Is $5.5M enough for a material impact? My reference point is the fact that setting up a single new farming operation that is profitable, can set you back by millions.
The focus is on co-packing and other food processing facilities.
> Using RFSI funding, the Tennessee Department of Agriculture will fund projects that increase access to commercial kitchens and co-packing facilities. Additional funded projects will expand processing capacity, including adding product types, increasing production volumes, and supporting new wholesale/retail product lines. The state’s priorities are informed by stakeholder engagement and outreach to underserved producers to better understand their needs.
I imagine they are doing grants that cover part of the costs not the whole thing. If they covered 50% of the cost and each project cost 100k, that would mean 110 projects, which is a lot in one state.
I’m more familiar with transportation grants than food grants, but I would imagine you write a proposal and get matching funds up to a certain ceiling, like 80-20 state-private up to $250,000, hypothetically. The costs on those blogs seem to refer to just furnishing equipment in a ready commercial space, though. If you’re having to develop a new site and incur construction costs, I could easily see spending $5M on a single site.
I’d think this is going to help producers upgrade or replace some existing equipment. Probably a good thing. $5.5M more than the market had, right?
I do wonder if there is some low hanging fruit on more efficiently connecting different stages of food production. Like a traveling salesman problem with getting food producers to packing.
Ahh interesting. I think I kind of expected the grant to only partially cover costs for any project. But it is very surprising to see the costs of setting up a commercial kitchen to be so low.
This is a drop in the ocean that will maybe help a few hundred mom & pop food products businesses get subsidized commercial kitchen space.
Meanwhile:
- Herbicide residues are put into food supply to save farmer's some money on harvesting
- Monoculture GMO crops create a single point of failure vulnerability to disease and pests that could lead to famine
- Big ag tells farmers they can't save their own non-GMO seed
- John Deere, the McFlurry machines of farming, tells farmers to wait for a technician to reset a sensor using proprietary software during harvest season
- The USDA doesn't regulate the entire food supply, mostly meat
- Meat agriculture is a huge contributor to climate change, pandemics, antibiotic resistance, and air, water, and soil pollution
This press release is so vague that I have trouble understanding what it is they’re actually doing.
> Using RFSI funding, the Tennessee Department of Agriculture will fund projects that increase access to commercial kitchens and co-packing facilities. Additional funded projects will expand processing capacity, including adding product types, increasing production volumes, and supporting new wholesale/retail product lines. The state’s priorities are informed by stakeholder engagement and outreach to underserved producers to better understand their needs.
So is it adding facilities that producers (of crops?) can use to go from harvesting to a product that is ready to sell? Is it because small farmers don’t have relationship with processors? Or is it that big farms do it all on their own and there is no one for small farmers to turn to?
Also what will a few million achieve when individual machines probably cost a lot more? I would think any facility would be enormously expensive to build and operate.
> So is it adding facilities that producers (of crops?) can use to go from harvesting to a product that is ready to sell? Is it because small farmers don’t have relationship with processors? Or is it that big farms do it all on their own and there is no one for small farmers to turn to?
As someone who used to work in the space, there are a lot of different ways for farmers to turn what they grow into something they sell. It can be as simple as a space at a farmer's market and as complex as a co-packer that turns fruit into jelly or chiles into hotsauce.
In the middle are commercial kitchens that let small food businesses safely make food to sell in stores and at markets. These are more expensive per unit to use than co-packers, but don't require the commitments that co-packers do.
There are also all kinds of tasks that need to happen that aren't related to food production/cooking, such as finding distributors, marketing, customer development and more. That's what "supporting new wholesale/retail product lines" means to me.
> Also what will a few million achieve when individual machines probably cost a lot more? I would think any facility would be enormously expensive to build and operate.
"The projects funded through this program will create new opportunities for the region’s small and midsize producers to thrive, expand access to nutritious food options, and increase supply chain resiliency.”
It sounds like they've identified challenges with small/medium producers being able to enter markets to compete with large producers (ie- family farms are disappearing), and it's the best way they can subsidize them without antagonizing Big Ag.
As a farmer, what we actually need is de-regulation of food production. The big four meat packers have used government regulations on "safety" to create a monopoly where it costs millions of dollars to process your own meat.
This $5.5m will disappear into the pockets of the cronies of politicians.
> The big four meat packers have used government regulations on "safety" to create a monopoly where it costs millions of dollars to process your own meat.
Could you go into what regulations you think are wrong? I am by no means an expert on the topic, but I'm under the impression that meat packing regulations exist because the meat packing industry was causing massive harm to workers, consumers, the environment, etc. I mean, high schoolers read The Jungle for a reason.
One thing that has changed in the past few years is that programs to help local farmers get organic certifications has made organic certification much more accessible to local farmers. Could there be similar programs to help smaller meat packers comply with regulation?
I'm not saying you are wrong, but there are a lot more people on Hacker News who are just against all regulation, than there are people who actually know why specific regulations exist and are against them for informed reasons.
I do not trust Big Ag. I’m convinced they’d mix hog shit in with the sausage if they thought they could get away with it - and no, I don’t support allowing the commercial sale of unpasteurized milk, either.
“ According to a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, there were 202 disease outbreaks in the US due to drinking raw milk between 1998 and 2018, leading to 2,645 illnesses, 228 hospitalizations, and three deaths. In 2017, nearly 5 percent of Americans were thought to consume unpasteurized milk products, including raw cheese, and raw dairy products led to 840 times more illnesses than pasteurized products.”
840x higher risk of food borne illness is significant.
Labeling should be enough regulation for products like this. Just make sure people can know the difference. This places the onus where it belongs, on the individual.
I don't know of any benefits to raw milk, why don't you ask a luddite or a granola mom? I don't consume raw milk products and I'm not trying to sell you on them.
The benefit to not regulating irrelevant things like raw milk, is that we can put regulatory funds toward things that kill more then 3 people in 20 years--that's your statistic, I pulled it from your post. How many people die of diabetes caused by added sugars each year, I wonder?
To be honest, I don't really care if raw milk remains illegal. My main objection to your post was the manipulation of statistics to make an insignificant issue seem significant.
Unpasteurized milk is mainstream in EU, where food safety is a big priority. You can find lots of hard and even soft cheeses made using raw milk in regular supermarkets. It's nothing fringe. The key is to monitor every batch for different bacteria as mandated by law.
Raw cheese producers tend to be better because they have to use fresh milk, whereas pasteurization lets anyone use old not-so-hygienic milk from mixed sources. It's of course potentially a lot unsafer if controls are bypassed, that is something to take into consideration. But if we follow that reasoning, we would end up with long-life UHT milk.
No. The regulations aren't in place to protect consumers, they're in place to make it prohibitively expensive for anyone to compete. They're lobbied into existence by the market incumbents to stifle competition.
The current regulations favor the established. In a society that is not entirely regulatory captured, where money does not equal political speech as much, regulations could favor independent family farmers.
I am writing this from the middle of EU farm country, and one of the things that regulations/policies do here is prevent multi-national corporations from buying family farms. The argument against this policy is that family farms are economically inefficient. I will take that trade-off every single day.
Livestock welfare regs in the EU did end up favoring corporations in recent years, to some extent. But, at least in my area, family crop farms will be protected by regulations for the foreseeable future.
> The _current_ regulations favor the established.
Which is why de-regulation is the answer in this case. If a regulation is bad, roll it back, don't put another layer of complexity on top. Complexity, again, favors the incumbents. They have more resources to deal with all the nuances.
Could you go into what regulations you think are wrong? I am by no means an expert on the topic, but I'm under the impression that meat packing regulations exist because the meat packing industry was causing massive harm to workers, consumers, the environment, etc. I mean, high schoolers read The Jungle for a reason.
One thing that has changed in the past few years is that programs to help local farmers get organic certifications has made organic certification much more accessible to local farmers. Could there be similar programs to help smaller meat packers comply with regulation?
I'm not saying you are wrong, but there are a lot more people on Hacker News who are just against all regulation, than there are people who actually know why specific regulations exist and are against them for informed reasons.
No, it costs millions to start a butcher business. Antitrust works for oil where one company owns everything, but this is a service business where regulations are the source of the competitive moat. We need de-regulation.
Not relevant. RFSI is a grant program, and it excludes meat and poultry.
I'm not saying you're wrong on your topic, but this is basically a subsidy program for family farms growing local/regional crops, not some nebulous direct cash infusion.
Alternative headline: consultancy firm owned by politicians friend hired for 5.5 million dollars to produce a paper that suggest ways to do something that will never be actioned on... Thankfully because it will also be incredibly innacurate
