this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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Science Memes

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[โ€“] Hegar@fedia.io 166 points 1 week ago (10 children)

Actual farmers are usually held hostage by the agro-giants who buy their product. In most markets there's a Monoposony - like a monopoly but a single buyer who can set prices and terms, rather than a single seller.

Industry behavior is driven by these companies who have all the power. They leave farmers with all of the risk and take all the profit for themselves.

[โ€“] tibi@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

Also, agriculture is awful... You can't make a living unless you have a lot of product to sell. You can't have a lot of product to sell unless you mechanize. The equipment is prohibitively expensive, so it's only worth doing it if you have a lot of land. And even then, to get decent yields, you need to sow at a specific time, harvest at a specific time, use expensive fertilizers, use expensive machines that can reduce wasting seed or fertilizer.

Even worse, you are at the mercy of wheather. Which, lately, has been shit. And everyone is trying to fuck you, from assholes controlling the markets, the assholes who make and fix the equipment (like John Deere), the asshole neighbor who let their animals escape, and mother nature with pests, diseases, and bad weather.

Every mistake can be costly. Broken equipment is expensive to repair. You might need to build expensive silos to store your product and sell it when the market is more favorable. Expensive because they have to keep things dry and free of pests, mice and rats love cereals. Harvesting when the cereals are too wet is bad, because it can rot and grow into plants, and drying is expensive (but you might be forced to do it because the weather is bad and you want to avoid a complete loss).

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