I didn't intend to reply to you specifically and gave no thought whatsoever about if you downvoted me or not - I was trying to address the folks who didn't like my comment, whoever they may be.
It didn't even bother me that it was downvoted to -3 before I added the follow-up. The comment was brief and quite negative, which I knew HN would find a distasteful ad hominem without more supporting info, but I was busy writing a lot of other comments at the time.
I assume Dr. Taber is knowledgeable about vegetable and fruit farming but I stand by my original accusation that she is aggressively, unfairly negative towards dairy farming, and I would gladly ride both comments past -3,000 karma to let people know about my distaste for it.
I think this is a really interesting distinction, to be honest. I am definitely a big fan of her commentary but know nothing about agriculture. I know she is very strident about communicating to people what "family farming" actually means and stuff. But I totally get there must be a ton of nuance that people in the biz can see that i can't.
I would really be interested, sincerely interested, in seeing some examples of what you mean
It's not like I keep a dossier on her that I can hand over, but from the time that I followed her on Twitter, I recall several things that ticked me off:
* She mentioned several times this one anecdote where she worked with a produce farm where a neighboring dairy/livestock farm had bits of dried manure that wound up blowing over onto the produce farm's product. She repeatedly uses this one pathological case to color all livestock farming as dirty and irresponsible.
* She plays up the above case as a "turf war" between vegetable/fruit farmers and livestock farmers. Presumably the implication being that livestock farmers are to blame for all E. coli and other illness outbreaks from contaminated produce. A different comment in this very thread pointed out how ridiculous that is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18945036 This whole "turf war" angle is just a way to sound edgy to get more Twitter followers.
* She trotted out some anecdote about when she lived in a small Wisconsin farming town how dairy farmers would not only routinely track cow shit through the grocery store, but do so purposefully, loudly and proudly. In my opinion as someone who grew up on a dairy farm in a small farming town in Wisconsin, this is a bald-faced lie. Every farmer I grew up around wears separate clothes and specifically cleans up before "going into town." Even if it's to the farm hardware store or cooperative. Farmers want to be respected members of their community and not ostracized for being dirty, just like anyone else. Obviously I can't disprove a personal story, I never, ever saw something remotely like this play out in my whole life.
* She mixes in identity politics where it isn't warranted. She is dismissive of the dairy farming crisis in whole as well as in specific instances because it disproportionately affects white people (because most dairy farmers are white). I shouldn't have to mention my mom's tribal membership to make my family worthy of sympathy.
* Her unsympathetic advice to dairy farmers is to "diversify." Meaning plant different things. Problem is she mostly works with produce farms in areas like California, where that kind of advice doesn't map to Wisconsin, which has a very different growing environment. It's also completely ignorant of the inelasticity of farming in general - there is so much specialized equipment/assets both for cattle and crops tied up in CAPEX, you can't just go "whelp, this year I'm gonna do something totally new!" and snap your fingers and make your cattle and barn transmogrify into a pile of money, and buy all new specialized equipment. She's not wrong that there's a perhaps foolhardy race-to-the-bottom in competing on milk price alone, but blaming individuals for not completely reconfiguring their business, knowledge and identity into a farming niche she's more comfortable with, and not giving a proper nod to the massive industry-wide shift towards vertical integration is unreasonable and tinged with an edge of cruelty.
To boil it all down, she's everything I despise in modern Twitter personas. She's an elitist passing judgment on entire swathes of hardworking blue-collar people with a sneer. And she does it dressed up in robes of faux wonkish authority using her adjacent knowledge and niche experience in produce farming. The excessive wokeness is just a shit cherry on top.
Click on "Difference between costs and returns," select a commodity (e.g. Corn), then click on Northern Crescent. Now click through different crop types and notice how many you'd be underwater on. Crops are a volatile crapshoot like milk. Yes, you can "diversify" and plant more than one type, but you're still placing bets on which ones are going to go underwater and cost you money, and which are going to net you anything at all - you're still betting on combined gains and losses.
