Mastodawn

Sarah Taber Dec 18, 2022

RT @[email protected]

@[email protected] @[email protected] We need to protect farmland from development, this may not be the best way. Lots of farmers are using the profit from selling their land as their retirement. The retention of farmland as farmland can take many different forms. None of them should penalize the retiring farmers.

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/BetsyGarrold/status/1604241411934748673

Betsy Garrold on Twitter

“@SarahTaber_bww @axman643 We need to protect farmland from development, this may not be the best way. Lots of farmers are using the profit from selling their land as their retirement. The retention of farmland as farmland can take many different forms. None of them should penalize the retiring farmers.”

Twitter

It surprises most people to find US farmers actually make more take-home income than most Americans! Because most of them have above-average-wage day jobs!

If we're all supposed to retire without selling off acreage, so can they!

Sarah Taber Dec 18, 2022

The farm sector has truly poisoned Americans' brains by convincing us all that they're poor.

I'm begging y'all please look at some statistics. Literally any data on US farmers' wealth and income before falling for the poor-lil-guy song & dance they do.

Sarah Taber Dec 18, 2022

Want to see some? Here you go!

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/farm-income-and-wealth-statistics/data-files-u-s-and-state-level-farm-income-and-wealth-statistics/

USDA ERS - Data Files: U.S. and State-Level Farm Income and Wealth Statistics

Forecasts and estimates of farm sector income with component accounts: for the United States, 1910-2022F; and for States, 1949-2021. Updated December 1, 2022.

Chris Dec 20, 2022

Feel like there's an archetype that's gotten completely lost in our shared pop cultural vocabulary, which TV Tropes used to call "Corrupt Hick" and now calls "Small Town Tyrant" (the rural patriarch who has an entire town/country under his thumb either personally or in tandem with a very small group of similar people). Thread -

V E R S A Y C E Dec 18, 2022

@sarahtaber There's not a single farmer where I grew up that either isn't the head of some giant agribusiness, or their "family farm" became a commercial farm decades ago. None of them struggle.

Sarah Taber Dec 18, 2022

@CreepPhone Yep! It's never people who actually grew up around farms who are surprised by this information LOL

V E R S A Y C E Dec 18, 2022

@sarahtaber The area I grew up is around the Salinas, California area. Tanimura and Antle is one of our biggest agribusinesses (a former "family farm"). They even got their name on the library of CSU Monterey Bay because they shoveled money at the university.

The Kitayama Brothers started a cut flower business in the 50's and it's a major cut flower grower near Watsonville (mostly Gerber Daisies). The Kitayama family still runs it but it's not a hardscrabble farm for them even with downsizing.

Sarah Taber Dec 18, 2022

@CreepPhone yeah for Japanese American farms that made it through WW2 incarceration, I'm like hell yeah get it tbh

V E R S A Y C E Dec 18, 2022

@sarahtaber The Japanese farms there all seem to be focused on landscape type plants more than commercial food growing and they tend to be modest businesses.

But I think anyone going into farming *now* has money and probably has some kind of high paying job to fund it all... you just can't start off as the American stereotype of a farmer these days.

Sarah Taber Dec 18, 2022

@CreepPhone Yep that's the point I'm making. At this point in US history farmers are wealthy because big farms take a lot of capital. And small farms are such a cursed proposition that you *have* to be wealthy to afford one.

V E R S A Y C E Dec 18, 2022

@sarahtaber This is why I have such a problem with most of those "homestead" and "small farm" YouTube channels, they make it seem like all you have to do is buy a plot of land and you'll be selling your organic vegetables in six months.

RVA Weather ❄️✅Dec 18, 2022

@sarahtaber always made me 🤦 trying to figure out how they could both be getting gov't subsidies yet also supposedly going bankrupt. Something's not adding up here, lol

Bribleck Dec 18, 2022

@sarahtaber aren’t there also a bunch of tax breaks etc geared towards farmers, on top of subsidies and loan programs

katfeete Dec 18, 2022

@sarahtaber As someone working on an actual family farm that we actually farm and that we all actually live off of (no “day jobs”)… yeah.

Farming — as in ACTUALLY PRODUCING FOOD FROM LAND — is hard to make pay, not least because of the many to whom the *farming* is an optional bit of extra income keeping farm costs high and food costs artificially low.

(And no, we don’t get subsidies. We tried in 2020 when we were desperate, but that money isn’t meant for FARMERS. 😂)

Sarah Taber Dec 18, 2022

@katfeete Yeah I think it'd really help the convo on food systems if we admitted that most US farmers are basically scabs. Happy to farm at or below cost of production for the tax breaks.

Saying it out loud is a great way to start a fistfight at any Farm Bureau meeting or other ag get-together LOL