The fact that you have to qualify your comment with your links to farmers puzzles me. I mean, I understand why you did it, but it's puzzling to me that attitudes are such that you need to. The Brave New Antibiotic-Resistant Apocalypse will hurt farmers just as much as the rest of us, after all.
The way I see it, farmers should be leading the charge to ban non-medicinal antibiotics use in farm animals. The current situation is causing a tragedy of the commons. The commons in this case is antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Every individual farmer is better off if they use non-medicinal antibiotics than if they don't, but they're all collectively better off (along with the rest of us) if none of them do. In short, the current market is forcing them to act in ways that are bad for humanity. If I were a farmer, I'd seriously dislike that, and lobby for laws that made it possible to do the right thing.
For poultry farms, farmers are essentially sharecroppers. They are paid a fixed fee to grow chickens owned by Tyson/Perdue/etc.
For beef farms, ranchers birth and keep cattle for a specific period of time, at which point they are sold to feedlot operators. The feedlots have thousands of cattle are where many of the nasty issues with disease/etc come from.
Farmers are not very politically powerful anymore. The next layer up in the agribusiness chain can control pricing and have all of the power.
I said "You will have to merge your agri-business with the daily delivery of fresh food to my house, making around 20x the profit on your produce if you capture the end to end market"
Hell, I agree but there has to be some solution - look at Mr Money Mustache. I know what he says is sensible. But I still have an unaffordable mortgage (my kids need a good school!) and buy lattes each day (I like them)
This is just exactly the same thing.
You know what, I like a Nanny state. I need more Nanny.
Except that farmers are also addicted to the hormones and other supplements that cause animals to grow larger and quicker, which in turn requires antibiotics to deal with the subsequent infections. Modern agriculture is on a downward spiral of alternating new practices with needing to mitigate health effects.
This American Life had a great TV episode on modern pig farming that I highly recommend watching on this subject. I believe it's this episode titled Pandora's Box:
The way I see it, farmers should be leading the charge to ban non-medicinal antibiotics use in farm animals. The current situation is causing a tragedy of the commons. The commons in this case is antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Every individual farmer is better off if they use non-medicinal antibiotics than if they don't, but they're all collectively better off (along with the rest of us) if none of them do. In short, the current market is forcing them to act in ways that are bad for humanity. If I were a farmer, I'd seriously dislike that, and lobby for laws that made it possible to do the right thing.