"Organic" Farming and the True Cost of Food-A Small Farmers Perspective

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113. [AGAIN]=> Nice excuse for pricing food too high...

... for actual working people.

(You can read the original here http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021878760#post16 , too... keep reading).

Funny, I was talking about this with a farmer friend of mine (his family runs a big dairy).

His family used to produce milk and to a local cheese factory which sold cheese in this area.

Both his farm and the cheese factory employed local people, but the pay was not high... it was only what you would pay working folks who work in those operations.

Well, some big size cheese operation in an entirely different part of the country began selling cheese in his area.
The cheese was a lot cheaper.
The big operation used its size and location to source milk from many sources around it in a bulk fashion that made all of its milk purchases mad cheap. Then on top of that, because their materials cost and production costs were lower per unit (due to their scale), they could afford to transport their cheese across the country to my friends town.

Working families can't afford to make the choice of paying 50% more for the local cheese than the stuff from the big operation. The lower price lets them afford other things their kids need.

The result:

* The local cheese factory shut down, meaning local cheese factory jobs lost.
* Without the cheese factory, my friend lost a big customer... had to lay off staff and switch to automation to keep things profitable.
* Everybody had cheaper cheese... both the people who still had jobs and the folks who didn't.

My friend says the situation sucks all over... but there is no easy solution.

It's really hard to convince regular working people and the poor to pay more when they have so many priorities to manage... when every penny counts they have to make every penny count.

We can't ask them to pay more like that.
My friend is a farmer who does environmental stuff on the mad scale (we looked at the two farms that are in the family via Google Earth... yeah... that mad scale)... and they couldn't win against a big corp.

And frankly, the only folks I see affording to pay 50%, double, or triple for free-range fair-trade whatever are people who have enough extra money to afford to drink $5 lattes with their $5 slice of cake any day of the week and not have to work weekends.

You know: people who already have money.

And frankly, I can't afford it either.

When the eco-farmers get together and make their stuff affordable for me, I'll be there.

But, I'm not holding my breath.

I already have a farmer friend who laments this same thing... and he can't see how he could ask the people around him to pay more.

Note on my friends farm: They totally an entire circle of life operations. They grown the feed for the cows, chickens and pigs. Has a really incredible map of how he takes the inputs of some systems and feed them into others and how he times extraction of resources to feed other systems. He totally runs no inputs from the outside world. So, this is not some lightweight we're talking about with just 100 or 200 head of cattle here.

So, I'm sticking to my imported beef.
In my case, here in Japan, I was able to buy American beef just this weekend for less than half the price of Japanese beef. It was imported into Japan... from America... by Walmart.

(Yes... I found the irony a mind blower, too).