10 ms·

The Sickness in Our Food Supply

132 points by Thevet 6y ago

wffurr 6y ago
http://archive.is/e70Ko http://archive.is/e70Ko
- thathndude 6y ago
  Thank you
MattGaiser 6y ago
Seems like we need to automate more of the food industry.
filoeleven 6y ago
> This is why the meat-plant closures forced American farmers to euthanize millions of animals, at a time when food banks were overwhelmed by demand. “Euthanize” is a euphemism. What pig farmers have been doing due to the shutdown is not painless euthanasia, it’s industrial-scale animal cruelty. The linked article and videos are not for the faint of heart. https://theintercept.com/2020/05/29/pigs-factory-farms-ventilation-shutdown-coronavirus/ https://theintercept.com/2020/05/29/pigs-factory-farms-venti...
- perfmode 6y ago
  truth, brother cull gas exterminate let’s call it like it is
  - cma 6y ago
    Pretty terrifying, they killed them with steam, not even something like carbon monoxide exhaust.
  - bluntfang 6y ago
    but bad words make feel bad. me want feel good. me need meat and patio seating.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  Stuff like this is why I don't eat meat. Combined with the ag-gag laws that prevent this from being more exposed, it's wild how inhumane our treatment of animals has become. https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missing-piglets-animal-rights-glenn-greenwald/ https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > Stuff like this is why I don't eat meat. Combined with the ag-gag laws that prevent this from being more exposed, it's wild how inhumane our treatment of animals has become. I understand these concerns, but please consider that this would never happen under Organic/Permaculture and sure as hell not under Biodynamic farms. They'd all lose their certification, and most are adamant on using the most humane ways in livestock raising. The first cow herd, for meat, I ever took care of in Germany ate better than I did. They could only eat a diet of silage (fermented grass) and fruit from the farm in addition to hay. Gassing them would not only be cruel, but its also a quick way to end being able to get your beef sold at 22 Eur/Kg faster than anything. I'm not going to lie and say its perfect, their are things that I think are inefficient in all of those, but its the cost of having an actual healthy relationship with the Earth that provides the food we eat. In fact one cow we had got an utter infection because we couldn't bottle feed the calf, it just wouldn't eat and was showing signs of anemia, so we had to isolate the mother and child and get a vet to apply local antiseptics and herbal remedies to cure the infection. This required like 5 separate visits from the vet, which was the child of a local farmer and family friend. The calf was just fed from another cow that didn't let it bite it, so it quickly learned to not do that and eventually got weened to grass by Spring when they went to pasture. But that gassing is just one horrible example of many in what it entails to do a race to the bottom pricing model based on State Subsidized Ag/livestock models. It's horrible for everyone involved and should be a bigger issue than it is. Especially now that we see how ineffective they are under a severe stress test like COVID. Consumers can vote with their money, waiting for regulatory changes and practices to be enforced are simply not teneble, monetarily incentivizing farmers to move away from this model is the only real way to make this work.
    - 6y ago
- jacobush 6y ago
  The people behind this should serve prison time.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    I don't usually agree with this line of thinking, but just a thought experiment - if you equate 10 thousand pigs to one human being, these people just in cold blood tortured several humans worth to death, to make some money.
- fractallyte 6y ago
  I got downvoted for this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23290075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23290075 Nevertheless, I stand by it: "...Humans have truly monstrous traits. Occasionally, there's a question of how future generations will see us... Maybe the Fermi Paradox has a really simple, obvious explanation: "Where is everybody?" - waiting for us to become less despicable." 'Never Again!' is a phrase born of the Holocaust (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_again). Reading the parent article, that sentiment seems pretty hollow... Aren't humans supposed to be 'sentient'?
  - xvector 6y ago
    We are a shortsighted species. Today we tear down statues of former slave-owners, tomorrow statues of today's carnists will also be torn down. When will we realize the universal truth that all sentience must be respected? It is getting old now, movement after civil rights movement behind which the underlying message is the exact same. Rather than fixing every instance of this problem, why do people struggle so much to see the big picture and fix it entirely?
    - perfmode 6y ago
      Amen. * We as people tend to believe our own thinking. * The ego controls all thinking. * The ego is the cause of all human sorrow and suffering. * The ego uses thought to preserve its imaginary self. * The ego can create an argument against anything. * the ego will generate arguments against any anti-ego presentation, thus blocking what is being presented. * Most humans live their entire lives without ever having observed the background of awareness.
    - fiveacres 6y ago
      this is such an oversocialized view of the world -- why do you think that all sentience 'must' be respected?
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  Why did this sort of thing happen in the US? As far as I can tell nothing like it has happened in Europe. We also have all sorts of subsidies and controls on agriculture. Our supply chains here (Scandinavia specifically, but as far as I know in most of Europe as well) have been functioning almost as before except for a few minor hiccups in the first couple of weeks of the restrictions due to COVID-19 (flour and yeast were in short supply for a couple of weeks). Is it because Europe has stronger animal welfare provisions? Or something else?
  - akudha 6y ago
    ag-gag laws is one reason. Many people don't even realize the cruelty that is happening, let alone on an industrial scale. The meat industry has a powerful hold on politics, gets a ton of special treatment (compared to fruit and veggie growers). I pay 3$ for a single big organic cucumber (not a pound, a single cucumber). Compared to this, meat is so cheap here, especially chicken. People are used to cheap meat for so long. It is going to be very difficult to loosen that dependence. So in effect, even if some people are aware of the cruelty, they choose to ignore because they get cheap meat. Another problem is consolidation. A few companies control a large portion of the food supply and we have the "too big to fail" problem.
  - makomk 6y ago
    That is a very good question. There have definitely been large coronavirus outbreaks in slaughterhouses all over Europe that have disrupted operations, maybe not in Scandinavia but certainly in countries like Germany and France.
    - kwhitefoot 6y ago
      But did they disrupt things so badly that massive numbers of livestock had to be just destroyed?
crazygringo 6y ago
This article starts with a correct premise: > The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed. Pollan identifies the representative problem: > One chicken farmer interviewed recently in Washington Monthly, who sells millions of eggs into the liquified egg market, destined for omelets in school cafeterias, lacks the grading equipment and packaging (not to mention the contacts or contracts) to sell his eggs in the retail marketplace. But the article then goes on to attack all of Pollan's usual bugbears: mergers, globalization, corn, and soybeans. Which have nothing to do with the problem he posed. He claims: > Local food systems have proved surprisingly resilient. Small, diversified farmers who supply restaurants have had an easier time finding new markets... But, frankly, citation needed. Small farmers can't just call up their local supermarket and say "hey can you take a field's worth of arugula off my hands? No sorry I don't have any way of packaging it into retail portions, I've always sold in food-service size bags to restaurants." And for cities of a certain size, "buying local" is an impossibility anyways. I live in New York City. The land required to feed us would stretch hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles around... where there are already smaller towns and suburbs that mostly fill the space. Which is why we source our food from all over the country and world. So unfortunately, this article completely fails to find the sickness or cure.
- roenxi 6y ago
  > One chicken farmer interviewed recently in Washington Monthly, who sells millions of eggs into the liquified egg market, destined for omelets in school cafeterias, lacks the grading equipment and packaging (not to mention the contacts or contracts) to sell his eggs in the retail marketplace. Also worth noting that none of those impediments matter to a hungry consumer; if the farmer trucked the eggs in and sold them on the sidewalk there'd be buyers. It is entirely possible that the reason the commercial food chain has collapsed is it is straight-up illegal to sell the food directly to consumers, so it gets destroyed. Farmers are not the sort of people who encounter a minor difficulty then think "welp, I'm just gonna destroy my produce, that seems like the best option". If that is what they are doing then there are some mighty impediments in their path.
GregoryVPerry 6y ago
Complete bullshit leftist puff piece. The U.S. food supply chain was shutdown because almost every single governor in the country issued completely unlawful shutdown orders in direct contravention to the First Amendment's guarantee to peaceably assemble, so that each of those states would then become recipients of Infinite Quantitative Easing funds being printed out of thin air by the Federal Reserve.
Melting_Harps 6y ago
I just love this is now starting to get the attention, this has been a worry that has robbed me of sleep and been main focus in my Life for over a decade now. But beneath my optimism is a sense of woeful regret of missed opportunities had more brilliant minds focused on this problem as there is so much potential for loss capture and cost savings that could enable a post-scarcity paradigm to occur; one that I think could potentially have massive impact on Greenhouse emission and climate change. I'll try to speak on these issues as I have a background in Ag and culinary and focused on locally sourced farm to table models. I also worked at BMW and VW in supply chain during some of the most mission critical things in their History (specifically Diesel-gate Tdi buyback at VW). > But, frankly, citation needed. Small farmers can't just call up their local supermarket and say "hey can you take a field's worth of arugula off my hands? No sorry I don't have any way of packaging it into retail portions, I've always sold in food-service size bags to restaurants." It may be anecdotal, but I can offer some insight here; the challenges you are talking about come down to margins, a small local farm doesn't have to go through a myriad of complications that come with multi-national corporations like Tyson that rely on a federated system of distribution from regions to central processing, warehouses, temperature controlled freight etc... in this way the economies of scale issue is reduced and a B2C (or farm to table if you prefer more apt jargon) can enhance total bottom line profits as it reduces the losses of having to sell at wholesale to retailers. I've personally gotten 50:50 pricing model to am upscale local health food store that was in direct competition with Whole Foods when I ran a farm in Hawaii, and had it not been for the long stranding community outreach program that was there before I did this would have never been possible. Its more often 10:90 for other things in my experience on other farms who supply to large retailers/wholesalers, the conventional dairy in the dorf where I managed a smaller farm in Switzerland had something similar that required 3 generations of family members to work on the farm as well as have day jobs comes to mind. Whereas we could charge 11 CHF for a bottle of Biodynamicly grown apfelmost (Apple Juice) we grew and bottled on site next to their farm. Moreover, Community Supported Agriculture models are great ways to finance the growing season(s) and raise capital, savings and help reduce future CapEx in future seasons if we have seasons like this years, where many farms have sold out their CSA and beef/pork harvests by early Spring. Mainly due to the food shortages that occurred due to relying on the complex supply chain mentioned in the article. > And for cities of a certain size, "buying local" is an impossibility anyways. I live in New York City. The land required to feed us would stretch hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles around... where there are already smaller towns and suburbs that mostly fill the space. Which is why we source our food from all over the country and world. Not entirely true, perhaps right now, yes; but look at projects like Square Roots [1] that is primarily focused on sending container gardens to NY, specifically in Brooklyn to try and combat this issue. Its actually a pilot test for future Mars colonization and a way to rely on local food sources. But NY has a myriad of models that have proved you can in fact have a direct Farm to Community model if the incentives are aligned, look into Dan Barber's work at Blue Hill. Or Thomas Keller's work with the French Laundry and Per Se (In NY), these are focused on restaurants but that's just a matter of scale, you can do that to an entire community if it avails itself. I did my Biodynamic farming apprenticeship in Europe specifically because that model has been refined and unchanged for millennia to feed its population despite being from California and it's rich Agriculture History and technological advances that makes it possible to feed not just the US but a lot of the rest of the World. I wanted to understand localized food supply chains and distribution models. Its really crazy to see how a Network is built around a farm, like a cell the Farms are usually the nucleus and everything is built around them. I wasn't farm from Alsace and Stuttgart in Southern Germany and after several trips to both regions to see what was occurring at that scale the model was still intact. In Schwäbisch Gmünd, closest area to Stuttgart it was a real challenge as the farms were way more massive than I had initially been exposed to (45 hectares) and were over 200+ with orchids, pasture, as well as gardens but that reflects the food demands of the population in the neighboring area (Stuttgart). We had multi year contracts with several high end grocery stores and mills (Rapunzel Naturkost) and other Gmbh's we sold wholesale to that made other products with the fruits and vegetables coming from the farm where I worked at. We were horribly understaffed with little to no prospects of hiring more people, it was just 3 of us in the Winter and Spring seasons, and by Summer I had better opportunities to explore in Italy and Switzerland (with offers of culinary work and management roles) so I took them. All this really made me think was that the this very viable model needs to be brought up to the 21st century as the vast majority of Ag has to be automated, the labour shortages are the thing holding it back the most, once that's achieved there is a massive boon waiting to happen to farmers to help optimize their distribution models and increase profits with B2B models with an emphasis on localized community supported based farms. I'm now more focused on supply chain optimization, having now fully retired from Kitchens and Farming as I destroyed my body doing so by my 30s, but I'm glad I did it as more people are moving into this space: one of my old team members at the Kitchen just launched his own gellato shop using re-captured losses in the food supply chain in Boulder after having been flown to Barber's place in NY. I'll plug his spot in my food series if I ever get it going as we spent lots of nights talking about our collective times farming and the impacts it has on the overall Supply Chain and Food Security as a whole. For further consideration check out this recent Joe Rogan podcast with Joe Salatin [2], who was a pioneer of this model in the US and has gained huge notoriety for his advances. Awesome watch. 1: https://squarerootsgrow.com/ https://squarerootsgrow.com/ 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-7O3fOXXKo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-7O3fOXXKo
082349872349872 6y ago
Starting with Reagan seems optimistic; I'd blame Earl "get big or get out" Butz for your predicament. alternative meatpacking, cool automation videos https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23367350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23367350 automation (cow and pig brushes) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23474129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23474129 (off topic, but I consider HFCS sickness in food supply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23363053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23363053 )
the_omegist 6y ago
'Farm' animals are the ultimate victims because they have no voice. Too many social activists start from the top-level (humans) but I think starting from the bottom-level (nature and animals) will give the most efficient change because it has a transversal impact on every aspect of human life. If more people could feel empathy toward "farm" animals, all other social problems would start being solved.

132 points by Thevet 6y ago

wffurr 6y ago

http://archive.is/e70Ko http://archive.is/e70Ko

thathndude 6y ago
Thank you

MattGaiser 6y ago

Seems like we need to automate more of the food industry.

filoeleven 6y ago

> This is why the meat-plant closures forced American farmers to euthanize millions of animals, at a time when food banks were overwhelmed by demand. “Euthanize” is a euphemism. What pig farmers have been doing due to the shutdown is not painless euthanasia, it’s industrial-scale animal cruelty. The linked article and videos are not for the faint of heart. https://theintercept.com/2020/05/29/pigs-factory-farms-ventilation-shutdown-coronavirus/ https://theintercept.com/2020/05/29/pigs-factory-farms-venti...

perfmode 6y ago
truth, brother cull gas exterminate let’s call it like it is
- cma 6y ago
  Pretty terrifying, they killed them with steam, not even something like carbon monoxide exhaust.
- bluntfang 6y ago
  but bad words make feel bad. me want feel good. me need meat and patio seating.
Pfhreak 6y ago
Stuff like this is why I don't eat meat. Combined with the ag-gag laws that prevent this from being more exposed, it's wild how inhumane our treatment of animals has become. https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missing-piglets-animal-rights-glenn-greenwald/ https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > Stuff like this is why I don't eat meat. Combined with the ag-gag laws that prevent this from being more exposed, it's wild how inhumane our treatment of animals has become. I understand these concerns, but please consider that this would never happen under Organic/Permaculture and sure as hell not under Biodynamic farms. They'd all lose their certification, and most are adamant on using the most humane ways in livestock raising. The first cow herd, for meat, I ever took care of in Germany ate better than I did. They could only eat a diet of silage (fermented grass) and fruit from the farm in addition to hay. Gassing them would not only be cruel, but its also a quick way to end being able to get your beef sold at 22 Eur/Kg faster than anything. I'm not going to lie and say its perfect, their are things that I think are inefficient in all of those, but its the cost of having an actual healthy relationship with the Earth that provides the food we eat. In fact one cow we had got an utter infection because we couldn't bottle feed the calf, it just wouldn't eat and was showing signs of anemia, so we had to isolate the mother and child and get a vet to apply local antiseptics and herbal remedies to cure the infection. This required like 5 separate visits from the vet, which was the child of a local farmer and family friend. The calf was just fed from another cow that didn't let it bite it, so it quickly learned to not do that and eventually got weened to grass by Spring when they went to pasture. But that gassing is just one horrible example of many in what it entails to do a race to the bottom pricing model based on State Subsidized Ag/livestock models. It's horrible for everyone involved and should be a bigger issue than it is. Especially now that we see how ineffective they are under a severe stress test like COVID. Consumers can vote with their money, waiting for regulatory changes and practices to be enforced are simply not teneble, monetarily incentivizing farmers to move away from this model is the only real way to make this work.
  - 6y ago
jacobush 6y ago
The people behind this should serve prison time.
- jacobush 6y ago
  I don't usually agree with this line of thinking, but just a thought experiment - if you equate 10 thousand pigs to one human being, these people just in cold blood tortured several humans worth to death, to make some money.
fractallyte 6y ago
I got downvoted for this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23290075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23290075 Nevertheless, I stand by it: "...Humans have truly monstrous traits. Occasionally, there's a question of how future generations will see us... Maybe the Fermi Paradox has a really simple, obvious explanation: "Where is everybody?" - waiting for us to become less despicable." 'Never Again!' is a phrase born of the Holocaust (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_again). Reading the parent article, that sentiment seems pretty hollow... Aren't humans supposed to be 'sentient'?
- xvector 6y ago
  We are a shortsighted species. Today we tear down statues of former slave-owners, tomorrow statues of today's carnists will also be torn down. When will we realize the universal truth that all sentience must be respected? It is getting old now, movement after civil rights movement behind which the underlying message is the exact same. Rather than fixing every instance of this problem, why do people struggle so much to see the big picture and fix it entirely?
  - perfmode 6y ago
    Amen. * We as people tend to believe our own thinking. * The ego controls all thinking. * The ego is the cause of all human sorrow and suffering. * The ego uses thought to preserve its imaginary self. * The ego can create an argument against anything. * the ego will generate arguments against any anti-ego presentation, thus blocking what is being presented. * Most humans live their entire lives without ever having observed the background of awareness.
  - fiveacres 6y ago
    this is such an oversocialized view of the world -- why do you think that all sentience 'must' be respected?
kwhitefoot 6y ago
Why did this sort of thing happen in the US? As far as I can tell nothing like it has happened in Europe. We also have all sorts of subsidies and controls on agriculture. Our supply chains here (Scandinavia specifically, but as far as I know in most of Europe as well) have been functioning almost as before except for a few minor hiccups in the first couple of weeks of the restrictions due to COVID-19 (flour and yeast were in short supply for a couple of weeks). Is it because Europe has stronger animal welfare provisions? Or something else?
- akudha 6y ago
  ag-gag laws is one reason. Many people don't even realize the cruelty that is happening, let alone on an industrial scale. The meat industry has a powerful hold on politics, gets a ton of special treatment (compared to fruit and veggie growers). I pay 3$ for a single big organic cucumber (not a pound, a single cucumber). Compared to this, meat is so cheap here, especially chicken. People are used to cheap meat for so long. It is going to be very difficult to loosen that dependence. So in effect, even if some people are aware of the cruelty, they choose to ignore because they get cheap meat. Another problem is consolidation. A few companies control a large portion of the food supply and we have the "too big to fail" problem.
- makomk 6y ago
  That is a very good question. There have definitely been large coronavirus outbreaks in slaughterhouses all over Europe that have disrupted operations, maybe not in Scandinavia but certainly in countries like Germany and France.
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    But did they disrupt things so badly that massive numbers of livestock had to be just destroyed?

crazygringo 6y ago

This article starts with a correct premise: > The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed. Pollan identifies the representative problem: > One chicken farmer interviewed recently in Washington Monthly, who sells millions of eggs into the liquified egg market, destined for omelets in school cafeterias, lacks the grading equipment and packaging (not to mention the contacts or contracts) to sell his eggs in the retail marketplace. But the article then goes on to attack all of Pollan's usual bugbears: mergers, globalization, corn, and soybeans. Which have nothing to do with the problem he posed. He claims: > Local food systems have proved surprisingly resilient. Small, diversified farmers who supply restaurants have had an easier time finding new markets... But, frankly, citation needed. Small farmers can't just call up their local supermarket and say "hey can you take a field's worth of arugula off my hands? No sorry I don't have any way of packaging it into retail portions, I've always sold in food-service size bags to restaurants." And for cities of a certain size, "buying local" is an impossibility anyways. I live in New York City. The land required to feed us would stretch hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles around... where there are already smaller towns and suburbs that mostly fill the space. Which is why we source our food from all over the country and world. So unfortunately, this article completely fails to find the sickness or cure.

roenxi 6y ago
> One chicken farmer interviewed recently in Washington Monthly, who sells millions of eggs into the liquified egg market, destined for omelets in school cafeterias, lacks the grading equipment and packaging (not to mention the contacts or contracts) to sell his eggs in the retail marketplace. Also worth noting that none of those impediments matter to a hungry consumer; if the farmer trucked the eggs in and sold them on the sidewalk there'd be buyers. It is entirely possible that the reason the commercial food chain has collapsed is it is straight-up illegal to sell the food directly to consumers, so it gets destroyed. Farmers are not the sort of people who encounter a minor difficulty then think "welp, I'm just gonna destroy my produce, that seems like the best option". If that is what they are doing then there are some mighty impediments in their path.

GregoryVPerry 6y ago

Complete bullshit leftist puff piece. The U.S. food supply chain was shutdown because almost every single governor in the country issued completely unlawful shutdown orders in direct contravention to the First Amendment's guarantee to peaceably assemble, so that each of those states would then become recipients of Infinite Quantitative Easing funds being printed out of thin air by the Federal Reserve.

Melting_Harps 6y ago

I just love this is now starting to get the attention, this has been a worry that has robbed me of sleep and been main focus in my Life for over a decade now. But beneath my optimism is a sense of woeful regret of missed opportunities had more brilliant minds focused on this problem as there is so much potential for loss capture and cost savings that could enable a post-scarcity paradigm to occur; one that I think could potentially have massive impact on Greenhouse emission and climate change. I'll try to speak on these issues as I have a background in Ag and culinary and focused on locally sourced farm to table models. I also worked at BMW and VW in supply chain during some of the most mission critical things in their History (specifically Diesel-gate Tdi buyback at VW). > But, frankly, citation needed. Small farmers can't just call up their local supermarket and say "hey can you take a field's worth of arugula off my hands? No sorry I don't have any way of packaging it into retail portions, I've always sold in food-service size bags to restaurants." It may be anecdotal, but I can offer some insight here; the challenges you are talking about come down to margins, a small local farm doesn't have to go through a myriad of complications that come with multi-national corporations like Tyson that rely on a federated system of distribution from regions to central processing, warehouses, temperature controlled freight etc... in this way the economies of scale issue is reduced and a B2C (or farm to table if you prefer more apt jargon) can enhance total bottom line profits as it reduces the losses of having to sell at wholesale to retailers. I've personally gotten 50:50 pricing model to am upscale local health food store that was in direct competition with Whole Foods when I ran a farm in Hawaii, and had it not been for the long stranding community outreach program that was there before I did this would have never been possible. Its more often 10:90 for other things in my experience on other farms who supply to large retailers/wholesalers, the conventional dairy in the dorf where I managed a smaller farm in Switzerland had something similar that required 3 generations of family members to work on the farm as well as have day jobs comes to mind. Whereas we could charge 11 CHF for a bottle of Biodynamicly grown apfelmost (Apple Juice) we grew and bottled on site next to their farm. Moreover, Community Supported Agriculture models are great ways to finance the growing season(s) and raise capital, savings and help reduce future CapEx in future seasons if we have seasons like this years, where many farms have sold out their CSA and beef/pork harvests by early Spring. Mainly due to the food shortages that occurred due to relying on the complex supply chain mentioned in the article. > And for cities of a certain size, "buying local" is an impossibility anyways. I live in New York City. The land required to feed us would stretch hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles around... where there are already smaller towns and suburbs that mostly fill the space. Which is why we source our food from all over the country and world. Not entirely true, perhaps right now, yes; but look at projects like Square Roots [1] that is primarily focused on sending container gardens to NY, specifically in Brooklyn to try and combat this issue. Its actually a pilot test for future Mars colonization and a way to rely on local food sources. But NY has a myriad of models that have proved you can in fact have a direct Farm to Community model if the incentives are aligned, look into Dan Barber's work at Blue Hill. Or Thomas Keller's work with the French Laundry and Per Se (In NY), these are focused on restaurants but that's just a matter of scale, you can do that to an entire community if it avails itself. I did my Biodynamic farming apprenticeship in Europe specifically because that model has been refined and unchanged for millennia to feed its population despite being from California and it's rich Agriculture History and technological advances that makes it possible to feed not just the US but a lot of the rest of the World. I wanted to understand localized food supply chains and distribution models. Its really crazy to see how a Network is built around a farm, like a cell the Farms are usually the nucleus and everything is built around them. I wasn't farm from Alsace and Stuttgart in Southern Germany and after several trips to both regions to see what was occurring at that scale the model was still intact. In Schwäbisch Gmünd, closest area to Stuttgart it was a real challenge as the farms were way more massive than I had initially been exposed to (45 hectares) and were over 200+ with orchids, pasture, as well as gardens but that reflects the food demands of the population in the neighboring area (Stuttgart). We had multi year contracts with several high end grocery stores and mills (Rapunzel Naturkost) and other Gmbh's we sold wholesale to that made other products with the fruits and vegetables coming from the farm where I worked at. We were horribly understaffed with little to no prospects of hiring more people, it was just 3 of us in the Winter and Spring seasons, and by Summer I had better opportunities to explore in Italy and Switzerland (with offers of culinary work and management roles) so I took them. All this really made me think was that the this very viable model needs to be brought up to the 21st century as the vast majority of Ag has to be automated, the labour shortages are the thing holding it back the most, once that's achieved there is a massive boon waiting to happen to farmers to help optimize their distribution models and increase profits with B2B models with an emphasis on localized community supported based farms. I'm now more focused on supply chain optimization, having now fully retired from Kitchens and Farming as I destroyed my body doing so by my 30s, but I'm glad I did it as more people are moving into this space: one of my old team members at the Kitchen just launched his own gellato shop using re-captured losses in the food supply chain in Boulder after having been flown to Barber's place in NY. I'll plug his spot in my food series if I ever get it going as we spent lots of nights talking about our collective times farming and the impacts it has on the overall Supply Chain and Food Security as a whole. For further consideration check out this recent Joe Rogan podcast with Joe Salatin [2], who was a pioneer of this model in the US and has gained huge notoriety for his advances. Awesome watch. 1: https://squarerootsgrow.com/ https://squarerootsgrow.com/ 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-7O3fOXXKo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-7O3fOXXKo

082349872349872 6y ago

Starting with Reagan seems optimistic; I'd blame Earl "get big or get out" Butz for your predicament. alternative meatpacking, cool automation videos https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23367350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23367350 automation (cow and pig brushes) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23474129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23474129 (off topic, but I consider HFCS sickness in food supply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23363053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23363053 )

the_omegist 6y ago

'Farm' animals are the ultimate victims because they have no voice. Too many social activists start from the top-level (humans) but I think starting from the bottom-level (nature and animals) will give the most efficient change because it has a transversal impact on every aspect of human life. If more people could feel empathy toward "farm" animals, all other social problems would start being solved.