Some commentators here have difficulty of understanding how small farming can be profitable. It’s relatively easy to explain.
They are not selling just the product. Just like microbreweries, small farms sell for people who want more than just a beer or lettuce. They want to distinguish themselves and buy the feeling of authentic life and values. Consumer pays more for “small farm” even if the product is not any different from neighboring farm product that is not marketing itself as “small farm”.
Modern consumer marketing sells identity, lifestyle, and values. There is no reason why small farm products can’t create value from association and self–identification just like Pepsi is not selling sugar water or Nike is not selling sneakers. Everything that is sold using words classic, authentic, natural, original can be more expensive for segment who wants those tings.
Traditional farmers who produce standard grain or milk in bulk quantities are selling for different market segment.
.. The local product is typically more expensive because it’s production is less efficient (if it wasn’t, it would just compete with the non-local product at regular market conditions). Being less efficient means using more inputs per output, so what is the local farmers inputs, and — crucially — where are those inputs made? Is he using his not-locally-made tractor less efficiently? Is he paying a mortgage to a non-local financial institution? Is he sourcing his feed, seeds, fertilizer, fuel etc locally? And of his profit, how much of it is he spending locally?
.. These are difficult numbers to work out exactly, but it’s not difficult to see that they have to be in a pretty thigh range for your local-premium to actually, on the net, drain resources from the community, compared to you just eating cheaper meals a bit more frequently. The main type of input that most obviously support the local community is labor, and most modern products, particularly agriculturally, are rather light on labor, so you might end up supporting one job at the farm in favor of three jobs at the diner. Especially if the farm-job is held by a “highly educated, ex-urban, first-time farmer” and the diner-jobs by single moms, it’s getting morally quite dubious.
But to wrap this up, local to non-local is rarely apples to apples. Just as with organic, there’s probably a very substantial overlap with meeting a demand for products that are simply better (and thus more expensive), with the nominal quality (local, organic) actually being secondary.
.. If you’re buying a better product for a price you’re considering fair, you’re not meaningfully “buying local” – the product you prefer just happens to be locally produced (and possibly can only be locally produced).The kind of buying local that you need campaigns to encourage people to do, is generally either more expensive or poorer quality than the non-local alternative.
What the parasites in a defector’s stomach tell us about North Korea
North Korea spends 22 percent of its gross domestic product on the military.
.. A Newsweek headline put it more succinctly — and brutally: “North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is starving his people to pay for nuclear weapons.”
.. many North Korean defectors to the South have shown up infected with parasites.
.. That’s partially because North Korea lacks chemical fertilizer, and many farmers rely on human excrement to fertilize fields.
.. In a 2014 study, South Korean doctors checked a sample of 17 female defectors from North Korea and found seven of them infected with parasitic worms
.. Finding worms inside a soldier who once guarded one of the most scrutinized borders in the world is especially telling, a sign that North Korea’s food woes affect military members, who typically have a higher ranking on the food-rationing list.
What the proposed 20% cut in farm subsidies mean for your grocery bill
Further, even if the Trump budget cuts were to increase market prices for crops and livestock, the effects on prices paid by consumers for their groceries would be modest.
The reason: most of the costs of putting food on supermarket shelves come from transportation, processing, and marketing expenditures. For example, payments to farmers for wheat account only for about 6% of the cost of a loaf of bread. Even relatively large increases in wheat prices would translate into modest increases in the price of a loaf of bread. So hypothetically, even if the Trump agricultural subsidy cuts were to increase agricultural commodity prices (which they wouldn’t), the effects on the food bills of U.S. consumers would be very modest.
What would the Trump budget cuts achieve? They would save taxpayers about $48 billion over the next 10 years and reduce U.S. farm-sector revenue by about 1%, scarcely an event that would cause the sector to collapse.
It would have negligible effects on food prices and food security.
Moreover, the impacts of the proposed cuts would be concentrated among the largest corporate farm operations and would have no impacts on the rural working poor and low-income farmers.
Ultrafiltered Milk Sparks a U.S.-Canada Trade Battle
The dispute over the protein product, used primarily for making cheese, could have ripple effects in global dairy markets
U.S. dairy farmers and processors in Wisconsin, New York and Minnesota have been hurt by a newly adopted Canadian pricing policy that encourages Canadian dairies to buy certain types of milk products domestically. The specific product in the trade dispute is a milk-protein concentrate called ultrafiltered milk that is used primarily in cheese-making to increase yields.
In 2016, the U.S. exported $102 million in ultrafiltered milk to Canada, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department. But industry observers estimate that exports have dropped to near zero since February, when Canada created a nationwide dairy classification that lowered the price of Canadian milk used to make ultrafiltered milk.
.. “If you take Nafta away, all of a sudden it gets more expensive to sell U.S. agriculture products,”.. Nafta has been very good for U.S. farmers, Mr. Newton says, and pulling out could have all kinds of negative effects, such as Mexico shifting corn purchases from the U.S. to South America, or losing an important market for rice... Because Canada has relatively strict dairy policies and a supply-management system that controls the amount of milk that reaches market, experts say U.S. milk tends to be cheaper than Canadian milk... the demand from Canadian cheesemakers for U.S. milk proteins like ultrafiltered milk, a relatively new milk protein that was developed well after Nafta was put in place.There are no explicit terms in the treaty for dealing with ultrafiltered milk, since it doesn’t fit into any of the dairy chapters that existed when Nafta was signed... “We have been producing more and more milk in the upper Midwest, and we’ve reached a point where other processors are full to the gills,”.. “For the industry, there is not going to be much of an impact,” Mr. Gould says. “But for individual farmers, it will be devastating.”