Also I’m not sure about ownership, repots I found says that 94% of farmland is not owned but land-leased.

When talking about efficiency gains you scale with your cultivated area. If that land is owned or leased does not matter.

those technologies were not given free, yes some old soviet stuff left but investments have to been made.

I’m not talking about Soviet stuff. It’s the fact that the ability to invest in new technology is strongly correlated with farm size. For example a farm only needs one N sensor. A 4 hectare farm could never invest in one profitably but a 800 hectare farm can buy one and profit first year.

If there is area with better farmland in France, does French farmer from across the country protest or move to better place? German farmer thinks Ukraine farming more competitive - accept Ukraine into EU, move to Ukraine - profit. That’s what people in other industries do.

Farming must be one of the least mobile industries in the world. It’s very rare that farmers ever move and that’s because the most common entry into farming is inheriting a farm. Most would rather close down than move internationally. And if you just bankrupted your own farm you don’t really have the capital anyway to buy another farm.

France’s territory is 27% arable land (170000 km2). Sounds big enough to improve at scale.

Becoming as competitive as Ukraine requires one of three things. Lowering wages, increasing average farm size for efficiency gains or increasing subsidies. Lowering wages is not desirable and neither are increasing subsidies. Increasing average farm size could be an option but that one is very controversial to a lot of people, even non farmers who just happen to be fond of small scale farming. News headlines titled “small family farms that have been run for generations are forced to close en masse” would not look good.

However don’t get me wrong. I 100% would be very pro getting Ukraine to enter the EU. However the fact that the entry of Ukraine would be a challenge to existing agriculture in the EU is a real issue that has to be accounted for. It’s kind of like attaching the US Midwest cornbelt right at the EU land border and opening up free trade. Of course that would lead to a disruption in the market.

Cheaper labor means lower costs of production. But honestly the largest reason is that Ukraine has these enormous mega farms that stem from Soviet era collectivisation. These farms own several hundreds sometimes thousands of hectares of continuous farmland and often own 0 debt. Being of that size and almost more importantly, being that size debt free, brings a lot of benefits. Just to put it into perspective the average farm in Ukraine today is 649 hectares while in neighbouring EU Romania the average farm size is 4,4 hectares. Ukrainian farming has more in common with the type of farming in the US and Canadian great plains than the rest of Europe, especially eastern Europe.

Also Ukraine is covered in a certain soil type called chernozem which is one of the most fertile on the planet. This leads to large yields. And contrary to a lot of other poor countries around the world all of their farms are fully mechanized and use the latest technology, which is possible because of the large farm sizes mentioned earlier. The 649 hectare Ukraine farm can afford a totally different equipment than the 4,4 hectare Romania farm.

I actually doubt it would meaningfully reduce food prices for regular consumers. Ukraine mostly produces bulk grain. The price of bread wheat hovers around 20-25 eurocent per kilo. When you buy bread in the store the cost of the wheat is a miniscule part of the price. The real money in the food network is not in farming food but in processing it and running grocery stores selling it. Wheat can easily triple in value just by grinding it to flour and putting it in a paper bag. The value of barley goes up over 1000% when brewed into beer. If we let Ukraine in maybe we can reduce the price of some grains and bulk sunflower seed by a couple eurocents which will make pretty much no difference at all for the consumer but it will reduce the profits of our EU grain farmers by double digit procentage points.

Can we counteract this with even more agricultural subsidies? Of course we can. But that’s a cost that has to be planned for. The alternative is letting the least profitable farmers to go bust, leading to only mega farms remaining. Which is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective. Worth noting is that in Ukraine there are almost only mega farms already because of the Soviet farm collectivisation heritage. That’s part of the reason they can produce grain so efficiently and cheaply, in combination with them having some of the most fertile soils on earth.

No, she’s not wrong about that. We have already seen that when the black Sea is blocked and Ukraine has been allowed to export grain via the land route into the EU it has depressed local grain prices in the eastern EU. Ukraine is one of the largest agricultural producers in the world and most of what they produce is not consumed domestically. Therefore the surplus of food the EU produces will increase in several categories. And when supply goes up by a lot but demand goes up by only a little, prices go down and the current EU farmers earn less. This would however be a good deal for Ukrainian farmers who get a new lucrative market to export to.

At least 20% of the reason I moved to the far north was to not have to deal with ticks. Life is bliss. Still no nude forests though. The mosquitoes are everywhere.

If his winter heating need is that large he may live in an area where solar does not produce that much electricity during winter. I myself live in an area that has 0 (yes zero) sunlight for one winter month because of the polar night and just 1-4 hours of very low intensity sunlight for the rest of the 5 month long winter. In summer when we have midnight sun, literally 24 hour sunlight, the electricity is almost free so whatever the solar panel produces then is near useless. Also you simply don’t use that much in that season. For me at least it’s not really a worthwhile investment.

I did go back to burning wood. Per watt of heat it’s roughly ⅓ of the price where I live and with the specific set up I have. However the largest drawback of wood is that it entails a lot of manual work. First I have to spend a dozen hours carrying wood into the basement during autumn. Then during winter I have to go down 2-3 times a day to feed the furnace. However to me it’s worth it. It’s a comfy ritual that saves 5-20 euros every single day during winter depending on what the electricity price is that day.

The Qing emperor’s didn’t have multiple wives. They had one wife who was the empress. The rest were mere concubines.

When making beer the hull is beneficial because if you use a hullless grain the mash becomes a big sloppy mass that doesn’t really drain well, like a super wet dough. The hull however breaks up this structure and makes the mash free draining meaning you can easily remove the liquids from the solids. Even beer like wheat beer is often still up to 50% barley because of this. Funnily enough the original mesopotamian beer was not strained at all. All the solids were still in there so it was chunky. They drank this beer with a straw.

Regarding how barley flour for bread was traditionally made. When you grind up whole barley the inner portion turns to flour while the hull tends to come out the other side pretty much intact because it’s quite tough. Therefore you can sift it through a sieve because while it is thin the hull takes up a lot of space in the other 2 dimensions. The house wives of old in barley dominant regions would do this near daily. While this works well it’s of course extra work compared to a hullless grain like wheat where the flour that goes out of the grain mill is ready to use straight from the get go. Of course nowadays we have industrial equipment that can dehull tonnes of barley per second.

Barley is the main staple grain of Tibet where it forms a large part of the local culture. The reasons for this are pretty much the same as for northern scandinavia. The fact that the Chinese eat mostly wheat and rice makes the eating of barley in Tibet a very important and unique cultural trait in the region.

There is six row barley and two row barley. The wild type is 6 row and in the two row barley the other 4 rows still exist but are sterile meaning you only get 2 rows of seeds on a ear. Because ⅔ of the planned seeds don’t come to fruit the last ⅓ gets extra energy from the plants meaning these seeds become larger. These larger seeds are excellent for beer brewing which is why malt barley is typically from a 2-row variety. The 6 row types are mainly used for animal feed and for bread flour.

You don’t have to grind barley to eat it. After barley is dehulled you get pot barley also called Pearl barley. This is a great filler in stew. You can also boil it like rice.

While wheat is very sensitive to salt, barley is much hardier to it. Archeological evidence shows that in ancient mesopotamia the amount of barley grown increased over time which has been interpreted, in combination with other findings, as evidence that these lands suffered from an accumulation of salt, making the growing of wheat impossible.

Malt from barley is not only used for beer. You can also use it to make a sweetener called barley malt syrup. You can also ferment malt to make malt vinegar, a staple in British cuisine.

The enzymes in barley malt are so strong it’s enough to not only convert its own starch to sugars, it can convert around 8-10 times more than its own content in starch. Traditionally vodka was made from potatoes but because potatoes lack the amylase enzyme needed you also always had to add substantial amounts of malt to convert the potato starch to sugar that can be fermented to make alcohol. This way you can make alcohol from almost any starch as long as you also add some barley malt to the mash.

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Did you know that barley is the earliest maturing of the grains which made barley the historically most important grain in the northernmost parts Sweden and Finland where no other grain could mature in time. The earliest varieties were ripe after a mere 90 days despite the temperatures in summer seldom going above 20 Celsius. However some parts of northern inland Scandinavia were too cold for even barley and this climatic border also became the border between agrarian Finns/Swedes and the reindeer herding Sami.

Did you know that barley may have been domesticated for beer before it was used for bread. Yes that’s a real theory that a group of real historians believe. The argument for this theory is that we have earlier evidence of beer brewing than we have of bread baking.

Did you know barley has a inedible hull covering every grain that makes it extremely annoying to process by hand. Because of this I don’t recommend growing it in your garden. Making it edible with only your kitchen tools would include you having to sift it over and over again. If you’re growing grain in your garden pick a hulless grain like wheat or rye.

Grass is much broader than most people think. Corn is my go to example of a grass that doesn’t really look like grass. Bamboo and the reeds next to the lake are also grass. So is wheat, barley, oats, rye and rice. I currently live in a region that’s too cold for legumes and canola so all that’s commonly grown is barley, wheat, oats and ley (grass for cows). I sometimes joke that all they grow up here is grass. Well except for potatoes, they do grow those up here, but quite sparsely.

I think it’s a good example because I believe the entirety of Lemmy can agree that that specific cultural tradition is a bad one, thus proving that not every cultural difference is good. No amount of historical context can justify it.

We can take an example. Female genital mutilation. Why do I think muslim west Africans moving to my country should stop female genital mutilation in my country instead of my culture starting practicing female genital mutilation? That’s quite clear. I think it’s an immoral practice. Doesn’t matter which culture is doing it. Not every cultural difference is a neutral thing. My culture for sure also has negative traits in it. I would also condemn child marriage, purity culture, strict family patriarchy, and clan honor culture. If someone is from a culture that sees gay people as an abomination to god I would condemn that as well.

Well you could have made in EU but not made in Europe. For example you can buy products made in French Guiana which would be EU but not Europe. Also Cyprus is in Asia according to how some people draw the lines of the continents. Then we have the Spanish part of North Africa and arguably the Canary islands as well.

It may be that using phones all the time is keeping kids from bullying each other as much thus lowering teen suicide rates. However at the same time it may also be true that their excessive screen time is frying their brains. One metric getting better doesn’t prove that all the bad metrics are not real.

Or only the blessed get crushed by The Hand. The crushing transports you straight to the heavenly hand realm. You will get worshipped as a god for generations in your village after getting crushed.

No it’s not impossible. The state can go in and build houses and rent them out and because it’s the state there doesn’t have to be a profit motive. I used to live in social housing for 8 years and thought it was great. However if there is no social housing construction and private investment is needed to get more housing built then there has to be a profit motive else no one will be motivated to build. However I’m against exorbitant rents. There has to be a balance. No profit at all (+no current social housing program) simply leads to no housing. At least not rental housing. People are of course free to build their own homes but that’s not the solution either as not everyone has the money to do so.

USDA FSA

I work in Swedish agriculture and here putting up land as collateral is very common. Of course it may be different where you live.

You can still want more housing without wanting more landlords… They could always sell the houses

That’s true but some housing always has to exist as rental properties as there will always be some people who can’t pay for a house upfront especially young people who can’t be expected to have saved up for one. I think we both agree that exorbitant rents are bad. But I would argue against the notion that every landlord is bad for society. However if you were to say that maybe only the state or the local city should be allowed to be a landlord I would say that’s totally fair as long as that’s managed in a good way and leads to enough housing getting built. I myself used to live in social housing owned by the municipality for 8 years and thought it was great.

I don’t buy this argument. The farmers I speak to who are close to cities enjoy the increased value of farmland as that allows them to take out very cheap loans with the farmland as collateral. Aspiring farmers don’t want to buy farmland close to cities anyway as it’s risky and expensive. So it benefits existing farmers and doesn’t really damage aspiring farmers. And regarding utility contractors and building materials. Those going to building housing is what we want no? Or do you prefer we stop building housing so that building materials for building data centers and mega mansions is cheaper instead? I’m guessing that’s not what you want.