this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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10 acres is very very small and is not even a full time job for a person. Are you assuming this is all done without machines? like small hobby farms are all Amish or something? (actually even the Amish farm way more then 10 acres per person, they are not lazy)
(EDITING TO ADD THIS IS WRONG AND I MESSED UP THE CALCULATIONS. IT SHOULD BE 40 TIMES OR SO MORE)
Also just because this bugs me in a strange way.
10 acres of land growing wheat produces about 600lbs of harvested wheat a year. That is about 900,000 calories a year. Even of you ate nothing but wheat gruel you would just manage enough food for one person (about 900,000 calories assuming 2500 a day).
I think like a lot of people you have no idea the scale of farming required to feed the world. Is this why Holodomors happen?
I think 600lbs for 10 acres is very low. That would be 1 bushel per acre. I think 30 bushels per acre is pretty low for current wheat growing areas. Just realized I could look it up and it's in the middle 40s per acre. So 24000 lbs for 10 acres.
That is an insanely low yield. You should be able to feed at least 1 person per acre with wheat. Other crops like corn and potatoes can have yields that are 2-4x larger from the perspective of calories vs. land use.
You are right I messed up the calculations, I still stand by 10 acres being a small farm.
Yes. But don't worry, one of them just assured me that communist countries "never make the same mistakes as their predecessors," so if we starve it'll be slightly different than the holodomor or killing all the sparrows, so we got that going for us.
Also the holodomor was totally an accident and not malicious or abject stupidity, just a goof-em-up!
I’m glad you answered in their stead. Obviously you’re the kind of person to steel man arguments to truly show their weaknesses and strengths. You’d never regurgitate boiler plate talking points from people opposed to the ideology.
Never look up how many famines have been overseen by capitalist countries btw. It’d make your comparison lack any meaningful difference. India was run by the east India trading company when they had the bengal famine after all. And don’t forget how the Irish “potato” famine happened. (The British made it a crime to keep any non potato crop for themselves).
Here's the main difference:
"Yes that happened, and it was bad. We shouldn't repeat those mistakes, though we do not have to abandon capitalism entirely."
It's a little different than "nuh uh, real capitalism has never been tried that was imperialism/colonialism. Real capitalism is only when everything is perfect forever under free market capitalism so if anything bad happens it was never real."
Actually I bring this up because when talking about famines people love to downplay the strife caused by capitalists maximizing profit and socializing loses.
Ironically your last paragraph is a pretty accurate paraphrasing of the usual dialogue around capitalisms faults.
Yeah, that's capitalism's version of Tankies. See why I don't like Tankies now? And Tankies even have the cult of personality thing I can't fucking stand too, they're just in essence Red Trumpers. Capitalists can as well, of course, but it isn't a prerequisite like it is for Stalinists or Maoists (I mean hell it's in the name lmao).
I don't know whats worse, weaponized stupidity or weaponized hunger. Well I guess both end in death of untold many.
See the problem here is you think farming means wheat. Did you know vegetable plants exist?