
The first high-resolution map of America’s food supply chain - benryon
https://www.fastcompany.com/90422553/the-first-map-of-americas-food-supply-chain-is-mind-boggling
======
dredmorbius
Clickbait title is clickbaity.

Direct link to paper:

"Food flows between counties in the United States"

Xiaowen Lin, Paul J Ruess, Landon Marston and Megan Konar

Published 26 July 2019. Environmental Research Letters.

[https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab29ae](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab29ae)

(Original link and title from: [https://www.fastcompany.com/90422553/the-
first-map-of-americ...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90422553/the-first-map-of-
americas-food-supply-chain-is-mind-boggling))

And the map in question:

[https://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/14/8/084011/downloadHRF...](https://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/14/8/084011/downloadHRFigure/figure/erlab29aef5)

Viewable online (above link downloads):
[https://imgur.com/gallery/E7eaf7l](https://imgur.com/gallery/E7eaf7l)

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jasonjayr
That imgur link is wrong ....

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dajohnson89
could've been worse.

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SiempreViernes
Should have been a rick roll in my opinion, but nobody got my joke so far : /

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teej
HN isn't typically responsive to jokes.

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gpm
HN is typically responsive to jokes that are on topic, technical in nature,
and/or make a good point. Rickrolling is none of those. As an example this
joke [0] I made is currently at 6 upvotes despite being burried pretty deep, I
can't see how many upvotes the joke it is a reply to has, but it is clearly
highly upvoted (it probably has many more upvotes than my reply).

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21411080](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21411080)

~~~
tzs
> HN is typically responsive to jokes that are on topic, technical in nature,
> and/or make a good point.

Also jokes that others can use as a launching point to nerd out about
something.

E.g., I once made a joke about how the ships in the old days were some of the
most efficient forms of transportation ever, because they got thousands of
miles per galleon.

dredmorbius responded [1] with a short essay on the history of marine
propulsion over the last couple of centuries, and how sail has many advantages
over powered ships. Many others jumped in with long, thoughtful, well
documented posts full of naval nerdery.

My joke got about 70 points, probably because people appreciated the
responses.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7736579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7736579)

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jnurmine
My takeaway from this is that the logistics network is very brittle and
contains many weak points:

"A disruption to any of these [nine] counties [in California] may have ripple
effects for the food supply chain of the entire country."

and

"... a lot of grain produced throughout the Midwest is transported ... via the
waterways of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

The infrastructure along these waterways ... have not been overhauled since
their construction in 1929. They represent a serious bottleneck ... If they
were to fail entirely, then commodity transport and supply chains would be
completely disrupted."

It would be interesting to know if the food logistics network of other
countries have a similar scale-free topology with a handful of very important
nodes and overlooked, but critical infrastructure. I'm guessing yes, they do.

~~~
Mountain_Skies
Fresh produce is sensitive to logistic snags but aren't grains much more
robust and thus able to better withstand delays caused by temporary
infrastructure failures?

~~~
bluGill
Only if it is temporary. A worst case lock failure will knock out river
transport for years. Eventually you run out of wheat on the other side of the
failure. Of course there are options, but they are vastly more expensive (ie
thousands of trucks).

~~~
protomyth
Rail will take over for barge before they would use trucks.

~~~
bluGill
Rail will try, but doesn't scale as fast: tracks are not always running in the
right direction, and the best maintained tracks are already busy. Eventually
rail can have more capacity, but trucks can scale faster.

~~~
hollerith
>tracks are not always running in the right direction

If the alternative is to let the grain rot, it does not matter much what
direction the tracks run in; all that matters is that the the rail network
connects some destination willing to buy the grain with where the grain is
now.

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sizzzzlerz
I don't think most Americans appreciate just how much of the food they consume
originates in California. Not just California, but in 6 or 7 counties located
in the San Joaquin valley. I grew up in the middle of it in Tulare County and
even I don't grasp the multibillions of dollars agriculture brings in. In the
event of some megadisaster which cause the valley to stop producing or
something happens to the transportation infrastructure on a massive scale,
there will be a lot of empty produce bins and grocery shelves in the US and
they won't be quickly refilled.

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retzkek
A project idea I've toyed with is "Where does X come from?", which would show
someone, to some approximation, where the things they buy and consume
originated, and the path they took to get there, and where their waste goes.
Mainly this is inspired by my own curiosity, but also desire to better
understand the impact my decisions have on the world.

I haven't pursued it due to lack of time and expectation that acquiring and
reducing the data would be a monumental effort, but this looks like a good
source for "where does [food item] come from", and has some useful-sounding
source databases for tracking other items.

Some other resources I'd want to include: water, sewer, trash, electric (at
least where the lines are and nearby power generation), and gas.

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brozaman
A few days ago I was listening to an interview on the radio, and the man said
that Spain had a very inefficient food supply chain becuase the food would
travel across provinces. He said that if the provinces would be able to self
supply about 80-90% of their own food that would reduce massively the CO2
footprint. He gave some numbers which I don't remember, but they were quite
massive.

Texas alone has a bigger surface than Spain, I wonder how much pollutes the
transport of the food alone and how much could be avoided by producing food
locally. The whole thing seems pretty wasteful...

~~~
lotsofpulp
People would have to stop expecting to be able to eat all vegetables and
fruits at all times. Going to be a hard sell, especially in the northern half
of the US that doesn’t grow anything in winter.

~~~
bmcooley
Improved local production doesn't have to reduce variety by necessity.

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thrower123
A county in Delaware being on the top ten for food inflow seemed odd. I assume
this must be including raw grain, because the only thing notable about that
county is that it apparently is nothing but chicken coops[1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sussex_County,_Delaware#Econom...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sussex_County,_Delaware#Economy)

~~~
tejtm
Could it be because Delaware is a preferred location due to corporate tax
laws? Please note that in this case, this is a non-rhetorical question on my
part. Transportation and tax shelters are out of my areas of interest. just
wondering if the graphs may be of parent company post office box numbers
instead of loading dock addresses.

~~~
bluGill
No, it is probably chicken coops. I'd guess that one country is responsible
for most of the eggs in New York, all those eggs going out means a lot of
chicken food going in.

Corporate tax laws just mean any significant company has an official address
in Delaware, which amounts to a private post office that gets official mail
for a few hundred companies and forwards it to the real headquarters which
isn't in Delaware.

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amatthew
I'm currently doing a literature review for a research project closely related
to this exact topic. And they say reading HN is a waste of time! ;)

But seriously. This is a great example of what a lot of other research also
points to: the growing vulnerability of the US food system to systemic
existential risks due to geographic specialization, market consolidation, and
decrease in network resilience of local food systems. This is important stuff.
Glad to see food systems pop up here.

~~~
v77
What risks are these? When was the last serious food shortage in North
America?

~~~
amatthew
Absolutely. But that's the not box to think in to see the problem. Sure, we
haven't had that happen in recent memory. Soooo... if there _were_ to be a
problem then, that means it wouldn't look what like we think "food problems"
should look like. What we see doesn't determine the problem space, the problem
space suggests ways we may need to change our viewing angle.

By the time you're responding to a catastrophe there have already been system
level changes happening for quite some time before that kind of observable
"phase transition" from normal function to disaster even occurs.

We've gotten increasingly better at producing a particular type of highly
optimized food and distributing it through just as optimized Just in Time/LEAN
systems. Which is great and allows you to carry less "inventory waste" \-
we've managed to get down to now keeping about 75 days worth of food reserves
globally - HOWEVER, the trade off to that type of efficiency is that
introduces new sources of risk. It (by definition) removes a ton of redundancy
from the system and severely decreases the resilience of the total system to
any sort of shock - let along multiple coincident ones.

THAT then brings in our outdated ways of conceptualizing, preparing for, and
mitigating risks across functional and geographic areas. If you're dealing
with an issue as complicated the global food system it's not productive to
just have individual risk calculations with insurance/consumer pricing baked
in for _individual_ scenarios. For example, in any particular area there may
be an x% chance of a 1000 year flood. So if there are 5000 of those
communities and the total system would have been able to withstand some number
of 1000 year floods distributed between them in a normal year, what happens
when you factor in that, for instance, our climate "context" is different than
when lots of infrastructure was built? What's the ability of the system to
withstand the normal amount of thousand year floods when you add in climate
effects that may both cause more events and make each event more
severe/destructive and there also happens to be a "bad year"/5-10% reduction
in (mostly monoculture) cereal crop output or a case of African swine fever
that kills 300 million pigs in China. Now factor in the systemic changes and
consolidation leading to less redundancy in the food system and you've got a
hard risk management problem on your hands.

A few case studies that may be interesting:
[https://www.bu.edu/pardee/files/2017/03/Multiple-
Breadbasket...](https://www.bu.edu/pardee/files/2017/03/Multiple-Breadbasket-
Failures-Pardee-Report.pdf) [https://www.fcrn.org.uk/research-
library/lloyd’s-emerging-ri...](https://www.fcrn.org.uk/research-
library/lloyd’s-emerging-risk-report-2015-food-system-shock-insurance-impacts-
acute)

A _great_ video about food/ecological systems and co-benefits:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with...](https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish?language=en)

------
pkaye
How come the midwest is not in the outflows chart? I thought there was a lot
of agriculture there?

~~~
dajohnson89
also why isn't the central valley of California featured? pretty sure they
produce more than los angeles county.

~~~
snerbles
Fresno, Tulare (home of the World Ag Expo), Stanislaus, San Joaquin, Merced,
and Kern counties are all on the top food outflows list and in the Central
Valley of California.

EDIT - for a total outflow of 53.9 billion kilograms of food. Of course, this
includes any flows between these counties.

------
ryanmarsh
I was surprised to find that my county (Harris, TX) was one of the nine
counties "most central to the overall structure of the food supply network".

Not much farming happens in this county, nearly zero industrial farming. In
the few spots of undeveloped land a few people have some cows, mostly for tax
purposes. One more thing, Harris encompasses most of the greater Houston
metropolitan area. It's mostly city and suburbs. So what gives?

"We did this by looking for counties with the largest number of connections to
others"

Ok, well there's very little farming in the surrounding counties relative to
California and the corn belt. We're quite a ways from the Rio Grande valley
(which does have quite a bit of farming).

So this still doesn't make sense.

~~~
mogadsheu
It's probably a major importer then

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SaintGhurka
From the article:

"At over 17 million tons of food, Los Angeles County received more food than
any other county in 2012, our study year. It shipped out even more: 22 million
tons."

I think that statement is backwards. The graphic shows Los Angeles with an
OUTFLOW of 16.6b and an INFLOW of 21.9b.

~~~
ladberg
Yep, I'm assuming the graphic is right because it makes zero sense that a
metropolitan area could somehow grow more food than it needs.

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Merrill
It doesn't look like there is enough flow eastward across the Appalachian
Mountains to the heavily populated eastern seaboard.

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madengr
There is a giant flow from KS to gulf coast TX. I assume those are grain
exports?

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kodablah
Always disappointing to see counties used for comparison. Also disappointing
to see totals instead of per-capita values.

~~~
bl4ckneon
Per-capita doesn't make sense in this case. This is about the total flow of
food. It again wouldn't make sense to say that a small town in the middle of
no where with say 100 people who have the highest per-capita food export when
in total they aren't even a drop in the bucket in importance to somewhere in
CA or the Midwest that is an agriculture power house and accounts for most of
our total food production.

~~~
kodablah
But total flow is skewed when one county is an order of magnitude bigger than
another in size. If you are going to compare counties which are not a fixed
physical size, you at least need to account for differing physical size's
effects on population or you can't reasonably compare. Were the counties a
quarter of their current physical size, capita split and all, would they still
appear as significant?

