This is how lazy farmers are and I really don’t know how @Sarah_k_mock and @SarahTaber_bww deal with this on a daily basis. A thread:

Google didn’t index the entire internet because consumers demanded it; consumers were fine with Altavista and AOL at the time... https://twitter.com/rboldan/status/1314997165954039808

Apple didn’t develop the iPod and iPhone because consumers demanded them. Consumers were fine with Discman and the Motorola Q...

The automobile and electric lights weren’t responses to consumer demand. Horses and candles were timelessly reliable; in-home lightning and carriages powered by explosions scared the sh*t out of people...

Amazon Web Services and elastic computing wasn’t a response to consumer demand; consumers were fine renting server space from GoDaddy or setting up server farms...

FFS, even the fact that we consider bacon and sausage “breakfast food” was not a consumer demand; it was engineered by pork marketers at a time when breakfast was whatever you had lying around...

Investment drives what consumers have available to choose from. Consumers don’t drive innovation because they often don’t have the expertise to realize what’s possible; they’re not subject matter experts...

But innovation and investment are hard and risky. And why bother when you’re already a near-millionaire, would rather drive autosteer and row crop, and can get away with it because ethanol, crop dumping, and price insurance underwrite your lazy-assed risk aversion?

These are the same people that’ll swear up and down “I don’t need no subsidies” because they don’t understand that most of their “market” IS a subsidy: created thru legislation and trade policy out of thin air by the same big government they insist blocks profitability...

Which is kind of true, because if the Feds stopped underwriting farmers, they’d be forced to seek profitability or starve. The ones that starved wouldn’t be farmers, and the ones left would be quite profitable. And likely diversified and integrated. In fact...

Farming would fundamentally change, as would the composition of rural communities and economics, electoral politics, modes and outcomes of environmental conservation, racial equity dynamics, and, last but not least...

Food choice could actually evolve around things like innovations in conservation ethics and regional food systems instead of an agribusiness model that feasts on the government-engineered surplus of wartime food policy (from the Homestead Acts to the Cold War)...

But that’s not going to happen a moment before we stop propping up farmers that want to make their fortunes everyone else’s responsibility. Innovation and sea change favor dreamers, hustlers, and visionaries, not the entitled scions of American agrarian feudalism /THREAD