
Small farms in New York are experiencing a surprising boom - elorant
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/nyregion/small-farms-ny-coronavirus.html
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karl11
Small, local, and diverse are antifragile qualities - farms with all their
eggs in one basket are suffering, and those with optionality and flexibility
are thriving. Like many things in life.

~~~
coldcode
In the US there are three major meat producers that dominate the market and
thus when they go down, so goes the meat. Europe on the other hand has lots
and lots of smaller producers, often focused on the local area, and no one
dominates. Right now in Europe there is no meat shortage. Distributed
production is less likely to be disrupted. It's less cost effective (from a
pure business perspective) but much more robust in the face of problems.

~~~
itronitron
Worth mentioning as well that the cost of meat in an EU grocery store is
comparable to that in the US. However you aren't likely to find the super-
cheap 'CostCo/WalMart' class of meat in the EU.

It wouldn't surprise me if the fast food industry in the US has basically
driven the smaller producers out of business by giving the larger producers
better efficiencies.

~~~
toasterlovin
Minor nitpick: Costco does not sell cheap meat. They don’t sell cheap
anything, really. They sell high quality products in bulk, which makes them
less expensive than buying comparable quality products at other retailers. But
there is a whole class of low quality products that you simply will not find
at Costco.

~~~
juped
That's a major nitpick! And accurate - Costco is the best way to source
expensive high-quality meat as a mere individual consumer.

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mcv
I wonder how this compares with the situation in Amsterdam. I have no big
numbers, but a lot of the better Amsterdam restaurants use small-scale[0]
local organic produce, and since the lockdown, you can now order a box of
random local produce that would normally have gone to those restaurants. They
contain lots of interesting stuff (we order one every week), and they also
made a special Mother's Day breakfast box.

Of course we also order delivery from those restaurants to help them stay in
business. I have no idea how well they're doing, though.

[0] Small scale is probably relative. They're not massive factory farms, but
they're well known and you find their products almost everywhere. They don't
sell their own products at a stand at a market somewhere, so maybe they're
medium-scale.

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ilamont
This works if you're close enough to the rich farmer's markets and suburban
customers around NYC. Vermont cheese makers, which also once supplied the
restaurants of New York and Boston, have had a different experience. This
comes from an email newsletter published by someone on the Vermont Cheese
Council (who urged recipients to spread the word, so I am sharing it here):

 _As restaurants in NYC and Boston started closing their doors, specialty
cheese shops and wholesales distributers that sold artisan local cheeses
started simultaneously seeing 50% drops in sales overnight. I started calling
cheesemakers around Vermont to learn how the situation was impacting them. My
job took a turn, shifting from trying to support best practices for makers in
Vermont to trying to ensure that as many makers as can are able to get through
the COVID-19 impact without shuttering their businesses.

I try to call a few cheesemakers every day to see how they are doing, and
we’re facing a range of challenges. Some are trying to reduce cheese
production, so that production doesn’t exceed demand. This means reducing
incoming milk quantities, which means diverting milk produced by dairy animals
to another buyer (since those animals keep producing milk every day!) or, in
some cases, selling animals off. Others are facing stock issues: Limited aging
spaces – meaning that if they continue to make cheese and can’t sell it,
eventually their aging spaces will fill, and their animals will still continue
to make milk … and they will be back to the previously expressed need to
reduce incoming milk.

Alongside the production challenges, there are other issues. The gooey, runny,
high moisture texture that makes camembert-style cheeses a delight to enjoy
also comes with a short shelf life. These cheeses often need to be eaten
fairly quickly when they are ripe, or they will quickly deteriorate in quality
beyond where one would want to eat or sell them. For those makers who focus on
making these softer cheeses – they have inventory that is sitting in aging
cellars without its usual consumer audience.

... So to summarize the situation, it’s like this: Imagine we had a three lane
highway going into NYC with cheese instead of cars, then two lanes closed
down. We have … a massive cheese traffic jam. We (Vermont Cheese) would
normally sell hundreds of thousands of pounds of cheese from our mid- and
smaller-sized makers over the next four months…and currently we are selling
around half (or perhaps less than that) compared to what we’d normally sell.
On other words, we have a BIG cheese traffic jam – one that will grow to
likely be hundreds of thousands of pounds of cheese if people don’t buy it –
or if makers don’t stop making it (and again - the milking animals will keep
producing milk ...)._

Online sales can only go so far. Some people won't order online, and certain
produce and dairy products are not suited to UPS deliveries, especially when
the temperature rises. Unless more distant producers can make the long round
trip to the NYC and/or work out wider grocery distribution, they're going to
suffer.

~~~
whathappenedto
As a solution, I would love to see more food supplies and restaurants selling
larger bulk amounts at discount. That could bring in a new set of consumers,
and reduce the number of trips/exposure.

A restaurant could sell 10 meals worth for 10 * original_price * 0.5 and make
more per order plus use up more ingredients. Farms could sell cheese by 5lb
packs, eggs by the dozen dozens, meat by 10lb packs, etc.

It's not worth the whole ordeal of going to a restaurant to get a small
portion of food, pay the same price as a sit-down experience, and be hungry
again in a few hours.

~~~
bearer_token
You're onto something. I've been wanting this for years, regardless of current
conditions.

A lot of people meal prep for the entire week. Restaurants could fill in for
that.

Something like [https://www.eatclub.com/](https://www.eatclub.com/) but for
home, and delivered in bulk.

~~~
whathappenedto
Yes, exactly. Like catering, but also with the intention that maybe you're not
going to eat it all at once, so something that stores well for a day or two in
the fridge would be ideal.

In frugal times, going to a sit-down restaurant is insanely expensive compared
to a good at-home meal. A typical sit-down restaurant is like $60 per person
including tip/tax with an appetizer and drink. For that, I can eat all 20
meals for a week if I shop sales.

The first link I found on Google
[[https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2019/05/16/survey-shows-
how-o...](https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2019/05/16/survey-shows-how-often-
americans-dine-out/)] says that almost half of Americans basically never dine
out or do take out. Only 10% eat out in any form 4-6 times a week. So there's
definitely space for something in between for the home consumer.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>A typical sit-down restaurant is like $60 per person including tip/tax with
an appetizer and drink.

Where do you live? We typically pay $30-$40 for a particularly nice night out
at our favorite restaurant. Cheaper stuff runs more in the $10-$25 range. And
we're in Boston!

~~~
flowerbeater
Seems a bit low. Isn't a drink already $7 a beer, or $12 a cocktail there?
That's $10 and $15 with tax+tip respectively, leaving very little for the
entree plus appetizer...

~~~
eli_gottlieb
If you're going to expensive gastropubs, sure, but not if you're in a proper
neighborhood hole in the wall.

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flyingfences
NPR also published an article [0] on the same topic this morning, which is not
behind a paywall.

[0] [https://www.npr.org/2020/05/10/852512047/as-food-supply-
chai...](https://www.npr.org/2020/05/10/852512047/as-food-supply-chain-breaks-
down-farm-to-door-csas-take-off)

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niftylettuce
If you're in NYC, check out our farm-fresh service, OurHarvest.

[https://ourharvest.com/?coupon=HACKERNEWS](https://ourharvest.com/?coupon=HACKERNEWS)

Coupon code "HACKERNEWS" gets you 25% off first order.

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engineer_22
New York's dairy farmers are PAYING to dump their milk. Demand has slackened
to the point that they are bottling it and giving it away and even paying
waste water treatment plants to dispose of it.

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fastball
"surprising"

Uh, is it though?

