Certain cultivars of fruits and vegetables are commodities; there are others that aren't, until the market for them grows beyond a certain size. Look at the price history for Honeycrisp apples for an example. Farmers choose to grow commodity cultivars because they're easier to sell in standardized markets. Of course, you could also sell in un-standardized markets, which is how a lot of producers pay their bills without growing on thousands of acres.
If we tried to grow crops in the mainstream agricultural style, but just subtracted machines and pesticides, maybe half the world's population would starve. If the places people lived were integrated with diversified, guilded orchard silvopasture, there would be a surplus of food without machines or pesticides, those people would just have to go pick it themselves.
People obviously don't just want cheap food, given the success of Whole Foods.
The culture war comes in when people act like there's only one way of farming, and one way of integrating farming and the rest of society. Y'all are firing the first shots, don't be surprised when people shoot back.
I'm well aware of all this, my parents run a small profitable hobby farm selling $25 chickens and eggs for $8/dozen to wealthy patrons. A friend of mine does microgreens in her back yard for local restaurants in a small resort town. Four of my great-grandparents were kolhoz farmers.
It doesn't scale, though, and you're going to get bread riots if you tried to.
> If the places people lived were integrated with diversified, guilded orchard silvopasture, there would be a surplus of food without machines or pesticides, those people would just have to go pick it themselves.
Nobody has the time and energy to go do that and pay their bills. Farm work is really friggin' hard.
It doesn't scale to New York city. It could easily scale to suburban areas and small/mid-size towns.
People "pick" their stuff at the grocery store. If you have a few acres of diversified permaculture within a mile of your house, it's not that different to walk a trail through a food forest and forage for everything you need. I guarantee it'd be cheaper and higher quality than the grocery store too. Animal products would cost more, but they're artificially cheap in a very unsustainable way now, so that's fine IMO.
Permaculture does a great job of reducing the labor involved in farming. Harvest is still a lot of work because of the sheer quantity of it you have to do if you're taking things to market, but if people are coming to you and harvesting themselves for a discount on food, I think that makes it workable for everyone.
> People obviously don't just want cheap food, given the success of Whole Foods.
Whole Foods is only able to exist in a tiny portion of markets consisting of the top quintiles of income and wealth. A simple search on Maps shows it’s not available for 80%+ of people in a city.
And even then, it had to sell to Amazon because it wasn’t doing so hot. Most Americans can’t afford anything but cheap, or one level up from cheap food.
If we tried to grow crops in the mainstream agricultural style, but just subtracted machines and pesticides, maybe half the world's population would starve. If the places people lived were integrated with diversified, guilded orchard silvopasture, there would be a surplus of food without machines or pesticides, those people would just have to go pick it themselves.
People obviously don't just want cheap food, given the success of Whole Foods.
The culture war comes in when people act like there's only one way of farming, and one way of integrating farming and the rest of society. Y'all are firing the first shots, don't be surprised when people shoot back.