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Large farms enjoy economies of scale that small farms can’t meet. Additionally, container shipping has to be one of the greatest innovations of the last century

• _heimdall 3y ago
  I don't have time to dig deeply into both links at the moment but I can reply to the Vox article and research it links to. That article actually makes my point. The consideration for comparison is exclusively the potential for reducing transportation a related emissions. No consideration is given to any externalized costs. The research assumes that local farms will have effectively the same farming practices and that emissions on the farm will remain unchanged. They assume that feed consumption will be the same, even though local farms more often graze their animals as much as possible and will use much less feed than feed lot operations. They even ignore the infrastructure required to make transportation work. They assume that the containers, trucks, freezer warehouses, grocery stores, etc. already exist that and that the emissions caused by creating and maintaining all that infrastructure can go ignored.