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This is also a great defense against something like bird flu. When you centralize operations a disease can spread through a population like wildfire. When it's

This is also a great defense against something like bird flu. When you centralize operations a disease can spread through a population like wildfire. When it's a number of smaller, separate operations the impact is lessened.

SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
Really raises the question - should vital infrastructure, like food production, be built in an attempt to maximize profit or resiliency? Have things swung too far in one direction?
- financetechbro 2y ago
  Feels like we’ve swung exceedingly far. Our drive to capture efficiencies through economies of scale make us very vulnerable to systematic disruption
  - Karellen 2y ago
    > Our drive to capture efficiencies through economies of scale Is that what's happened here? It looks to me more like the billionaire/PE class's drive to capture rents through monopolies is a more accurate lens to view the situation through. Especially as it's the trope namer for chickenization https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chickenization https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chickenization https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/ https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenize... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chickenization&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chickenization&ia=web
    - graemep 2y ago
      I think both are true. It also goes far beyond farming - it applies to many supply chains.
- afavour 2y ago
  To my mind there's no question that it's swung too far. But it's very easy for me to live in the country and say "oh I get all my fresh produce from the local farm!" when there are cities of millions of people that need feeding too. Scaling while retaining resiliency is not easy.
  - jghn 2y ago
    I live in a city and buy most of my fresh produce, meat, and dairy from local farms.
    - phil21 2y ago
      Which is not scalable for the entire big city. My parents are organic market gardeners, and there is simply no way that model could scale up enough to feed that many people cheaply. Food budgets would have to go back to the 1940's or earlier - where they were a significant fraction of take home pay. Now they are almost a rounding error comparatively. I don't necessarily think that would be a bad thing. A lot of the asset price inflation like homes can be tracked to food and consumer goods taking an increasingly lesser portion of the family budget. Re-balancing this seems wise to me.
      - jghn 2y ago
        You put your finger on what I think is the real issue: whether or not access to cheap food is a net benefit or not. I also won't claim to have the perfect answer but do feel we've gone at least a bit too far in one direction.
        cj 2y ago
        I think we've only "gone too far" in the sense that cheap food also means unhealthy food, generally. Access to cheap food would be wonderful if it were healthy! Unfortunately the cheapest food is typically the worst food for your health.
        2y ago
- codemac 2y ago
  In many cases maximizing profits increases supply through efficiency, especially in the case of things like food. Increased supply is usually considered a safer place than a lower supply if it's vital. Every step you take that makes food more expensive, some use cases of food are no longer possible (say, free eggs in all elementary schools or something). How many of these uses are we ok eliminating so the wealthier population has a more consistent/resilient supply?
- epistasis 2y ago
  > built in an attempt to maximize profit or resiliency I think framing it as an either/or is a bit of a mental trap. They are sometimes in opposition, sometimes not. For example, those farms which were not resilient are not maximizing their profits, since they've had more than a year of warning of avian flu. They were operating to minimize work and costs, not maximize profit, and they are losing out on a ton of it right now. Those operations which built with resilience, or got lucky, are swimming in profits right now.
  - Chabsff 2y ago
    The issue with that reasoning is that it fails to take into account that risk is a commodity now. It's often more profitable to go for short term profit and offload your risk to an insurer who amortizes that monetary risk in a pool containing a bunch of other industries. For critical services like food production, that's a problem. "Well, we don't have food, but it's okay because screw production went well" doesn't make sense socially, but our system makes it so monetarily.
    - epistasis 2y ago
      I'm not sure in what sense you mean risk is a commodity, and why it's a problem. I'm also unsure what changed to make it so now, as opposed to having ever been so. Those who actually took risk into account and planned accordingly have profited wonderfully. Those who did not take risks into account lost their bet. Eggs are priced higher for some, but are pretty much available everywhere still, and have not dipped below some sort of minimal level of availability. In California, past shortages were far far worse than this one, and even then the egg shortages were in no way catastrophic to the economy or health of humans. Of all the times in history, ever, we are at the lowest possible risk of famine. Instead, our abundance of high calorie food is the biggest risk to the health of Americans. So I would like to understand your point a bit more if you have the time to elaborate.
      - mlyle 2y ago
        > Those who actually took risk into account and planned accordingly have profited wonderfully. I don't know why you're saying this. Imagine I'm investing. If I "take risk into account" and select stocks anyways, I may lose a bunch of money one year. But I expect to make more on average than bonds. Looking at a year where bonds excel compared to stocks doesn't mean that I failed to "take risk into account." Likewise, a conventional producer of eggs that has now had a significant downturn in production may be having a bad year, but this doesn't mean that they're not following a profit maximizing strategy or not taking risk into account. > Of all the times in history, ever, we are at the lowest possible risk of famine. I think this is making the same kind of mistake: looking at today's outcome and assuming that reflects the risk picture. We're not observing too much famine right now. But we could certainly have a more of a risk of the most catastrophic possible famines now because of things like monoculture, critical links in production, climate risk, etc. Just looking around and saying "all is great today" or "conventional egg producers are having trouble today" or "stocks are down 15% for the year" does not capture the picture of risk, particularly for rare events. The best we can do is try to interpret sentinel events like this one and think about what else can happen.
- bluGill 2y ago
  1000 years ago we were much less resilience, and that despite farmers then optimizing for that and not profit. (read acoup.org for long discussions on what farming was really like over different times in history)
- conradev 2y ago
  A surprisingly large amount of the United States' crop yield comes from rain falling on non-irrigated fields (85%). Our biggest crop is corn, and corn is very water-sensitive at specific points in its growth. There is no infrastructure to protect there – only infrastructure to build (irrigation), for better resiliency.
- tshaddox 2y ago
  Surely “profit versus resiliency” is solely a matter of time preference.
  - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    True. It's really a matter of maximizing profit when measured between quarter. Resiliency isn't a factor in that equation.
- stickfigure 2y ago
  > be built The passive voice is disingenuous. Do you buy local farm products? You vote with your wallet. Make your choice, like everyone else.
- concordDance 2y ago
  Profit works very well if there are many food sources with uncorrelated problems. Still works fairly well as long as capital owners are smart and use insurance (who in turn advise their users on how to reduce their risk).
- Frost1x 2y ago
  We as thoughtful human beings can consider non-extreme points where we find other optimizations that aren’t necessarily around profit or resiliency. We can create a new metric called “human progress mertric” where we consider profit as a strong driver but also put weight on things like resiliency and allow profit to slide a bit so our real goal is better achieved. Rarely ever, IMO, are worthwhile goals entirely profit optimized or resiliency optimized. Some blend tends to be best, and sometimes you can even have both simultaneously (they’re not always inherently mutually exclusive, although those taking in the winnings may want it to be).
lowbloodsugar 2y ago
Profit of course! And only short term profit! Don’t want any of you eggheads trying to constrain profit to the goal of not killing all our customers!
oceanplexian 2y ago
Actually the inconvenient truth is that it's not. Free range birds are able to interact and spread the disease more easily than the caged birds which can be quarantined. At least in my location all the cage free inventory is totally wiped out.
- mplanchard 2y ago
  That’s not at all the case here (VT). The local sellers are essentially all pasture-raised, free-range, etc., and their eggs are the only ones in stock. I have read some posts from them talking about the various ways they keep segments of the flocks separated, and they are being quite careful about any outside access. Edit: I guess also the birds are indoors much more anyway, given the winter. It's 11 F here today, so probably they're huddled up inside :)
  - mothax 2y ago
    My half-dozen chickens in my yard in VT are hardy and out and about! I get about four eggs a day, and endless entertainment from the small herd of therapods.
    - mplanchard 2y ago
      I love to hear it! I didn't realize they were so cold tolerant, but I'm glad they can still enjoy the outdoors even when the winters are as cold as this one. I'd love to get some chickens one of these days. Four eggs a day would be enough for us to regularly give away dozens while supplying all of our own egg needs.
      - talldrinkofwhat 2y ago
        If you ever get the opportunity, have a chicken perch on your finger. First thing you'll notice is much lighter they are than they look. Second thing you'll notice is how hot their feet are. A tangible lesson in the importance of surface area vs volume wrt mechanical, thermo, aero systems.
- 2y ago
aj_icracked 2y ago
Totally agree with this. After selling my last company (iCracked W12) I had been playing around with the idea of how to build the world's largest decentralized food production network - think millions of people leveraging their backyards to produce, share, and sell protein and vegetables. I've always wanted to build a company that blends smart home / AI technology with backyard agriculture and we decided to start with chickens. I have been raising chickens for 15 years and automating my coops with Arduino's, automatic doors, cameras for computer vision, etc. We spent 2 years building and designing a AI / smart coop and it's been a fascinating company to be able to build. We've trained our computer vision model on around 25 million videos and have gotten extremely good at doing specific predator detection, egg alerts, remote health monitoring, specific chickens in a coop and behaviors etc. We're at the point now where we can say, "Hey AJ, there's 2 raccoons outside your coop, the automatic door is shut, all 6 chickens are safe, and you have 10 eggs that can be collected". Super fun project and would love y'alls feedback. If you're interested in seeing what we're doing we're at www.TheSmartCoop.com
- TylerE 2y ago
  Seems interesting a bit but surely the economics are rather brutal? Even a traditional coop has an ROI of years and years and years.
  - aj_icracked 2y ago
    It's a good question - From what we've seen most suburban people that raise chickens don't do it to lower costs of eggs - they do it to have better control over the quality of food they eat, to teach their kids that you take care of the chickens, they take care of us. To eliminate food waste (avg family throws out 200+ lbs a year of food that can go to chickens, and because funnily enough most backyard farmers treat the chickens as family and pets vs just little egg-factories. Avg hen lays about 250-270 eggs a year depending on breed. So 6 chickens (our coop is designed for 6) throws off about 1500 eggs a year. Avg American eats around 291 eggs + egg products per year (which is crazy!). Most people build their coops or buy one from Tractor Supply or Amazon for $300 and day-old chicks are around $4 each and feed is inexpensive (50lb bag at Tractor Supply is $21). You can make the economics work super well if you want to but as most backyard chickens are treated as pets (I am leaving out large farms and homesteads, etc) a lot of people pamper and spend $ on their hens because it's more than just getting a lower cost egg if that makes sense.
singleshot_ 2y ago
If all the birds are in a farm, would you have more or less inter species infection than if lots of people lived close to chickens? What’s worse for the community, eggs from factories going way up in price due to supply shocks, or rapid and pervasive infection in the community?
heavyset_go 2y ago
The disease affects wild bird populations heavily and is just as transmissible to disparate flocks as it is larger flocks. Breeders tend to keep their flocks isolated, often for genetic reasons, and because they're their cash cows versus just cattle. I generally agree with you about centralization and monocultures, just in this case I don't think it's really going to change things.
mschuster91 2y ago
On top of that, large operations tend to be hell on earth from an animal welfare perspective. The air alone is toxic and hard to breathe because there's so much avian poop everywhere that is constantly decomposing.
fullstop 2y ago
I highly doubt that the farmer down the street from me is testing for avian flu. Their eggs are fantastic, though!
- azinman2 2y ago
  It spreads so fast and is lethal enough that they probably don’t need to test, because they’d know quite quickly.
  - fullstop 2y ago
    Likely. I guess if they held onto the eggs for a few days before selling them it would work. If the bird is still alive and the egg is a few days old, sell it.
palmotea 2y ago
> This is also a great defense against something like bird flu. When you centralize operations a disease can spread through a population like wildfire. When it's a number of smaller, separate operations the impact is lessened. But muh efficiency!

SketchySeaBeast 2y ago

Really raises the question - should vital infrastructure, like food production, be built in an attempt to maximize profit or resiliency? Have things swung too far in one direction?

financetechbro 2y ago
Feels like we’ve swung exceedingly far. Our drive to capture efficiencies through economies of scale make us very vulnerable to systematic disruption
- Karellen 2y ago
  > Our drive to capture efficiencies through economies of scale Is that what's happened here? It looks to me more like the billionaire/PE class's drive to capture rents through monopolies is a more accurate lens to view the situation through. Especially as it's the trope namer for chickenization https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chickenization https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chickenization https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/ https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenize... https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chickenization&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chickenization&ia=web
  - graemep 2y ago
    I think both are true. It also goes far beyond farming - it applies to many supply chains.
afavour 2y ago
To my mind there's no question that it's swung too far. But it's very easy for me to live in the country and say "oh I get all my fresh produce from the local farm!" when there are cities of millions of people that need feeding too. Scaling while retaining resiliency is not easy.
- jghn 2y ago
  I live in a city and buy most of my fresh produce, meat, and dairy from local farms.
  - phil21 2y ago
    Which is not scalable for the entire big city. My parents are organic market gardeners, and there is simply no way that model could scale up enough to feed that many people cheaply. Food budgets would have to go back to the 1940's or earlier - where they were a significant fraction of take home pay. Now they are almost a rounding error comparatively. I don't necessarily think that would be a bad thing. A lot of the asset price inflation like homes can be tracked to food and consumer goods taking an increasingly lesser portion of the family budget. Re-balancing this seems wise to me.
    - jghn 2y ago
      You put your finger on what I think is the real issue: whether or not access to cheap food is a net benefit or not. I also won't claim to have the perfect answer but do feel we've gone at least a bit too far in one direction.
      - cj 2y ago
        I think we've only "gone too far" in the sense that cheap food also means unhealthy food, generally. Access to cheap food would be wonderful if it were healthy! Unfortunately the cheapest food is typically the worst food for your health.
        2y ago
codemac 2y ago
In many cases maximizing profits increases supply through efficiency, especially in the case of things like food. Increased supply is usually considered a safer place than a lower supply if it's vital. Every step you take that makes food more expensive, some use cases of food are no longer possible (say, free eggs in all elementary schools or something). How many of these uses are we ok eliminating so the wealthier population has a more consistent/resilient supply?
epistasis 2y ago
> built in an attempt to maximize profit or resiliency I think framing it as an either/or is a bit of a mental trap. They are sometimes in opposition, sometimes not. For example, those farms which were not resilient are not maximizing their profits, since they've had more than a year of warning of avian flu. They were operating to minimize work and costs, not maximize profit, and they are losing out on a ton of it right now. Those operations which built with resilience, or got lucky, are swimming in profits right now.
- Chabsff 2y ago
  The issue with that reasoning is that it fails to take into account that risk is a commodity now. It's often more profitable to go for short term profit and offload your risk to an insurer who amortizes that monetary risk in a pool containing a bunch of other industries. For critical services like food production, that's a problem. "Well, we don't have food, but it's okay because screw production went well" doesn't make sense socially, but our system makes it so monetarily.
  - epistasis 2y ago
    I'm not sure in what sense you mean risk is a commodity, and why it's a problem. I'm also unsure what changed to make it so now, as opposed to having ever been so. Those who actually took risk into account and planned accordingly have profited wonderfully. Those who did not take risks into account lost their bet. Eggs are priced higher for some, but are pretty much available everywhere still, and have not dipped below some sort of minimal level of availability. In California, past shortages were far far worse than this one, and even then the egg shortages were in no way catastrophic to the economy or health of humans. Of all the times in history, ever, we are at the lowest possible risk of famine. Instead, our abundance of high calorie food is the biggest risk to the health of Americans. So I would like to understand your point a bit more if you have the time to elaborate.
    - mlyle 2y ago
      > Those who actually took risk into account and planned accordingly have profited wonderfully. I don't know why you're saying this. Imagine I'm investing. If I "take risk into account" and select stocks anyways, I may lose a bunch of money one year. But I expect to make more on average than bonds. Looking at a year where bonds excel compared to stocks doesn't mean that I failed to "take risk into account." Likewise, a conventional producer of eggs that has now had a significant downturn in production may be having a bad year, but this doesn't mean that they're not following a profit maximizing strategy or not taking risk into account. > Of all the times in history, ever, we are at the lowest possible risk of famine. I think this is making the same kind of mistake: looking at today's outcome and assuming that reflects the risk picture. We're not observing too much famine right now. But we could certainly have a more of a risk of the most catastrophic possible famines now because of things like monoculture, critical links in production, climate risk, etc. Just looking around and saying "all is great today" or "conventional egg producers are having trouble today" or "stocks are down 15% for the year" does not capture the picture of risk, particularly for rare events. The best we can do is try to interpret sentinel events like this one and think about what else can happen.
bluGill 2y ago
1000 years ago we were much less resilience, and that despite farmers then optimizing for that and not profit. (read acoup.org for long discussions on what farming was really like over different times in history)
conradev 2y ago
A surprisingly large amount of the United States' crop yield comes from rain falling on non-irrigated fields (85%). Our biggest crop is corn, and corn is very water-sensitive at specific points in its growth. There is no infrastructure to protect there – only infrastructure to build (irrigation), for better resiliency.
tshaddox 2y ago
Surely “profit versus resiliency” is solely a matter of time preference.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
  True. It's really a matter of maximizing profit when measured between quarter. Resiliency isn't a factor in that equation.
stickfigure 2y ago
> be built The passive voice is disingenuous. Do you buy local farm products? You vote with your wallet. Make your choice, like everyone else.
concordDance 2y ago
Profit works very well if there are many food sources with uncorrelated problems. Still works fairly well as long as capital owners are smart and use insurance (who in turn advise their users on how to reduce their risk).
Frost1x 2y ago
We as thoughtful human beings can consider non-extreme points where we find other optimizations that aren’t necessarily around profit or resiliency. We can create a new metric called “human progress mertric” where we consider profit as a strong driver but also put weight on things like resiliency and allow profit to slide a bit so our real goal is better achieved. Rarely ever, IMO, are worthwhile goals entirely profit optimized or resiliency optimized. Some blend tends to be best, and sometimes you can even have both simultaneously (they’re not always inherently mutually exclusive, although those taking in the winnings may want it to be).

lowbloodsugar 2y ago

Profit of course! And only short term profit! Don’t want any of you eggheads trying to constrain profit to the goal of not killing all our customers!

oceanplexian 2y ago

Actually the inconvenient truth is that it's not. Free range birds are able to interact and spread the disease more easily than the caged birds which can be quarantined. At least in my location all the cage free inventory is totally wiped out.

mplanchard 2y ago
That’s not at all the case here (VT). The local sellers are essentially all pasture-raised, free-range, etc., and their eggs are the only ones in stock. I have read some posts from them talking about the various ways they keep segments of the flocks separated, and they are being quite careful about any outside access. Edit: I guess also the birds are indoors much more anyway, given the winter. It's 11 F here today, so probably they're huddled up inside :)
- mothax 2y ago
  My half-dozen chickens in my yard in VT are hardy and out and about! I get about four eggs a day, and endless entertainment from the small herd of therapods.
  - mplanchard 2y ago
    I love to hear it! I didn't realize they were so cold tolerant, but I'm glad they can still enjoy the outdoors even when the winters are as cold as this one. I'd love to get some chickens one of these days. Four eggs a day would be enough for us to regularly give away dozens while supplying all of our own egg needs.
    - talldrinkofwhat 2y ago
      If you ever get the opportunity, have a chicken perch on your finger. First thing you'll notice is much lighter they are than they look. Second thing you'll notice is how hot their feet are. A tangible lesson in the importance of surface area vs volume wrt mechanical, thermo, aero systems.
2y ago

aj_icracked 2y ago

Totally agree with this. After selling my last company (iCracked W12) I had been playing around with the idea of how to build the world's largest decentralized food production network - think millions of people leveraging their backyards to produce, share, and sell protein and vegetables. I've always wanted to build a company that blends smart home / AI technology with backyard agriculture and we decided to start with chickens. I have been raising chickens for 15 years and automating my coops with Arduino's, automatic doors, cameras for computer vision, etc. We spent 2 years building and designing a AI / smart coop and it's been a fascinating company to be able to build. We've trained our computer vision model on around 25 million videos and have gotten extremely good at doing specific predator detection, egg alerts, remote health monitoring, specific chickens in a coop and behaviors etc. We're at the point now where we can say, "Hey AJ, there's 2 raccoons outside your coop, the automatic door is shut, all 6 chickens are safe, and you have 10 eggs that can be collected". Super fun project and would love y'alls feedback. If you're interested in seeing what we're doing we're at www.TheSmartCoop.com

TylerE 2y ago
Seems interesting a bit but surely the economics are rather brutal? Even a traditional coop has an ROI of years and years and years.
- aj_icracked 2y ago
  It's a good question - From what we've seen most suburban people that raise chickens don't do it to lower costs of eggs - they do it to have better control over the quality of food they eat, to teach their kids that you take care of the chickens, they take care of us. To eliminate food waste (avg family throws out 200+ lbs a year of food that can go to chickens, and because funnily enough most backyard farmers treat the chickens as family and pets vs just little egg-factories. Avg hen lays about 250-270 eggs a year depending on breed. So 6 chickens (our coop is designed for 6) throws off about 1500 eggs a year. Avg American eats around 291 eggs + egg products per year (which is crazy!). Most people build their coops or buy one from Tractor Supply or Amazon for $300 and day-old chicks are around $4 each and feed is inexpensive (50lb bag at Tractor Supply is $21). You can make the economics work super well if you want to but as most backyard chickens are treated as pets (I am leaving out large farms and homesteads, etc) a lot of people pamper and spend $ on their hens because it's more than just getting a lower cost egg if that makes sense.

singleshot_ 2y ago

If all the birds are in a farm, would you have more or less inter species infection than if lots of people lived close to chickens? What’s worse for the community, eggs from factories going way up in price due to supply shocks, or rapid and pervasive infection in the community?

heavyset_go 2y ago

The disease affects wild bird populations heavily and is just as transmissible to disparate flocks as it is larger flocks. Breeders tend to keep their flocks isolated, often for genetic reasons, and because they're their cash cows versus just cattle. I generally agree with you about centralization and monocultures, just in this case I don't think it's really going to change things.

mschuster91 2y ago

On top of that, large operations tend to be hell on earth from an animal welfare perspective. The air alone is toxic and hard to breathe because there's so much avian poop everywhere that is constantly decomposing.

fullstop 2y ago

I highly doubt that the farmer down the street from me is testing for avian flu. Their eggs are fantastic, though!

azinman2 2y ago
It spreads so fast and is lethal enough that they probably don’t need to test, because they’d know quite quickly.
- fullstop 2y ago
  Likely. I guess if they held onto the eggs for a few days before selling them it would work. If the bird is still alive and the egg is a few days old, sell it.

palmotea 2y ago

> This is also a great defense against something like bird flu. When you centralize operations a disease can spread through a population like wildfire. When it's a number of smaller, separate operations the impact is lessened. But muh efficiency!