The Sickness in Our Food Supply
I just love this is now starting to get the attention, this has been a worry that has robbed me of sleep and been main focus in my Life for over a decade now. But beneath my optimism is a sense of woeful regret of missed opportunities had more brilliant minds focused on this problem as there is so much potential for loss capture and cost savings that could enable a post-scarcity paradigm to occur; one that I think could potentially have  massive impact on Greenhouse emission and climate change.<p>I&#x27;ll try to speak on these issues as I have a background in Ag and culinary and focused on locally sourced farm to table models. I also worked at BMW and VW in supply chain during some of the most mission critical things in their History (specifically Diesel-gate Tdi buyback at VW).<p>&gt; But, frankly, citation needed. Small farmers can&#x27;t just call up their local supermarket and say &quot;hey can you take a field&#x27;s worth of arugula off my hands? No sorry I don&#x27;t have any way of packaging it into retail portions, I&#x27;ve always sold in food-service size bags to restaurants.&quot;<p>It may be anecdotal, but I can offer some insight here; the challenges you are talking about come down to margins, a small local farm doesn&#x27;t have to go through a myriad of complications that come with multi-national corporations like Tyson that rely on a federated system of distribution from regions to central processing, warehouses, temperature controlled freight etc... in this way the economies of scale issue is reduced and a B2C (or farm to table if you prefer more apt jargon) can enhance total bottom line profits as it reduces the losses of having to sell at wholesale to retailers.<p>I&#x27;ve personally gotten 50:50 pricing model to am upscale local health food store that was in direct competition with Whole Foods when I ran a farm in Hawaii, and had it not been for the long stranding community outreach program that was there before I did this would have never been possible. Its more often 10:90 for other things in my experience on other farms who supply to large retailers&#x2F;wholesalers, the conventional dairy in the dorf where I managed a smaller farm in Switzerland had something similar that required 3 generations of family members to work on the farm as well as have day jobs comes to mind. Whereas we could charge 11 CHF for a bottle of Biodynamicly grown apfelmost (Apple Juice) we grew and bottled on site next to their farm.<p>Moreover, Community Supported Agriculture models are great ways to finance the growing season(s) and raise capital, savings and help reduce future CapEx in future seasons if we have seasons like this years, where many farms have sold out their CSA and beef&#x2F;pork harvests by early Spring. Mainly due to the food shortages that occurred due to relying on the complex supply chain mentioned in the article.<p>&gt; And for cities of a certain size, &quot;buying local&quot; is an impossibility anyways. I live in New York City. The land required to feed us would stretch hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles around... where there are already smaller towns and suburbs that mostly fill the space. Which is why we source our food from all over the country and world.<p>Not entirely true, perhaps right now, yes; but look at projects like Square Roots [1] that is primarily focused on sending container gardens to NY, specifically in Brooklyn to try and combat this issue. Its actually a pilot test for future Mars colonization and a way to rely on local food sources. But NY has a myriad of models that have proved you can in fact have a direct Farm to Community model if the incentives are aligned, look into Dan Barber&#x27;s work at Blue Hill. Or Thomas Keller&#x27;s work with the French Laundry and Per Se (In NY), these are focused on restaurants but that&#x27;s just a matter of scale, you can do that to an entire community if it avails itself.<p>I did my Biodynamic farming apprenticeship in Europe specifically because that model has been refined and unchanged for millennia to feed its population despite being from California and it&#x27;s rich Agriculture History and technological advances that makes it possible to feed not just the US but a lot of the rest of the World. I wanted to understand localized food supply chains and distribution models.<p>Its really crazy to see how a Network is built around a farm, like a cell the Farms are usually the nucleus and everything is built around them. I wasn&#x27;t farm from Alsace and Stuttgart in Southern Germany and after several trips to both regions to see what was occurring at that scale the model was still intact. In Schwäbisch Gmünd, closest area to Stuttgart it was a real challenge as the farms were way more massive than   I had initially been exposed to (45 hectares) and were over 200+ with orchids, pasture, as well as gardens but that reflects the food demands of the population in the neighboring area (Stuttgart).<p>We had multi year contracts with several high end grocery stores and mills (Rapunzel Naturkost) and other Gmbh&#x27;s we sold wholesale to that made other products with the fruits and vegetables coming from the farm where I worked at. We were horribly understaffed with little to no prospects of hiring more people, it was just 3 of us in the Winter and Spring seasons, and by Summer I had better opportunities to explore in Italy and Switzerland (with offers of culinary work and management roles) so I took them.<p>All this really made me think was that the this very viable model needs to be brought up to the 21st century as the vast majority of Ag has to be automated, the labour shortages are the thing holding it back the most, once that&#x27;s achieved there is a massive boon waiting to happen to farmers to help optimize their distribution models and increase profits with B2B models with an emphasis on localized community supported based farms. I&#x27;m now more focused on supply chain optimization, having now fully retired from Kitchens and Farming as I destroyed my body doing so by my 30s, but I&#x27;m glad I did it as more people are moving into this space: one of my old team members at the Kitchen just launched his own gellato shop using re-captured losses in the food supply chain in Boulder after having been flown to Barber&#x27;s place in NY. I&#x27;ll plug his spot in my food series if I ever get it going as we spent lots of nights talking about our collective times farming and the impacts it has on the overall Supply Chain and Food Security as a whole.<p>For further consideration check out this recent Joe Rogan podcast with Joe Salatin [2], who was a pioneer of this model in the US and has gained huge notoriety for his advances. Awesome watch.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;squarerootsgrow.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;squarerootsgrow.com&#x2F;</a><p>2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4-7O3fOXXKo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4-7O3fOXXKo</a>