I read an interesting article by the Washington Post (!). So I guess 87% of farms are family owned or owned by a single person.
It also said that the small diverse farm is making a comeback. Good deal I think. That means that there is money in it.
For some reason, agriculture is the only profession where you should not make money. I mean, its food right?
It has gone towards bigger and bigger farms here .
I read a lot of articles about farming in the paper these days, because we have a situation there every 5th farm here is bancrupt, only kept going through the good grazes of the banks.
So there is a lot of debate about wheter as good socialists, the state should step in and save them ( basically pay off their loans for them) or we should just let them die.
After WW2 we had 20,000 farms, today the number is 6,000. They have gone from being diverse farms, with a bit of animal husbandry and crops, to large factories where pigs are stacked on top of each other.
It is not farming anymore, but industry. None the less the zoning laws and pollution rules that go for industry here, do not apply for industrial farming.
We've always had a firm rule that the polluter pays the clean-up bill. Seems only fair.
However, the farms that send nitrogen and phosfor out in the waterways, which are now fairly devoid of life ( Since I've spent the better part of my summers working in those waterways for a decade, this is not hearsay, but something I have seen) then into our tidal zones where the fish and natural vegetation is gone ( We used to have a thriving inner coastal fishery, small boats, actually pretty environmentally friendly, but it is gone because there are no fish left to catch.
Those farms are not made to foot the bill, but susidized instead. Where is the logic.
And we are not talking about producing food to feed the poor inner city folks here, there is no way in hell 6 million Danes can eat the 26 million pigs produced yearly, even if I s the only vegetarian here.
As for my take on whether to save the bancrpt farmers:
It has always been said here between farmers that it is better to buy a new tractor you don't need than to pay taxes.
Our tax system is set up in a way, that if you just keep expanding and buying new shit, so you never show a profit, you won't pay taxes.They went bancrupt because they invested too heavily before the economical crisis, in order to avoid paying taxes.
These guys got a bit carried away with playing that system and lost everything.
I hope they let them fall.
