• NeuronautML@lemmy.ml
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    24 hours ago

    I see farmers’ protests almost every quarter about how they are struggling, how bad big farm competition is, how the equipment they need is prohibitively expensive and vendor locked, how any seeds that they need to be competitive are patented and exorbitant in costs. I didn’t know farming was so easy.

    Someone tell the farmers to watch youtube videos and clear out their closets. They clearly are doing something wrong.

    • finderscult@lemmy.ml
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      3 hours ago

      You can always feed yourself and your family if you’re a farmer, that’s not true if you’re a podcaster. Also most the farmers that are complaining about those things just want more government subsidies

    • SpruceBringsteen@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      You’re missing my point.

      There’s zero income if you’re an unknown podcaster and there’s zero demand for it.

      Almost anyone can grow something and there’s always demand for fresh produce.

      I could work equally hard at either task and one would actually net returns for my work. This isn’t saying farming is easy.

      • NeuronautML@lemmy.ml
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        3 hours ago

        Yeah, but you said you could have a podcast, but it wouldn’t earn you a living. The same way you could theoretically grow produce and it wouldn’t earn you a living either.

        With enough work you could make returns on a podcast too. Both podcasting and farming require lots of work to grow a network, to acquire equipment and to find customers and partners. In both, you require time to be trustworthy. Both of those things are part of the same entrepreneurial process.

        I may concede that perhaps you can get a couple of bucks faster with a homegrown garden, but it is not as easy as you’re saying. Your grocery store/restaurant will not buy random veggies from Joe nobody when they have suppliers already. They don’t even know how safe is the food you’re growing. You’d have to find specialized farmer’s markets and you’d have to pay for a stall there, as well as all the grow lights and hydroponics setup to grow the produce. That’s residual money, if money at all.

        The people you see on youtube are probably making more money with youtube selling education than they are with their micro arugulas or whatever. Or maybe they’re lucky to have friends with restaurants or stores already who are willing to take the risk on some random person with no store and no licenses selling food on the side. And it’s a big risk, because some farms have sent people to the hospital by growing greens next to livestock and ended up contaminating everything with E. Coli. They probably won’t boil greens, so you can guess why it’s not a small risk to take. Sure, you can say, but I’m very clean, i have no livestock and my fertilizer is reputable, but without licenses, there is no proof and it’s not like they are going to send someone to inspect your farm.

        And they’re not even gonna hear you out unless you’re coming with a price lower than the supplier that’s growing an entire greenhouse full of microgreens for them. The whole microgreens/mushrooms fad was a gap between the demand appearing and big corpos responding to it with their massive greenhouses. Every year that goes by, it’s gonna be harder and harder to break into that market, let alone survive in it. Farming is a very scale up sensitive industry and small players have an incredibly rough time in it over time.