Switzerland's direct payments.
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I'm going to be filming the inspection but I don't want to interfere with the inspection in any way so I'm going to be giving a little bit of room when I film I don't want to be you know in their faces or anything like that making a video about tractor tires or weeds is one thing but when we start getting into the interaction between farmers and the government and the government programs things start to get a little bit more complicated and of course as soon as you bring in government regulations and programs it becomes very political everybody's got an opinion and they're more than happy to voice it as an American the whole Swiss system is foreign to me and it's kind of difficult to understand I don't feel particularly qualified to make this video but I don't think you can make videos about modern farming and not talk about the interaction between farmers and the government so here's an Americans take on Switzerland's subsidies we've actually already touched on this topic in the okay video this is where farmers are compensated for farming certain pastures in a way that promotes biodiversity the funding Farmers receive for these biodiverse fields is part of a broader program called direct payments this program started in the early 90s and it's Switzerland's way of subsidizing its agriculture the idea being to fund stable food production well at the same time promoting environmentally friendly methods of farming like the Oklahoma this program is also meant to do other things like maintain the Swiss landscape we don't often think about it but those classic Swiss views require maintenance imagine being a cow here you have your house right on top of this View look at that it's like a million dollar view in the US that's insane like we talked about in the okay video if the field is left unmaintained it will grow up with trees millions of people come to Switzerland every year for these views and of course that brings money in but tourism is just one of the reasons that Switzerland wants to keep these fields open these fields also produce food working and maintaining these Steep and hard to get to Fields requires a lot of time it's dangerous it's difficult and unfortunately it's just not profitable Farms are a business and to stay in business they have to make money if they don't eventually they'll be a farmer without a farm coming from America it's crazy to me that people Farm Switzerland at all I mean how can a farmer working on the side of a mountain compete with a farmer on flat fertile ground first far as he can see it's just way cheaper to farm that flat ground I grew up in New Hampshire it's a small state in the north eastern part of the U.S during the 1800s it had a huge agricultural economy supplying food down to the city of Boston see these lines of piled up Stone running through the forest these are called stone walls and at one point they were fences this was all cleared farmland and this was somebody's Farm sometime in the late 1700s probably during or right after the Revolutionary War somebody built a farmhouse and barn here we don't know for sure when the farm was abandoned but there is documentation saying that both buildings were gone by 1860. at one point as much as 80 percent of at least Southern New Hampshire was Farmland which is pretty crazy but New Hampshire has a problem the ground is pretty fertile but it's also very Rocky making it difficult to farm with the invention of the train it became cheaper for Boston to just ship food in from the Midwest than it was to have it made in New Hampshire New Hampshire Farmers with their Rocky ground just couldn't compete with the wide open Plains of the Midwest most Farmers either went out of business or took their operations out west today only seven percent of New Hampshire is farmland and 84 of it is Forest the reality is that Switzerland doesn't have that much farmland and of that Farmland a very small percentage of it could be competitive it's just cheaper to import food from other countries if Farms go out of business and the fields grow up into forests Switzerland loses its ability to produce its own food although a lot