
Too Much Food in the Wrong Places - jelliclesfarm
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2020/04/03/826006362/food-shortages-nope-too-much-food-in-the-wrong-places
======
aazaa
The closure of big distributors such as restaurants means that big orders get
cancelled. These cancelations cause a glut at the point of production.

However, the article fails to mention the role that agricultural subsidies
play in the oversupply. Regarding dairy in particular, consider:

> "... in 2015, the support granted to U.S dairy producers represented
> approximately C$35.02/hectolitre - the equivalent of 73% of the farmers'
> marketplace revenue. USDA data also reveals that US dairy farmers operate at
> a loss, and have a cost of production that is higher than what they earn
> from the marketplace."

[https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/american-
dai...](https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/american-dairy-
farmers-depend-on-government-subsidies-1015126442)

This has been happening for decades, leading to artificially suppressed food
prices and market distortions across many categories.

~~~
mjw1007
Historically, one of the main purported justifications for agricultural
subsidies has been to ensure that insert-country-name-here can be more nearly
self-sufficient if some crisis comes along to make importing food difficult.

That doesn't sound too silly today.

~~~
heurifk
It does sound silly if the food is left to rot on fields.

Maybe we should also subsidize food transportation and storage or something.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
It has to be harvested first.

------
zanny
Its 2020 and we still have farmers destroying crops rather than having some
sensible state backed cost floor price guarantee to just buy excess and
distribute it freely. You can definitely guard against exploitation by doing
the math on what the maxima is between the volatility of pegging it to market
prices vs the delay in using historical means.

I'd much rather get a quart of state milk once or twice a year for free while
paying .2% more sales tax than having usable food destroyed.

~~~
dehrmann
They're destroying crops because there's a surplus due to changes on the
demand side. What they do with crops isn't all that important right now, as
long as there's government support so that they replant next season.

> I'd much rather get a quart of state milk once or twice a year for free
> while paying .2% more sales tax than having usable food destroyed.

Once you realize wasting food isn't bad and a surplus actually implies
resiliency, that statement is just confusing to read. Governments subsidizing
farmers to overproduce so that shocks to the system don't cause famines is a
_good_ thing. That just means there's either waste or obesity.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Except here the demand for food didn't disappear, it shifted from HoReCa
(hotels/restaurants/catering) to groceries. People don't suddenly need less
food during a pandemic, so the food that rots on the field now is that much
less food in peoples's bellies.

~~~
droithomme
> the demand for food didn't disappear, it shifted from HoReCa
> (hotels/restaurants/catering) to groceries

The demand for food didn't change but the kind of food changed a lot.

I'm a heavy purchaser of fresh produce. I've completely stopped purchasing
most produce because these are in open bins at the market and I see people
with grey skin who are obviously infected staggering around and coughing and
sneezing on everything. I'm not convinced I can sufficiently sterilize things
like lettuce and broccoli. I'm still buying carrots but remove it from its
bag, destroy the bag, thoroughly wash, and only eat as cooked. Avocados I wash
in soapy water, then spray with 90% alcohol. Lettuce though needs to go in the
fridge, at which temperature any virus sneezed on it lives indefinitely. So
for me no lettuce, no premade salads, no deli products. No problem, I have
about 200 sq ft of garden with lettuce and many other things at present, and
am adding about 200 sq ft per week to this, and will continue until I have
about a quarter acre. this should be enough for me and for the neighbors that
otherwise might attack and raid should things get that bad. I've got 30 tomato
seedlings staged of 3 different species and these will go in the ground soon.
In the past 3 tomato plants have given me huge numbers of tomatoes all summer
long. This year I'm going for 10x that. I also have a greenhouse under
construction, for managing next year.

Now what if some others are like me? They maybe aren't eating that lettuce,
demand is down. Looking around, everyone I know is planting gardens right now.
Baking bread is the new thing since there were actual bread shortages here in
the US of all places. Not the Soviet Union. At present yeast can't be found.
So everyone has their own sourdough starter and is basically manufacturing
their own yeast.

The pattern of what people buy has _dramatically_ changed.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
If you are planning to be self sufficient, might I suggest that you also
consider growing millets.(if your growing zone allows it)...growing grain is
tricky but a hundred foot row of millet is a worthy experiment for this year.

------
lisper
There might not be food shortages, but something hinky is definitely going on
with the paper product supply chain. I have not seen a single roll of TP or
paper towels on a shelf anywhere in my area (San Francisco Peninsula) since we
went on lockdown on March 16.

~~~
sbuttgereit
Hoarding is an interesting phenomena... you start with some people panic
buying supplies unreasonably. That runs supplies low... now, a person that
otherwise might not hoard at the first sign of crisis rationally must do at
least a little so since they may not be able to get their supplies as usual...
which in turns amplifies it all. If you went to the store and they happened to
have TP would you take the opportunity to buy it, need now or not? I probably
would unless I already had few weeks on hand.

I live in the bay area, too... and I have a Target who's front door is about
200' from my front door. I have seen TP and paper towels... but it goes very
fast when it's there. Of course, I called our close by friends as soon as I
saw the stock and I'm sure others did as well. It was gone very quickly. If
that's happening everywhere. Reductions in logistics capacity will also
contribute to the slowness of getting some of this stuff to store shelves
regardless of production capacity.

Until you start seeing "shelter in place" orders lifting, I think this is only
the start of the consumable goods problem.

~~~
ghaff
I did something similar with flour yesterday. I was in a grocery store getting
mostly dairy and some other perishables I was starting to run a bit low on.
But I saw a solitary 5# bag of King Arthur flour and grabbed it. I wasn't out
at home but I was down to a few pounds of all-purpose flour so it seemed
sensible to grab some more while I had the opportunity. I'm sure a lot of
people are acting that way.

~~~
nitrogen
This is exactly how people act during normal times, isn't it? Or are people
really running on such thin margins that they have to shop every few days?

~~~
ghaff
I think most people normally run on thinner margins. Personally, I probably
end up with more food etc. in the house than I need during normal times. Even
so, I've definitely picked up some things that happened to be available which
weren't really at my usual informal restock level yet. I'm talking about
things that I probably have a good 2-3 week supply of and getting some more
anyway.

ADDED: Part of it is that a lot of people in cities don't have a lot of
storage space. Furthermore, a lot of people also can't really afford to lay in
large quantities of products rather than picking up enough to last a week or
so when they run out.

------
sudosteph
My mom, who's from a town in the Appalachian mountains in NC, was just telling
me about how she and her sisters would can tons of vegetables in the summer
because there were times in the winter when they would get snowed in for weeks
because the roads weren't safe. That surprised me because she didn't even grow
up that long ago, she was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s.

I had always pictured canning as a thing people did in the twenties, not in
modern era (unless they were hipsters), or just something that had to be done
in a factory. But now I'm sitting here wondering, if it's so easy a bunch of
kids could do it without poisoning themselves - why can't farms can the excess
food themselves? I get that some stuff (canned powdered milk from the article)
is harder to do locally, but we still did it with worse technology for many
years.

Is it a regulation problem, are they not allowed to? Is it economics - are
human-canned goods worth less than the cost of paying people to pick+can? Is
it too hard to get canning supplies / train people to can on short notice? Do
the grocery stores have deals with certain brands of canned foods that would
prevent them from introducing locally canned items?

It's just interesting because while I've only been out shopping twice in the
past month, both times the canned good aisle was hit much harder than the
fresh produce section. I know this is a temporary thing, but it just feels
like preserving food is something that has been done effectively on a local
scale for so many years - it seems weird to let good food rot because large-
scale canning factories can't keep up with demand.

~~~
dehrmann
Your story halfway answered your own question. You preserve food because you
need it later (say, for the winter), not because you have a surplus. As long
as production keeps up (and governments will try hard to make that happen) and
food processing isn't severely impacted by social distancing, no one will ever
want all that canned food. If food production does break down, the concerns
are staples, not squash, tomatoes, and peppers.

~~~
TeMPOraL
If food production does break down, all that surplus of canned goods would
mean cheaper food and healthier meals for everyone. There's argument to be
made for canning the surplus on the grounds of derisking. Doubly so, given
that the calamity isn't hypothetical - we're right in the middle of it.

~~~
dehrmann
> that surplus of canned goods would mean...healthier meals for everyone

Canning tends to use lots of sugar or salt.

> There's argument to be made for canning the surplus on the grounds of
> derisking

You need staples in this scenario, not pickles.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Canning tends to use lots of sugar or salt._

Extra sugar = lots of extra calories = good in times of food shortage.

> _You need staples in this scenario, not pickles._

Canned veggies _in addition to_ staples would ensure more calories are around,
as well as access to wider range of nutrients and more taste variety.

------
fovc
Is there a robust but economical alternative to our current supply chain?

I've been looking at local CSAs and most seem to be doing fine right now, but
the pricing is way higher than in the supermarket (even comparing it to
organic, grass fed to grass feed, etc.).

Are the economies of scale so large, or is it more of a segmentation issue? If
CSAs weren't such a niche would it be feasible to bring costs closer to
supermarket levels?

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Co-operatives or farm hubs with reliable stream of income.

It is not that CSAs are expensive. It’s that most people pay less for
industrially grown food.

Supermarket tomatoes are uniform, thick skins, picked when green and gassed
them red, grown in thousands of acres, mechanically harvested, grown broadacre
with chemicals and trucked thousands of miles by palletfuls.

How can you compare that to food grown in ten acres, harvested by hand and has
the shortest distance from soil to kitchen and usually done by hand because
true mechanization, automation tech and economies of scale hasn’t reached
small farms.

The consumer has to make a stand and be willing to pay what food is worth.
That our food is cheap is what fuels many of the woes of the world.

~~~
pdonis
_> The consumer has to make a stand and be willing to pay what food is worth._

Most consumers can't afford to. The solution is not to make everyone pay a lot
more for food; it's to figure out how to produce healthier food cheaply enough
that most consumers can afford it.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
As long as population increases, production from fixed resources that are
dwindling should cost more.

Ag depends on labour. Right now cheap food doesn’t come from better production
but from economies of scale to a certain extent but mostly by hedging and
importing from poorer countries where labour is cheaper.

Such a supply chain is unstable and unreliable. We will see food shortages in
places like America as imports will fall short and labour dries up. The farm
workers are the most vulnerable population. Most will likely be infected
during this crisis and will contribute to community spread. Because there is
no one willing to work as hard as them at such low wages, ag is going to come
to a screeching halt in the coming seasons.

~~~
pdonis
_> production from fixed resources_

 _> Ag depends on labour._

Labor is not a fixed resource. Also, ag does not _have_ to depend on labor. It
does now because, as you say, the supply chain is currently set up to take
advantage of the cheap labor which is available in many places. But it doesn't
have to be set up that way.

