They’re still not wrong. The difference between what they get paid for a potato and what I pay for a bag is quite extreme.
I think it’s quite a bit different than say, gasoline vs barrel of oil, or iPhone at Bestbuy vs what Apple gets paid, or lower-end clothing.
I get that potato is low value/lb, but I’m thinking the same applies as you go up the value/lb for raw things.
Also, transporting, washing, sorting, storing are all scalable but not free, and these are important parts of the easy availability for the end customer. Then, storage is not preserving 100% of produce, some of it inevitably withers or spoils, and handling this is also not free.
Potatoes are only dirt cheap if you buy them in bulk on the farm, then store in your basement, and sort and handle yourself. This is a lot of work and time spent, I've seen such an approach firsthand.
Financially efficient. Trucking a ton of food 100 miles is worse for the environment than trucking it 10 miles.
> There is no where near enough farms close to NYC to meet NYC’s food demands.
It doesn't have to be just within the nearest few miles. My general point is that shortening logistic chains is a good thing. Is this a controversial idea? Just because its cheaper to ship products from China or food from Latin America, doesn't mean its better for the environment. It means that capitalism's cost model is completely detached from the actual environmental costs.
(This is part of why I'm so strongly in favor of carbon taxes:. It means businesses can continue to be optimizing for lowest cost, and the tax reconciles places where cost and environmental impact currently diverge)
Even then distance is a terrible measure on it’s own. Suppose a local farmer drives 100 lb of food 25 miles to a farmers market in a 25 MPG truck. They just spent 1 gallon per 100lb of food. A semi driving 2000 miles at 6.5 MPG is moving 34,000 pounds is at 1 gallon per 110 lb of food. And that’s just the surface a farmer needs to drive his truck home, where semi’s try to have useful cargo on the return trip. Granted the farmer might haul more food etc, but the semi could haul more and probably isn’t traveling that far etc.
Further distribution chains aren’t about a single good, grocery stores for example get bulk delivery of multiple goods from distributors. When you include people driving to a farmers market who also drive to a grocery store, farmer’s markets often become much worse for the environment than the giant logistics chain their trying to improve upon.
The real solution is to add taxes for the externalities you care about not simply wing it via feel good assumptions.
As for economies of long distance transportation, this is as a result of investment into those forms of transport as a result of centralised bargaining power and economies of scale. It's not like long distance transport has an inherent efficiency benefit over short distance, it's just more amendable to centralization.
Efficiency in long distance transportation is inherently a function of scale. Very quickly you find it’s often more environmentally friendly to do longer distances with full loads than short distances with nearly empty or much smaller trucks/trains/boats/ etc. A farmer > collection point > train to regional distribution points > truck to local distributor works. A farmer isn’t going to say fill up a train on his own, and a train stop per farm isn’t going to work.
At the outer end N to M transactions between distributors with one product sending to different distributors with multiple products works. A grocery store getting deliveries from hundreds of farmers runs into issues especially when people want out of season fruits and vegetables.
The downsides of this model is it’s difficult to supply goods that decay quickly. A farmers market physically next to the farm can sell fresh food that would never work in a grocery stores supply chain. But people driving to every farm is a different inefficiency thus seasonal farmers markets.
True - I think we're better-served in some areas by consciously avoiding pure market competition in service to ideals like fair compensation or environmentalism.
> Efficiency in long distance transportation is inherently a function of scale. Very quickly you find it’s often more environmentally friendly to do longer distances with full loads than short distances with nearly empty or much smaller trucks/trains/boats/ etc. A farmer > collection point > train to regional distribution points > truck to local distributor works. A farmer isn’t going to say fill up a train on his own, and a train stop per farm isn’t going to work.
True. What I'm talking about is shortening logistic chains though, not increasing distribution of logistics. Maybe a farmer's market is a bad example because typically the farmers drive their own crops to market - I was thinking an alternative to supermarkets where rather than the accumulate-transport-distribute pipeline that you described, sale happens directly after accumulation of goods into a locally-central store or market. That accumulation can happen the same way it does now, but you remove or reduce the international shipping and distribution from ISO containers that's inherent to a global market with subsidised transport.
Not only extreme, but also obscene.
I recall in the late 90's someone described the poor profitability of potato growing in large tracts of the USA, and it sounded impossibly low - in the order of hundreds of dollars per acre.
Sad but true -- while revenue per acre may be ~$2500, costs are ~$2000 [0]
There's probably an on-topic observation to be made here about the past century or so spent driving subsistence farmers off arable land, monoculture, soil destruction, leading to an objectively unsustainable potato farming industry (in the sense of throwing more Joules into the working of the land, than you are getting out of it).
[0] https://www.farmprogress.com/story-potatoes-profitable-risky...