At the height of the pandemic, farmers were forced to dump millions of pounds of perfectly edible produce. Four years later, they still need help with their surpluses.

At the height of the pandemic, farmers were forced to dump millions of pounds of perfectly edible produce. Four years later, they still need help with their surpluses.

  • bluGill
    2•3 months ago

    Farmers don’t want waste, but you as the public want a lot of waste. When there is waste food that means when “something” happens there will still be enough food for you to eat.

    • @Flumpkin
      1•2 months ago

      Yeah in some fields like food production or medicine you want less efficiency and more surplus and reserves in times of crisis especially with climate or possible wars coming.

      I don’t really know much about all this but I’d think ideally we should have at least 50% of the needed calories for a year in reserve. Presumably there should also be incentives to leave fields fallow but be able to quickly start planting food crops if there is a crisis. And less intensive agriculture should also mean less intensive fossil fuel usage. Of course we also should drastically reduce meat consumption.

      Local efforts like FarmLink are awesome but maybe we should do more under something like the UN World Food Program. And you’d want food distribution to be run non-profit or more like a public utility. We are now in the time of AI where we should be able to create an objective semi-planned economy that optimizes quality, sustainability and fairness. Basically a piece of software that can plan globally in real time and offers farmers multiple options for contracts to grow stuff, or contracts to build food storage, and can manage or help to plan food distribution. You want less market volatility and some kind of monetary and food reserve to buffer fluctuations.

      We should also have a push for open source robotics in farming so you can build and repair and maintain your own farm robots. This doesn’t have to be so complicated compared to e.g. 3D printers. I’m not sure how if and how soon solar powered agri-bots can become truly useful and replace big and energy intensive farming equipment and reduce fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide use, but the sooner the better. I imagine patents and IP will severely hinder adaption too just like with 3D printers.

      Instead it seems farmers are being neglected by governments or bought out by big agricultural corporations. Or they are co-opted by Russian propaganda to destabilize democracy.