Our children and grandchildren must wonder what we were thinking of. And with.

Soon, no one will know how to produce food for the rest of us.

By Anders Nordstad, Master of Science in Business

For the past 50-70 years, Norwegian society’s orders to Norwegian food producers have been as follows:

1. Get a second job—or preferably two. You will need that. We do not intend to pay.
2. Use your own money and take up substantial loans – at your own expense and risk – to carry out significant investments on which we guarantee a negative return.
3. If the investments—against presumption—yield efficiency gains, you may not keep them yourself. We take them regardless of whether they can be realized or not.
4. When it turns out that this is nowhere near going around – neither in terms of workload nor profitability – we just say that you, as a farmer, are not using your income opportunities! Then we turn up your fictitious income and say you earn like others.
5. The most important thing for us is that you continue to produce food. Therefore, by all means, you must not lose faith in the future. After all, you are the one that keeps the rest of us alive! To get you to carry out the unprofitable investments, we, therefore, offer to contribute a grant to the investments we believe are necessary to carry out – so that you have to continue to produce and so that there will be fewer and fewer people with the knowledge to grow food in our country.

Do we want it this way!

6. The average farmer is 55 years old. We’ll make sure he gets even older.
   
   The strangest thing about this is the belief that the food will be both cheap and of high quality if only those who produce it are left empty-handed as if that determines the price of food. Of course, it isn’t. Norwegian grocery chains assess the cost of food, and their task is to increase our willingness to pay as much as possible. Or what did you think?

Honestly. Do we want it this way?

Well – we can, of course, continue as before, but then we will soon have no one left who has the knowledge needed to produce food for the rest of us.

And to our children and grandchildren. They must be wondering what we were thinking of. And with. To call a spade a spade. [Or, as they say, on the Norwegian coast of Spain, al pan, pan y al vino, vino.]