Global warming: Are we doomed? A poll.

[The Grand Nudger]

95% of rice farms in Arkansas are family owned and run.  Precision levelled, low flood fields.  Real time data on display maps.  Remote irrigation control.  Hi tech stuff has increased profits and made their jobs easier.  Great opportunity for an instrumentation and controls engineer, but don't talk to them about kooky liberal vaccines and climate change.

Family farms are usually family owned, but not family run, the two in combination are wildly unrepresentative.  The idea of a family farm was more myth than anything else, and in that myth - hiring out of house specialists like engineers wasn't included..and yet, clearly, it helps. OFC, I have a dog in that hunt, so don't take my word for it. That said, laser leveled fields are a bit of an issue. We had a field laser leveled in fl a few years back, which is generally too flat to notice elevation change..and all it took was three weeks worth of eight hour days running a series 3 tractor to smooth out 2-5 inch lumps in the sand. That said, I love the long shaft wheeled jon boats boats they use in combined rice and crawdad harvest.

If you enjoy this sort of stuff..

I tried to prove that small family farms are the future. I couldn’t do it.

https://thecounter.org/sarah-mock-fails-...he-future/

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A pursuasive strategy needs to show it minimizes not only the cost of global warming, but the combined cost of global warming AND the effort to minimize it.

exactly so.

Dismissing the cost of efforts to minimize impact of global warming, rethoricalky brushing it under the rug,  or otherwise trivializing by exaggerating the cost of not doing anything does not help build the necessary case.

However, to this, the costs being brushed under the rug are generally -not- the costs to transition.  We lay these out so specifically that for some systems we have a parts list by sku at the local box store so that we can quickly tell people the exact cost of transition for their operations..while most of them, and most of the public, are completely oblivious to the rather opaque (if addressed at all) costs of business as usual.  

once a case is made for a particular approach, or family of approaches, as being optimal in her sense of minimizing the combined cost of global warming and efforts to control it, there remain the issue of who should pay for the cost of combating global warming.
om grants.

In the extension model, it's the interested producer, with some help from federal and state grants. Usually post cost matching. As in, here's what to do if you think you can do it, and after you pay for it, bring us receipts, and well go over them and tell you what you can be reimbursed for (alot of the costs to site modification are unpredictable and uncovered). That's the weakest link in the process at present. It's hard to attract 3rd party investment for appropriate tech, and it's not hard to attract investment..for..say.....a mcdonalds franchise. If you're sitting on enough money to build a laying hen paddock you're sitting on enough money to open a fast food restaurant. The only difference between the two from a business perspective is that you don't have to come out of pocket for the latter. That and the burger joint has a faster and better roi.

That's why land use and land transfer are so thorny for the legendary family farm. You've got one heir that wants to farm it and one that wants to turn it into a mobile home park and another that wants to sell it to a developer. Guess who has the better spreadsheets for presentation to a loan officer..or their mother..and we're talking about assets commonly in excess of a cool mil.

Taking that back to ranjrs point...the things that might tip the spreadsheet in the farmers favor are things that are not traditionally the ao of the kid who wants to farm...and, not for nothing, but both the kid who wants to farm and the parents weighing that decision are very often extremely resistant to the advice of outside professionals with specific experience.

Long story short, it's a fucking shitshow.