Ask HN: Can farmers deny food based on the political beliefs of customers?

Quite a few people fantasize about doing exactly this as a way to leverage political power. The main obstacles to the idea are the way the US food industry is highly corporatized, so that an individual farmer/agricultural contractor has little knowledge or say in where their product ends up, it just meets a certain grade that is worth a certain price and is them loaded onto trucks and taken away.It would be very hard to coordinate this commercial machinery for political ends, and if it were done the government could exercise existing powers to take control of distribution to ensure a steady food supply.

Supposing an extreme scenario where federal authority had collapsed and the country was int he process of Balkanization along ideological-historical rather than ethnic lines (unlikely but not impossible), most of the really big liberal enclaves are built around ports, which would allow both the import of food and a counter-blockade of essential and semi-essential goods that would have a slower but equally deleterious economic impact.

Since some of the biggest Biden supporting areas of the USA are also some of the most densely populated, I suspect this would backfire very quickly.

States targeted by these food blockades might feel some pain at first, but if that pain persisted the states would just start looking to get their food from other sources and that could even mean from suppliers outside of the USA.

I don't think they could take the market loss and stay in business. There'd be a lot of idle land and a lot of unemployed farmers. I guess they could eat their own mono-crops for awhile. Mmmm, corn.

There’s a pretty strong “Feed the World” ethos surrounding small and medium sized farms.

And I never heard of it formally happening during the Civil War between N-S factions within a given border State.

But this isn’t the community with enough ties and knowledge to say anything intelligent about it. You’d want to talk to someone in the Grange

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grange_of_the_Order_o...

While listening to a version of

http://www.protestsonglyrics.net/Farmer_Songs/Farmer-Feeds-U...

> conservatives control nearly the entire food production industry.

What is the source or evidence for this little factoid?