Homestead mailing list

[VAN DELL JORDAN <vdjor AT yahoo.com>]

One reason that we pay less for food than anyone in
the world ever has (I believe) is that farmers can not
control the price of most of their sales.  This has
caused them to take low prices and make up the
difference by expanding.  A cycle that has caused
increasingly tight profit margins.  At some point
corporate farms will gain such a large percentage of
the market they will be able to control the wholesale
price of agricultural products.  As that happens I'm
sure that our food prices will start to rise, and the
percentage of our income spent for food will increase
instead of decline.
Now, having said that I'm thinking about poultry.  In
our part of the country at least there is no place
where a small producer can go and sell eggs or
chickens wholesale which means that industrial
producers have the market except for those who market
directly to the consumer.  That could be 90-99% of the
market??  If relative price of poultry products are
not rising that may question the theory I have just
spouted.
Van Dell


--- Marie McHarry <mmcharry AT gmail.com> wrote:

> >From the point of view of the farmer, those prices
> aren't extravagant.
> Compare them to prices of 30 and 50 years ago (there
> was that nice
> bump for soybean farmers about 30 years ago when
> soybeans got to $12,
> but the price of corn hasn't changed much over the
> decades).
> 
> In the meantime, the prices that the farmer pays for
> equipment,
> fertilizer, pesticides, and fuel have gone up much
> faster, just to
> understate the situation.
> 
> Americans have had cheap -- if not all that tasty --
> food for a long
> time. It would be a revelation to cut farm supports
> and let prices
> float. In the short term, I'm sure much land would
> be consolidated and
> we'd import a lot more. More food from China?  Yum.
> 
> Marie