savings accounts pay floating rate interest. I want a hedge so the floating rate doesn't end up costing me too much.
A currency swap is like that but with different currencies. So say we change things so it's 10m USD on one side and 15m EUR on the other side and we agree to exchange principal amounts. So that sets an exchange rate of 1.5 as well as the interest rate thing from before. If interest rates or exchange rates now move, this provides a hedge. So the hedge now is not just against the rate changing but also against the currency moving adversely. Central banks use this to ensure the import/export vs domestic balance of their economy is appropriate given the levels of trade between nations and also as a hedge against adverse currency movements affecting both assets they hold (yes they hold bonds etc) and their outstanding debt (which for the Fed will include "Eurobonds" they have issued in other currencies than USD).
> Less than 5% of poultry processing facilities still use chlorine in rinses and sprays, according to the National Chicken Council, an industry group that surveyed its members. (Those that still do use a highly diluted solution at concentrations deemed safe.)
> Nowadays, the industry mostly uses organic acids to reduce cross contamination, primarily peracetic, or peroxyacetic acid, which is essentially a mixture of vinegar and hydrogen peroxide.
What do European chicken meat plants use to reduce bateria load?
> prevalence of GM crops
EU grows plenty of GM maize. More will come. Are Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) crops bad?
That’s really the whole point - EU food standards indicate that the need to use acids to prevent bacteria growth is the problem. The EU system is based on having higher sanitation requirements at all steps from feed to cage to plate.
My understanding was that the meat-packing process in the US involves a butchering method that results in more fecal matter contamination, posing the risk of salmonella, which necessitates the wash. Those bacteria occur naturally, so you can't avoid that without being careful with butchering, which is probably what the EU standards require. But I doubt the big meat conglomerates like Tyson will want any hit to productivity, and they would fight a change every step of the way.
Mechanically separated meat bluntly ruptures the digestive tract and smears the flesh with feces. So they soak the feces and flesh together in a chlorine or acid bath to sanitize it. It's disgusting.
Generally, I agree with your post. About "keep them out of the fridge": I thought this is mostly due to wash or not-wash the eggs before packing. I think washing removes a thin layer that makes the eggs last longer, but can be visually less appealing. Please correct me if you know better! Japan also vaccinates heavily for Salmonella, and they eat plenty of raw eggs in their cuisine.
> However my employer is a Dutch B.V. with headquarters in Germany, thus they avoid having to form a board with works council representatives as a German GmbH (or AG) of comparable size would require.
Damn, that's a pretty sleazy business practice. How do you feel about it? That would be a nice loophole to close.
It's not that easy if you want European integration and support the idea of "freedom of settlement" also for companies, which to me makes sense and it is known that some countries try to pull companies to register in their legislation with sometimes improper means. I would prefer to focus on Irish taxation, which extracts value produced elsewhere to Irish benefit.
Workers rights are being unified, but that's a long complex process, as work cultures vary a lot and most companies fear German-style code termination, while it's an uphill battle to weaken it in Germany, thus it remains in national law's responsibility.
And to be clear:
a) works council exists with all normal rights, only they don't have board seats, which can be quite powerful, especially in public companies where one might form alliances with independent share holders. In the case here it's a 100% subsidiary of an American corporation, so they get their will one way or the other, board members may only delay
b) I am somewhat priviligedge as I am no simply replicable conveyor belt worker, but somewhat specialized engineer
c) I'm currently on garden leave period after 18 years in the company (incl acquisitions) due to a reduction, where works council produced a quite nice exit for me, so the only time I needed it, it worked well. But then I am somewhat privileged over others, making it hard to generalize.
>c) I'm currently on garden leave period after 18 years in the company (incl acquisitions) due to a reduction, where works council produced a quite nice exit for me
Isn't this type of generosity the exact reason why German companies are making restructuring and moving jobs abroad where they don't have workers councils and such generous exit packages?
Like I'm sure it worked well for you now, but I'm wondering how sustainable this is for German companies going forward, in a more competitive business-cutthroat globalized world, that has less and less barriers for capital and trade.
It is complicated and has multiple dimensions. For example it also leads to workers not switching Job away from an employer as quickly.
It's also interesting how it plays together with social benefits: As it is hard to fire people, hire&fire isn't an approach, thus companies keep workers longer during a downturn, thus when they let go there is more budget for social security.
Also the effects of having works council representatives on the board might lead to decisions not tied to the quarterly results, but long-term stability.
This all of course makes it harder to do experiments, build up a business unit to see if an idea might work ...
As a worker it is quite good and the model worked quite well for large parts of the 20th century. With global competition (for many jobs exact location doesn't matter) it could be a factor which plays a role in being late with digital stuff.
Unfortunately your comment still doesn't address my concerns on how this model is supposed to be sustainable to work in the future given the new economic realities of Germany's faltering industry, and especially the existing intra-EU disparity between german labor and eastern European labor, let alone international labor.
You're reiterating the pros of why it's been good SO FAR, but you don't drive on the road by looking in the rearview mirror, if you get what I mean.
My take is that the german government will have to do another "agenda 2010" row of cuts to union and labor rights, if it wishes to keep jobs in the country and remain a competitive export economy, hell, even Switzerland has significantly less labor rights than Germany. Not saying that's a good thing, but it seems like that's one of the necessary evils if you want to have a growing economy, and not turn into Italy or France.
AFAIK that's what they offer to juniors straight out of university and usually even give a substantial pay rise after the first year. I don't know other places in Italy that can match that.
> For starters it appears to be impossible to even trade in foreign bonds with traditional brokerage accounts in the United States (hosted by E-trade, Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab, etc).
Try Interactive Brokers. They are US-based, but offer accounts in most other countries. (Insane list here: https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/accounts/open-account-...) I frequently recommend them here, so much so that I must look like a shill. I assure you that this is not a sponsored post! I have been a customer for 10+ years. I describe their service as institutional in breadth, but offered to retail customers. The number of international stocks markets, futures and options markets, and fixed income markets (all types of gov't and corporate bonds) is stunning. The numbers look similar to a Tier 1 investment bank, like Morgan Stanley, could offer their institutional clients. It is unmatched for non-institutional (retail) traders in my experience. It also has crazy low fees and is wildly transparent about them. To me, the only negative point is the website is a bit slow and feels about 5 years out of date, but that's not a deal breaker for me. I can trade all equities on the website, and the more complex things (like bonds or futures) I trade using their (I assume white-labeled) Java trading app that is cross-platform.
+1 for Interactive Brokers. You can migrate super easy by having them filing a full ATAC. I came from Charles Schwab, which I have to keep because my employer sends GSUs to either Schwab or Morgan Stanley.
Additionally, the UX is much better (IMHO) than Schwab, both on mobile and desktop.
I remember thinking similar when JetBrains finally released LLMs integrated into their IDEs. I still don't love their integrated LLMs (too many silly suggestions that are simply syntax errors), but they were intentionally slow to release... to wait for some of the hype to blow over.
For the desktop Mac, the base OS is essentially UNIX. It is much more secure by default than Microsoft Windows. For the mobile Mac (iOS), they are much preferred by large corporations when giving mobile phones to employees. Why? Security is much better than Android.
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