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Isn't centralized agriculture more efficient on a calories-per-acre basis? You even say that you can't raise as many cattle as industrial cattle production. Als

Isn't centralized agriculture more efficient on a calories-per-acre basis? You even say that you can't raise as many cattle as industrial cattle production. Also, the more people we can feed with land in places like the US Midwest, the less land we need to use in places like the tropics which are more important from a biodiversity standpoint.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago
Yes but we are past the point where calory price is the problem. That's solved. Now we need better food.
- mym1990 3y ago
  A calorie is not indicative of nutrition. I can eat 10 pop tarts a day for a few bucks but it has little to no nutritional value.
  - throwaway894345 3y ago
    That's the parent's point.
SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
Centralized agriculture is not necessarily more efficient compared to localized agriculture, because centralization introduces additional machinery, transport costs, pesticide/fertilizer research/production/shipping etc etc. centralized agriculture is actually a huge resource suck compared to localized methods, which puts a huge thumb on calorie-per-acre net.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  How does labour costs compare? As in amount of living wage labour per calorie?
- lukas099 3y ago
  On the other hand, it's easy to teach a few large farmers best practices from ag and soil science. The more decentralized agriculture becomes, the more individuals have to educate themselves. Do you trust your next door neighbors to become ag scientists to be good stewards of their land?
  - Calamitous 3y ago
    > Do you trust your next door neighbors to become ag scientists to be good stewards of their land? As someone who lives in a rural/agricultural area, yes.
    - circlefavshape 3y ago
      As someone else who lives in a rural/agricultural area (in Ireland), definitely not
  - defrost 3y ago
    As it happens, yes. She is an ag scientist and and damned good one to by all accounts, co owner of a regional ag consulting group. For that matter the chap down on the corner is in the grain seed ANOVA business, he has thousands of test plots all over the wheat belt region. What's always happened here is that everybody multi skills - not everbody is an ag scientist, but everybody knows someone who is - ditto diesal mechanics, well borers, drone operators, tractor hackers, silo builders, etc.
  - artificialLimbs 3y ago
    >> Do you trust your next door neighbors to become ag scientists to be good stewards of their land? I expect the people intending to produce good, healthy, and natural food to be more able to do so than those who follow FDA standards with the sole intention of making money.
  - throwaway894345 3y ago
    The problem with industrial farming isn't an education bottleneck, it's an incentives bottleneck. Family farmers treat the land like a legacy to be passed onto their children--they don't necessarily know that they're depleting the land, and as such education is a bottleneck. But industrial farmers know they're exploiting the land to make as much money as quickly as possible. They're perfectly happy to exhaust the soil because they can make a bunch of money and still sell the depleted land for a profit later on. Educating small farmers is a big task but it's at least actionable--I have no idea how you could go about making corporations care less about profit than they do about sustainability.
- throwaway894345 3y ago
  Centralized-vs-distributed is mostly a matter of efficiencies of scale vs transportation, and efficiencies of scale almost invariably win. Pesticide/fertilizer/etc are all orthogonal (there's nothing preventing local farmers from using pesticides and fertilizer). In particular, the machinery costs per acre are lower for centralized agriculture than for distributed agriculture, but the transport costs are higher (although not as high as you might think because the costs of moving things around the country are shared broadly--not just by food producers). Besides machinery, personnel costs are much lower for centralized agriculture. There are a lot of advantages to local agriculture, but 'cost' isn't one of them. I would like to live in a world where more food is grown locally, but that means we have to solve (and not ignore) the cost problem--how do we afford the additional machinery, personnel, etc costs that are passed along in food prices without pricing out poorer people?
throw9away6 3y ago
Absolutely is. Especially in meat production where you can have good quarantine practices in factory farms and test at scales. We choose not to because fda has no teeth but we could and it wouldn’t add much cost
cfn 3y ago
It is not possible to compete on price with feed lots, only on quality. Feed lots are more efficient if the only thing you're measuring is weight of meat per acre.
- flagrant_taco 3y ago
  Unfortunately that is how the industry works though. There are small niches for providing high quality meat and dairy, but the market is tiny in comparison and can't come close to competing on price. Regulation is also a big blocker. It's not even legal to sell raw milk for human consumption in the US, and for red meat it all must be processed by a facility regulated by either the state or federal government (depending on if the cuts of meat will cross state lines). If you've ever seen how USDA processing facilities operate, its far from what anyone would consider humane and if you would rather not eat meat that was sprayed with bleach you have to look somewhere else entirely.
  - cfn 3y ago
    You are right, it is a small market. I am surprised about the raw milk, though, I read of places in the US that sell raw milk, cheese, etc. Maybe it is legal in some states? I also heard of companies that go to your farm to put down your cattle (also in the US) so you don't have to send them to a slaughterhouse. Again, niche stuff but nice to know it exists.
flagrant_taco 3y ago
> Isn't centralized agriculture more efficient on a calories-per-acre basis That's exactly the problem, the entire industry is built on metrics that revolve around calories and poundage. The calorie is an absolutely useless metric by itself and says nothing of nutritional value. Similarly, a pound a beef is not always the same and nutritional value can vary wildly depending on how the animal was raised. Moving all production to one place like the US Midwest only externalizes the costs for everyone else. Centralizing that dramatically leaves the Midwest in a huge whole with regards to input requirements - they have to ship in fuel, fertilizer, feed, etc from other areas. Not to mention the cost of processing, preserving, and shipping that product back to customers hundreds or thousands of miles away.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

Yes but we are past the point where calory price is the problem. That's solved. Now we need better food.

mym1990 3y ago
A calorie is not indicative of nutrition. I can eat 10 pop tarts a day for a few bucks but it has little to no nutritional value.
- throwaway894345 3y ago
  That's the parent's point.

SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago

Centralized agriculture is not necessarily more efficient compared to localized agriculture, because centralization introduces additional machinery, transport costs, pesticide/fertilizer research/production/shipping etc etc. centralized agriculture is actually a huge resource suck compared to localized methods, which puts a huge thumb on calorie-per-acre net.

Ekaros 3y ago
How does labour costs compare? As in amount of living wage labour per calorie?
lukas099 3y ago
On the other hand, it's easy to teach a few large farmers best practices from ag and soil science. The more decentralized agriculture becomes, the more individuals have to educate themselves. Do you trust your next door neighbors to become ag scientists to be good stewards of their land?
- Calamitous 3y ago
  > Do you trust your next door neighbors to become ag scientists to be good stewards of their land? As someone who lives in a rural/agricultural area, yes.
  - circlefavshape 3y ago
    As someone else who lives in a rural/agricultural area (in Ireland), definitely not
- defrost 3y ago
  As it happens, yes. She is an ag scientist and and damned good one to by all accounts, co owner of a regional ag consulting group. For that matter the chap down on the corner is in the grain seed ANOVA business, he has thousands of test plots all over the wheat belt region. What's always happened here is that everybody multi skills - not everbody is an ag scientist, but everybody knows someone who is - ditto diesal mechanics, well borers, drone operators, tractor hackers, silo builders, etc.
- artificialLimbs 3y ago
  >> Do you trust your next door neighbors to become ag scientists to be good stewards of their land? I expect the people intending to produce good, healthy, and natural food to be more able to do so than those who follow FDA standards with the sole intention of making money.
- throwaway894345 3y ago
  The problem with industrial farming isn't an education bottleneck, it's an incentives bottleneck. Family farmers treat the land like a legacy to be passed onto their children--they don't necessarily know that they're depleting the land, and as such education is a bottleneck. But industrial farmers know they're exploiting the land to make as much money as quickly as possible. They're perfectly happy to exhaust the soil because they can make a bunch of money and still sell the depleted land for a profit later on. Educating small farmers is a big task but it's at least actionable--I have no idea how you could go about making corporations care less about profit than they do about sustainability.
throwaway894345 3y ago
Centralized-vs-distributed is mostly a matter of efficiencies of scale vs transportation, and efficiencies of scale almost invariably win. Pesticide/fertilizer/etc are all orthogonal (there's nothing preventing local farmers from using pesticides and fertilizer). In particular, the machinery costs per acre are lower for centralized agriculture than for distributed agriculture, but the transport costs are higher (although not as high as you might think because the costs of moving things around the country are shared broadly--not just by food producers). Besides machinery, personnel costs are much lower for centralized agriculture. There are a lot of advantages to local agriculture, but 'cost' isn't one of them. I would like to live in a world where more food is grown locally, but that means we have to solve (and not ignore) the cost problem--how do we afford the additional machinery, personnel, etc costs that are passed along in food prices without pricing out poorer people?

throw9away6 3y ago

Absolutely is. Especially in meat production where you can have good quarantine practices in factory farms and test at scales. We choose not to because fda has no teeth but we could and it wouldn’t add much cost

cfn 3y ago

It is not possible to compete on price with feed lots, only on quality. Feed lots are more efficient if the only thing you're measuring is weight of meat per acre.

flagrant_taco 3y ago
Unfortunately that is how the industry works though. There are small niches for providing high quality meat and dairy, but the market is tiny in comparison and can't come close to competing on price. Regulation is also a big blocker. It's not even legal to sell raw milk for human consumption in the US, and for red meat it all must be processed by a facility regulated by either the state or federal government (depending on if the cuts of meat will cross state lines). If you've ever seen how USDA processing facilities operate, its far from what anyone would consider humane and if you would rather not eat meat that was sprayed with bleach you have to look somewhere else entirely.
- cfn 3y ago
  You are right, it is a small market. I am surprised about the raw milk, though, I read of places in the US that sell raw milk, cheese, etc. Maybe it is legal in some states? I also heard of companies that go to your farm to put down your cattle (also in the US) so you don't have to send them to a slaughterhouse. Again, niche stuff but nice to know it exists.

flagrant_taco 3y ago

> Isn't centralized agriculture more efficient on a calories-per-acre basis That's exactly the problem, the entire industry is built on metrics that revolve around calories and poundage. The calorie is an absolutely useless metric by itself and says nothing of nutritional value. Similarly, a pound a beef is not always the same and nutritional value can vary wildly depending on how the animal was raised. Moving all production to one place like the US Midwest only externalizes the costs for everyone else. Centralizing that dramatically leaves the Midwest in a huge whole with regards to input requirements - they have to ship in fuel, fertilizer, feed, etc from other areas. Not to mention the cost of processing, preserving, and shipping that product back to customers hundreds or thousands of miles away.