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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Production is cheap because it's massive and economies of scale apply, but distribution is not because it works with every customer inevitably. Every customer in a supermarket needs to interact with a cashier.

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.

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The operations you cite aren't free, but they aren't the reason that costs of food for consumers dwarf payments made to farmers. Distribution is not a free market. Farmers sell to monopsony, and consumers buy from monopoly. Firms like Tyson, JBS, Cargill, etc. are not the immense size they are in order to create efficiency but rather to extract rents from abusive market positions.

Many companies buy directly from farmers or actually own farms. This however isn’t a major cost savings. Those distributors are actually doing a lot of work relative to the effort needed to produce it at a farm. Consider even just someone driving a semi truck from Idaho to NYC takes over 30 hours of labor one way and roughly transports one acre worth of potatoes. That’s excluding loading, packaging, unloading, etc or any effort needed to actually sell to each customer.

Of course, none of this would be necessary without the idea that produce grown anywhere should be available everywhere. You don't need all that infrastructure if the potatoes you buy are from a farmer's market and were grown a few miles outside town.

In 90s in my country it was a norm to buy potatoes directly from farmers. Many would find it funny that in richer places people pay more buying it washed, and sorted. However, as economical circumstances enhanced majority of urban dwellers started to pay more for washed, and sorted (and often imported, because you can't guarantee high quality of yield in any given year, at any given place) potatoes. You still can buy directly if you like, but nowadays it's mostly for students, and unsupported seniors. I don't know, maybe there's some sort of cartel conspiracy in US food trade, but consumers paying more for intermediary services is universal phenomenon. Likely after reaching some economical threshold, it becomes easier to spend for a bit of free time, and comfort.

I have no issue with people paying for processing, only the part where you're buying potatoes from a supermarket that came from another country when there's a farmer growing the exact same thing a few miles away. Reducing logistic complexity is both an inherent good for the environment and places distributive power in the hands of farmers to form a market or a distribution union or whatever form is applicable locally.

There is no where near enough farms close to NYC to meet NYC’s food demands. Buy local can work depending on the local climate, population density, etc but it isn’t inherently more environmentally friendly. Large scale food distribution networks are extremely efficient where farmers markets high markups often mean inefficient practices behind the scenes. At the extreme end you get indoor farms for produce which takes vastly more energy and resources than using sunlight on a farm thousands of miles away.

> scale food distribution networks are extremely efficient

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.

Distance is just a really bad proxy for environmental impact, though. Larger trucks are more efficient than smaller ones, rail is much more efficient than trucking, and shipping is much more efficient than rail.

(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)

Logistic chains are being optimized and thus shortened behind the scenes as a cost saving measure.

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.

Taxes for externalities do not solve power imbalances caused by centralisation.

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.

Power imbalance is a function of capitalism, they can setup a setup a cooperative but the prices wouldn’t change much. The issue is if they sell a commodity in bulk they get a bulk commodity pricing.

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.

> Power imbalance is a function of capitalism

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.

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