Monday, November 30, 2009

Selling off a Farm due to low prices

How is it that a farm handed down generations stops being profitable? I keep saying buying something at the lowest price does not mean you got the best deal since you are not comparing oranges to oranges. How can milk produced in a mechanized farm factory be the same as the milk produced on a free roaming family farm? It can't compare in quality and it certainly can't compare on price. How something is produced matters whether it's a milk farm or a plastic toy factory. The consequences catch up with time.

You have been cheated. You've been told that a crop grown on one farm is exactly the same as one grown on a completely different farm. Not only that, but the methods of production and distribution are inconsequential. Based on this logic, all wine should be commoditized and packaged with a private store brand label and sold based on price. So why does wine have farm names and vintage years on them but not fruits and vegetables? Is it because if you commoditize a product it is easier to to securitize and profit off of?

Ideally, the end consumer needs to be tied to the end producer. I envision a system that tracks what farm the product came from based on a barcode or serial number. A person can go to the internet to look up more information on a particular farm. Perhaps one farm produces better quality than another, and in time, demands a higher premium. Just like fair trade, there is a bottom line price that's agreeable to the producer. There is no way an anonymous brand name can produce with a small scale farm. No way. Alas, we will continue to have mass produced junk as long as people are looking at lowest cost methods rather than high quality AND low cost.

At a certain point in time we will reach a point of no return when the small farms will no longer exist to produce. Take it as a security risk. Pay now or pay later.

[Article] Selling the Borland Farm

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