Sarah Taber, who has the YouTube channel Farm to Taber, has a really good video discussing a NYT story about some farmers who had to close their farm. Here are the key points:
The farmers were wealthy (they had a couple of million dollars worth of land).
Their farm was essentially a hobby project.
They were trying to make a living selling a bulk commodity (milk) even though they didn’t have the scale to make a profit.
The farm closed after the owners had to work the farm themselves (probably because of a shortage of immigrant labor).
They were Trump supporters.
Even though the New York Times doesn’t understand it, the “small family farm” is essentially dead. My wife’s family were farmer/ranchers, and my dad grew up on a farm — they were both “small family farmers”. Today, those farms are rented to a grandson (in my wife’s case) and mostly sold to a neighbor (in my dad’s case) because there’s no way to run a profitable farming operation without having a couple of million dollars of equipment and millions of dollars of land in order to have some economy of scale.
The need for scale means that today’s farmers are relatively well-off and, like most other well-off small town businesspeople, they’re going to vote Republican. There’s really no way to convince them to vote for Democrats because they generally believe that Republicans have their best interests in mind, and they aren’t wrong. Trump might have screwed them in the last round of tariffs, but overall their interests are best served by the rich people’s party, the Republicans.
This brings us to Taber’s really smart insights. We can all agree that our food supply is incredibly important to the country. So, why are we trusting it to a group of people who are dumb enough to vote for Trump? Their judgment is too flawed to put that kind of trust in them. And, if their judgment is so poor, why not let them fail so that others can take over their land and maybe do a better job farming it? She thinks that the “sky is falling” farm rhetoric is just a PR campaign to shake money out of city dwellers who are constantly told they’re too ignorant to make a judgment about agriculture. (Where I grew up, it was a constant joke about that farmers are always crying, to the point that my dad would say that he knew a baby he delivered was going to be a farmer because it cried really loudly after it was delivered.)
I think her point can be generalized. Our media and other establishment institutions are inclined to protect the incumbent members of the status quo. Yet these people are often second or third generation people who make bad decisions. Our society is ready, willing and able to penalize poor people who have made bad decisions, but millionaires who screw up expect sympathy. This needs to end.
Or, as Taber says, “We need to be able to look a millionaire dead in the eyes, watch him be sad, and say ‘that’s your problem, not mine.’”
The whole video is very worth watching.
