If you have an hr dept that isn't worthless, they're already in compliance with whatever local state laws they need to in order to operate in that state, including workman's comp.
Yes. Labor demand is softening a bit, but actually kind of welcome because it is an inflation driver. April data just out. March revised up, so it was actually 2.0 openings per job seeker, April ticked down to 1.9
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=Q27U
Unless the farmer is a moron, IPM is how most farmers try to use pesticides. Pesticides and chemical applications can be very expensive. Farmers try to use the least possible amount they can for purely economic reasons. My wife's grandfather was using IPM back in the 70s. Farming is competitive. If your costs are too high, you eventually go bankrupt during bad years. For the most part IPM is the rule, not the exception. Purely limited by the farmer's ability to understand pest cycles.
A matter of degree, maybe. Certainly there's a degree of understanding that's cheaper than just blind heavy spraying, and that any grower would thus be foolish not to obtain. I've often seen "IPM" used to refer to systems that went beyond that though, incurring higher cost for lower ecological impact. For example, the guidelines linked below note explicitly that
> Practices contained in this protocol are considerably more expensive than conventional programs that rely on highly toxic pesticides.
I think my supermarket apples were just plain "IPM" though, not a specific set of guidelines like that. Those guidelines seem like a tough sell overall, hard to succinctly explain the benefits to the average consumer.
Conventional IPM programs use more toxic, but muuuch less volume of pesticides.
Organic programs user "better" pesticides, but much much more.
Which is better? We'll, it depends on how fast those pesticides break down and what those degraded molecules are. It depends on how much volume is applied to the produce. It depends on if it accumulates in the flesh of the produce.
What if a pesticide outrageously lethal to humans, but breaks down in 2 days and you only apply it in the first 25% of the produce growing window?
Which is worse? 400 lbs of feathers accumulating on your chest at 100 lbs/week for 4 weeks or 400 lbs of steel on your chest applied once.
Silly metaphor, but the answer to incredibly difficult system problems is really "it depends". Conventional vs organic is not clear cut.
Certainly agreed. Note that the guidelines I linked above do permit certain synthetic pesticides, despite their somewhat confusing use of the word "conventional" in the text that I quoted. For example, cyflumetofen is synthetic, and it's in their lowest-risk category. Copper hydroxide products are permitted under OMRI organic guidelines, but forbidden or restricted here.
I generally like the idea of more restrictive voluntary guidelines based only on safety to the ecosystem and consumer, and not on naturalness like for "organic". I haven't seen much commercial uptake, though.
Stalin allowed for the household plot, because.... everyone was starving due to communism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_plot During the Holodomor and in "the breadbasket" of Ukraine, people were arrested for not yielding _all_ of their produce to the state.
Now the effect of terrorizing people with scarcity of food may have caused them to try to grow more of their own food, but I'm not sure that's the best tactic.
Europe and Russia has a history of peasants growing their own food. Subsequently farmland was divided into small lots. With lots of small farmers. This did not sit well with ideological goals of communism and also the soviets were in a military race with the west. Stalin wanted the state to be productively competitive with the high output large farms in America. So centrally controlled economy, and taking away land from the former peasants was one way he thought he would achieve that. But it failed in famine and the country side still to this day has many smaller farms. The land is just divided differently there. Locally grown organic food is how people still feed themselves through many parts of the world. But with globalization the price of food is low enough that local small farms can't compete on price. But still offer higher quality food in many regards. They're just squeezed out by mega farms. Also twice as many people in the world now, so need more food cheap to feed them. Globalization has made same things better and some things worse at the same time.
It makes it an interesting idea that poor people own more land in poor countries and are more self sufficient. The current form of capitalism in Canada and America is creating an underclass of people that are totally reliant on the state through debt schemes or direct welfare programs. Their labour has so little value, their salaries don't even cover rent and food. Inflation will make this more apparent than ever before.
I'm not sure the forced collectivization failed in the metrics that mattered to Stalin. The collectivization did really massively increase agricultural productivity enabling huge numbers of workers to be moved into factory work in the cities. Many people, including in the West, were in awe of the supposed communist productivity miracle.
Now, in retrospect we can say it was just the process of industrialization played out in a super-compressed timeline, and not due to the inherent economic superiority of communism. But it wasn't clear at the time, it was really an open question whether communism was a economically superior system. Which made the capitalist class really afraid, and caused various forms of communist repression in the West like McCarthyism.
As an aside, it wasn't like industrialization as a process was all roses in the West either. Enclosure of the commons drove masses of subsistence farmers into brutal factory work in the cities.
The only part of your first post I object to is the attribution to communism. Literally, growing all the food and then sending it to the collection point of the commune. That didn't work at all and home plots were _allowed_ as a violation of pure communist idealogy. They existed before, they were opposed by communism, but then allowed to return because they actually work.
I don't disagree with that. I just wanted to advocate for something more like it here. Allowing more poor to be self reliant and sufficient through more equitable land ownership.
That's fair. Traditionally land jubilee's and debt jubilee's helped this happen. In ancient Israel of the Old Testament there was a complete unwinding of ALL debts every 6 years. Any that extended into the 7th year were... cancelled. Also, land wasn't sold, according to the law. It was apportioned by family and you could only _lease_ it for 50 years -- after that, it reverted to the family. Thus preventing land accumulation in a few hands.
