This seems to imply a choice is being made between one or the other. These are systems used in major cities. Agriculture can be handled concurrently in other places.
The government has a lot of stakeholders to manage.
If we declare the methods that keep the Midwest alive as the breadbasket of the world and the deserts of California and Arizona as our greenhouses as catastrophes, what’s next?
New Jersey isn’t going to be the garden state again. My grandfather used to buy tomatoes in Paramus from a farm cooperative, now a Westfield mall.
Meat is similar. You don’t have to use gross feedlots and unsustainable husbandry methods. But… distributed meatpacking was unionized and hard to consolidate.
In the long run, we’ll have hard times and small scale gardens for vegetables, etc will come back. Where I live in upstate NY, agriculture is absolutely devastated - like 70% of small farmers are basically out of business in a few years if not already. But Amish families are scooping up property in some areas and make a lot of money on farming with non-conventional methods.
What I found interesting about the article was that the government intervention it’s describing is fairly lightweight: e.g., instead of nationalizing farms, the government is making it easier for farmers to sell directly to urban residents.
I personally think that governments would be better at making decisions of what to farm and where to farm it than farmers. Farmers have a profit motive whereas governments can have other non-profit motives.
Centralized-vs-distributed is mostly a matter of efficiencies of scale vs transportation, and efficiencies of scale almost invariably win. Pesticide/fertilizer/etc are all orthogonal (there's nothing preventing local farmers from using pesticides and fertilizer). In particular, the machinery costs per acre are lower for centralized agriculture than for distributed agriculture, but the transport costs are higher (although not as high as you might think because the costs of moving things around the country are shared broadly--not just by food producers). Besides machinery, personnel costs are much lower for centralized agriculture.
There are a lot of advantages to local agriculture, but 'cost' isn't one of them. I would like to live in a world where more food is grown locally, but that means we have to solve (and not ignore) the cost problem--how do we afford the additional machinery, personnel, etc costs that are passed along in food prices without pricing out poorer people?
Why would you want to move farmers to cities where they cant farm? who would do the farming then? why not just pay farmers what you would pay a factory worker in the city?
Well, one of the big issues is just in time logistics.
India and lots of other countries have a lot of local agriculture and would probably be fine. The US and other countries highly reliant on centralized agricultural production and transportation? Uhoh.
If you charge both the agricultural and residential users the same price, the agricultural ones go out of business. That may well be necessary, but they're politically well connected.
The system looks pretty damn robust given that we've just shut the global economy down and the food still keeps coming in. Maybe with some hiccups but that's complaining at a high level.
The reason decentralization doesn't make a lot of sense is because we need to produce food cheap and at scale to feed the world. Putting thousands of dollars into vertical farming equipment that doesn't fit into the apartments of most people on the planet is kind of silly.
There's also simply division of labour at work here. It's uneconomical for large portions of the population to spend their time farming.
It's essentially just a recreational hobby for wealthy people or maybe reasonable on a Mars Colony, but here it does not make much sense.
One of the benefits of living in a semi-rural area btw is that you can easily participate in changing this situation. During the Spring, Summer, and Fall months I can go and pick up fruits and veggies from a local grower -- just show up on their property during regular business hours, go and pick it yourself if you feel like or just pick up one of the boxes they've prearranged. I can get meat from a good local ranch too. I don't think there's any nearby dairy though.
Mega-agribusiness is one of the consequences of increasing urban living. To support really large, dense cities, everything has to be scaled way up. A dairy farm is no longer producing for the 100,000 people in a 20 mile radius, it's producing for millions, and the waste it creates scales up too.
In an ideal world, these mega-producers would be less harmful to the environment than the equivalent number of small producers, because there would be some benefit from economies of scale. But in this world, the mega-producers largely see regulation and environmental caretaking to be cost centers and they pursue the cheapest solutions, which usually involve hiding the problem or paying somebody off or buying themselves some legislation. Smaller producers meanwhile have a harder time getting away with that.
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