In article ,
"Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote:
"Billy" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote:
[...]
They do not want to go out and separately negotiate
orders of corn of this magnitude from 100 separate small
farmers who can each only supply a ton of corn.

You didn't read the chapter. Chem ferts kill top soil. The less top
soil, the more chem ferts, and more pollution of ground water and
fishing areas. Who pays to remediate the land and the water? The tax
payer does. It is called "privatize the profits and socialize
the costs". The price of the box is only part of the price.

You don't actually have to remediate the land and water, you
know. At one time we didn't. People would just use the
resources until they were all gone, then move to a new place.

What? When the Earth's population was only a few million? Surely you
are not defending this practice in the current timeframe?

However, nowadays people are valuing clean water and
clean land more than they used to. So now there is a cost
for those things that we didn't have before, which is now being
factored in. That is why you have to file environmental
impact statements nowadays when you want to build a factory.
They didn't require environmental impact statements when
those large farms were created years ago. So the real question
is, are we going to apply current laws retroactively?

No, I don't think that is the real question at all. Environmental laws
have been on the books for decades. Nowadays? The Clean Water Act goes
back to at least the 1960s, no? That's nearly 50 years FCOL. Since
when has it been legal to pollute and contaminate your neighbor's
property with a stinking mountain of pig or cow shit (pardon my French)
like those created by factory "farms"? What are you talking about and
how is that possibly a meaningful defense for destruction of other
people's property?

If not, then how are you going to justify taking current
environmental requirements for creating a large farm and
apply it to large farms that were created years ago?

What "environmental requirements for creating a large farm" are you
talking about? How is this even relevant? What are you talking about
when you refer to "large farms" created years ago? How many years ago?
I'm just trying to understand what you mean here. Keep in mind that the
average size farm in the 1950s was around 200 acres.
[...]

Isabella
--
"I will show you fear in a handful of dust"
-T.S. Eliot