Ah, that makes sense.
So what you have here is a large scale commodity farmer that is already
established and profitable. An operation like that can then divert some of
the product into the direct market stream and employ the children or bring
the wife home from the town job to market it.
That extra job scales well because the marketing labor goes up
proportionally with income.
Since they're at scale on the production side their costs are very low and
they're supported by the farm so they're not in a farming after work
situation. Land and equipment was paid for generations ago. And anything
over commodity price is profit; so they just have to make enough to cover
marketing labor.
There is no stress about the slow ramp up time in growing a direct market
cause it can just go to the commodity channel. Eventually they grow the
direct market enough to dump the commodity channel.
Its a lot harder to loose money in a situation like that.
But none of that helps a beginning farmer. Typically they don't have the
large scale land and the equipment. They cannot get big enough to sell
commodity so start small and grow with the market but that means they
don't produce enough to keep costs low. They're doing marketing and
farming: two jobs. And due to the way farming scales they often have a
full time farming job with a part time farming income. And so they depend
on off farm income while they work themselves to death trying to grow the
farm.
That model isn't working well. But the previous model isn't an option for
beginning farmers.
So what do we as beginning farmers do?
One solution being increasingly proffered is to eliminate the marketing;
build food hubs and other agrigators to market the food. But these are
just middlemen who in the long term will push down farm gate prices and
keep all the profits. This is nothing less than the recommodification of
the local food movement.
At first that might sound like an opportunity for a beginning farmer to do
like the first model: sell at scale while building a direct market. But it
doesn't deal with the trouble of getting to scale and it adds a new
problem: agrigators become least cost suppliers of local food and
eliminate the market opportunity for direct marketers.
So what do we as beginning farmers do?
Pete
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