Which is why for example more dairy farms are turning milk into goods to sell direct to market. For a much higher price than selling raw milk to supermarkets. Another example are Pig farmers moving into high end Charcuterie.
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Has anyone ever bought 3 cucumbers at once?
- Thread starter T4tomo
- Start date
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Which is why for example more dairy farms are turning milk into goods to sell direct to market. For a much higher price than selling raw milk to supermarkets. Another example are Pig farmers moving into high end Charcuterie.
Slick
Guru
Definitely my ignorance, but I had to Google that term, as I am but a peasant. Genuine question, how do pig farmers move 8n to that particular area?
Andy in Germany
Guru
- Location
- Freiburg im Breisgau
The most obvious cooperatives locally are the wine growers; many villages have a wine growers cooperative with a little warehouse on the edge of the village. These also work with a larger cooperative: just outside Breisach I often pass the massive Baden Wine Growers Cooperative building which has the size and architectural beauty of a nuclear bunker.
We also have the Raiffeisen cooperative suppliers for farmers, of which one is just around the corner and sells everything the farmer may need from food and clothes to equipment. I like going there just because of the novelty of visiting a supermarket that sells tractors.
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Normal though trying and refining different recipes. Some courses are around giving the basics , others read up on it , some go off to Spain and other placers to learn. For some they have a love of Charcuterie and move into farmer to "live the dream". Some good quality stuff around that can stand it's own against the best.
Slick
Guru
Is this small scale village Sunday Market stuff or is it more than that?
I just can't picture it yet.
It can be but equally it's supplying top end restaurant trade , speciality delis and farm shops. It's quality over mass market, outdoor bread and rare or unusual breads. As well as attracting a premium they get to control the quality from start to finish.
presta
Guru
In general (ie. when we don't have the current shortages), the surplus in the market will drive prices down until sufficient farmers go out of business to limit the surplus. It's the farmers' perpetual misfortune that unlike most other sectors of the economy, people can't eat more food when productivity improvements increase the supply*, so unless productivity improvements cease, neither will the farming redundancies. 500 years ago it took 58% of the population working in agriculture just to feed everyone, now it's just 1%, and that can't do anything but continue, because in a competitive market everyone is forced to seek productivity improvements.
The supermarkets could offer higher prices of course, but what then? So long as the surplus remains, by the time the supermarket buyer has finished placing all the orders there will be some farmers left with no customer. What are they going to do, throw in the towel or ring the buyer and offer a discount if he'll give them the business instead? And when those farmers have won the contract by offering a discount, what will the ones who have just lost out do, if not undercut the farmers who have just stolen their customer?
By the time the farmers have finished their Dutch auction, prices have ratcheted back down to where they were in the first place, and some still remain on the verge of going out of business. You can also repeat exactly the same argument with supermarkets undercutting other supermarkets as consumers look for the cheapest food. That's why I said that the farmers' enemy is the other farmer, just as the supermarket's enemy is the other supermarket. A cooperative is an agreement among suppliers not to compete with each other in this way, which is fine as long as regulators tolerate anti-competitive practices.
(*People can't eat more, but they can 'consume' more by wasting it, which is why we also have a quarter of all food going to waste in the UK. With such high levels of food waste, higher prices would be a powerful incentive for consumers to reduce it, but farmers might ask themselves what would happen to their profits, and agricultural employment levels if Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's food waste campaign were successful at removing 25% of their trade. This issue with economic growth is at the root of the hole we've dug for ourselves with the environment, and if we're going to get out of it, we'll have to get used to working less and consuming less. Unemployment needn't be iniquitous if we find ways of sharing the diminishing work fairly instead of leaving some with no job at all.)
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Reynard
Guru
- Location
- Cambridgeshire, UK
This is a point I've been making for a fair old while now. The fact that even the basics have really gone up in price, with some things almost doubling, it might make people think twice about throwing perfectly good food away, and thus reducing what is, really, quite a significant problem. I heard it quoted recently that the average household throws out about £60-worth of food a month.
That's a fair bit of wodge (and food) - I can visualize that, because my typical main shop is around about that mark, and usually fills one of the small trolleys. I spent £65 last night, but admittedly a fair bit of that was on yellow sticker.
Perhaps food has been too cheap for too long (for whatever reason), and people simply don't respect it. Of course no one likes to spend more on groceries than they absolutely have to, but if anyone remembers the first series of "Back in Time for Dinner", they mentioned that in the 1950s, the average household spent some 30% of the income on food, and by the time we get to the Millennium, that had dropped to 10%.
Although I'm not sure whether farmers and profits actually go hand-in-hand...
