This week, Swedes are called to boycott the major retailers in protest of a rapid increase of food prices (they are also supposed to boycott US goods as a protest against trumpism).
In 1950, the year I was born, the average American family spent 20% of its income on food. And eating out was not the significant factor it is now. By the 1980s, when I was in my 30s, the percentage had dropped to 5%, which was maintained until about 2008-2010. In the last 10-15 years, the percentage has crept up to 6%, largely as a result of inflation. Food is still cheap compared to housing and transportation. I have absolutely NO sympathy for retailers because of the corporate takeovers of agriculture. Now, major corporations control the supply chain, so when they whine about their low margins at the retail level, they mask the money they make all along the supply chain. As a sustainable farmer, no one helped me out and I had to basically work for 50 cents/hour. Like many farmers I cashed out my sweat equity when I retired. What really made me economically comfortable - for the first time in my life! - was moving to a cheaper country: France. Nevertheless, I still grow most of our food and this keeps us in good health and allows us to live on our Social Security - something most Americans who still live in the US cannot do.
When you are a small farmer or fisherman you need to find a niche where the big players don’t compete. Rare livestock , high end vegetable crops, out of season production or tasty produce that just won’t ship. Otherwise you are competing with 500 horsepower tractors. When peoples food budget gets reduced they tend to cut back on high end specialties which puts lots of stress on small producers and restaurants. People’s search for value also IMO leads to cheap processed and unhealthy choices . This year I plan to grow several blocks of sweet corn and put together a hot dog cart for the farm stand. If I can’t tempt their desire for quality I guess I will try to appeal to their addictions.
in the same boat here, the only profitable markets at the small scale tend to be luxuries that will/are suffer(ing) when people are forced to cut back. Not sure how to get around that though as it would mean growing more staples, but it seems like a harder sell to get a customer to pay over the odds for grain if they won't for a more niche product.
"While this will be a great challenge for politics and for the poor, it might also be a start of a rebalancing the food system and the economy towards localized food systems with a higher share of self-sufficiency and ruralization of societies. But that is yet another story."
This is the story I want to see and be part of. In my village (in Sweden) we are starting a community garden which I hope will lead to more ambitious projects of community self reliance. Food production does not have to be so energy intensive. The energy input cannot be more than the energy output. (permaculture logic) I want to use some of the information in this article to present to the people who will let us use their land (currently lawns). Do you have this post in Swedish?
Not really, I do write about similar things on my Swedish blog. But mostly not identical pieces, as it is too boring for me and also for some of my readers who follow both blogs. https://tradgardenjorden.substack.com/
I have no sympathy for the retailers, though good luck boycotting them as you still need to get some of your food from them. The profitable links of the food system for many years have been the middle men, Cargil, ConAgra, AMD, and the like, in fact they all made record profits as prices exploded.
Some of the farm payments appear to be for the loss of foreign markets, specifically China for sorghum, due to the trade war. USAID was also mostly an excuse to buy up cheap grain from the Plains for export so prices might drop here from the loss of that as well. But more broadly I think it's not even so much the end of cheap food right now as the end of the single global market for food. This is the first piece I remember of yours where my situation in the US was not nearly identical to yours in the EU. Here the commodity prices are basically back to pre-covid levels and energy prices including natural gas don't seem to have spiked as badly (I think it took awhile to get LNG online for exports?). Now we don't see that reflected in the grocery store at all (so they must have enough high price markets to sell elsewhere), but it looks like the farm sector will probably need more government payouts to stay afloat due to low prices, which is I guess pretty normal at this point.
It would seem climate is already starting to bite for some crops. Maybe I'm biased writing this two weeks after a dust storm, but Kansas had the worst wheat harvest in 50 years in 2023 thanks to back to back drought years. That's not unheard of for the plains of course but the slow march of getting wiped out every 5 years instead of every 10 will have an effect at some point. I also read, but you might be in a better position to know, that record drought was responsible for reduction in the olive harvest in the last few years. Changing rainfall patterns also seem to be hitting cocoa and vanilla production as well. Cocoa I know was already suffering from aging orchards which the farmers don't make enough to replace and would also take several years to produce. Citrus in Florida is also getting hit by stronger hurricanes but was already suffering from citrus greening. I guess at this point it's more a case of climate change not making growing impossible (yet) but chipping away at the margins of what would otherwise have continued to work as what was once record outliers in terms of weather become more frequent. And margins afterall are what drive prices.
Higher food prices are something I've anticipated for awhile (though I still don't enjoy as a consumer) but getting support for them and local farms is going to be pretty tough when most people's income is getting rent extracted for housing.
I have been doing landrace research for almost 30 years. The original idea was that landraces (locally adapted crops - both plant and animal) have a greater flexibility to adapt to changing weather and climate patterns. In the course of doing this research, I have come across many things. For example, my original Flame Buttercup squash reliably splits into component parent varieties every year, as well as the type specimen. This is even though I select seed from type specimens only. I have done some line breeding back to the original Buttercup strain over the years, but the result is the same. As another example, my original landrace corn was a mix of two sweet corn and two flint corn varieties. After the first year I dropped the flint corn landrace in favor of the sweet corn. A taste test on cornbread indicated little difference between dried sweet corn and flint corn. (Connoisseurs may disagree!) I have lots of other examples.
I get no funding from this research, but I have been able to create a lot of varieties. I explain my methods in my books (available on Amazon) but you can also watch videos by Joseph Lofthouse on YouTube. I have done a couple of videos over the years for YouTube but they are just raw footage and very short. I am not a filmmaker.
The key to adapting to higher food prices is threefold: 1) Eat lower on the food chain. This means a flexitarian diet, where one eats some meat but mostly plants and staple grains. This will also allow you to pay more for quality as your food bill goes down. 2) Grow as much of your own food as you can. Start with a small amount, say 5%. If you have absolutely no gardening experience, you can join a community garden or even volunteer with someone who has an allotment. 3) Go to your local farmers market and find a grower close to you with whom you can volunteer and get paid in food.
The current industrial food system is not your friend. Support the alternative small-scale farmers. The "last farmer standing" will likely be someone very close to you.
I'm working on landraces for sorghum (flour, syrup), tepary bean (protein), and sesame (oil). I'm outside the native range for tepary and it's almost too wet here some years, but looking ahead for crops that can take heat and drought. Sunflower is native and an argument could made for it, but it's easier to process the sesame on a small scale.
Haven't gotten to corn yet other than a few rows of sweet corn in the garden. I've started nixtamalizing corn for masa first, so while corns do yield different results sweet vs flint vs dent will just depend on what I can grow well and dry for storage reliably year over year. Wheat is a little demoralizing as I can still get local flour at the big box store quite cheaply and I don't have any dedicated processing equipment for it.
For fruit working on figs (die back to the ground and fruit once in late summer, but with warmer winters that might change in 20 years), and also selecting local varieties of mulberry and bur oak that yield well or seem healthy on comparable sites, though I don't know if that's truly developing a land race.
We try and focus on eating plants and grains, with tofu and tempeh and have chickens for eggs. Prices are just out of whack, I used to save a lot of money cooking our food but now you can sometimes get fast-casual or prepared food for less than what you would spend on the ingredients!
I grow about only around 5% of our calories but around 15-20% of our food by value depending on the year. (Former CSA farm site that I've scaled back but still is fairly intensive vegetable production in summer plus some canning) so I guess I'm setting myself up to be the last farmer standing! But stuck with scaling up since I'm not able to live on any of the land I have access to right now, so somewhat limited with livestock and doing more grains that take up more space. (And calorie crops are pure money losers at a farmers market)
I am impressed, especially as you are working on a broad base. For the corn, I suggest you push it as much as you can. Barbara McClintock discovered transposons in corn back in the 1940s and got the Nobel Prize for her work in 1983. These "jumping genes" move around on the chromosome arms as well as in their position on the DNA zipper. This is an indication of how flexible and adaptive corn really is. By the way, you can see the expression of the transposons in stripes on the corn seed, usually red or blue strips. There are YouTube videos on this too. One experiment I did was to plant my red corn a month later than normal in mid-June just to see what would happen. It was stunted in stalk size but completed its growth cycle. The next year it grew higher when planted at the right time, but did not immediately go back to full size. Glad you are thinking about future climate and weather conditions. All the best and keep up the good work!
In 1950, the year I was born, the average American family spent 20% of its income on food. And eating out was not the significant factor it is now. By the 1980s, when I was in my 30s, the percentage had dropped to 5%, which was maintained until about 2008-2010. In the last 10-15 years, the percentage has crept up to 6%, largely as a result of inflation. Food is still cheap compared to housing and transportation. I have absolutely NO sympathy for retailers because of the corporate takeovers of agriculture. Now, major corporations control the supply chain, so when they whine about their low margins at the retail level, they mask the money they make all along the supply chain. As a sustainable farmer, no one helped me out and I had to basically work for 50 cents/hour. Like many farmers I cashed out my sweat equity when I retired. What really made me economically comfortable - for the first time in my life! - was moving to a cheaper country: France. Nevertheless, I still grow most of our food and this keeps us in good health and allows us to live on our Social Security - something most Americans who still live in the US cannot do.
When you are a small farmer or fisherman you need to find a niche where the big players don’t compete. Rare livestock , high end vegetable crops, out of season production or tasty produce that just won’t ship. Otherwise you are competing with 500 horsepower tractors. When peoples food budget gets reduced they tend to cut back on high end specialties which puts lots of stress on small producers and restaurants. People’s search for value also IMO leads to cheap processed and unhealthy choices . This year I plan to grow several blocks of sweet corn and put together a hot dog cart for the farm stand. If I can’t tempt their desire for quality I guess I will try to appeal to their addictions.
in the same boat here, the only profitable markets at the small scale tend to be luxuries that will/are suffer(ing) when people are forced to cut back. Not sure how to get around that though as it would mean growing more staples, but it seems like a harder sell to get a customer to pay over the odds for grain if they won't for a more niche product.
"While this will be a great challenge for politics and for the poor, it might also be a start of a rebalancing the food system and the economy towards localized food systems with a higher share of self-sufficiency and ruralization of societies. But that is yet another story."
This is the story I want to see and be part of. In my village (in Sweden) we are starting a community garden which I hope will lead to more ambitious projects of community self reliance. Food production does not have to be so energy intensive. The energy input cannot be more than the energy output. (permaculture logic) I want to use some of the information in this article to present to the people who will let us use their land (currently lawns). Do you have this post in Swedish?
Not really, I do write about similar things on my Swedish blog. But mostly not identical pieces, as it is too boring for me and also for some of my readers who follow both blogs. https://tradgardenjorden.substack.com/
Yes of course, understandable! I will follow the Swedish one.
I have no sympathy for the retailers, though good luck boycotting them as you still need to get some of your food from them. The profitable links of the food system for many years have been the middle men, Cargil, ConAgra, AMD, and the like, in fact they all made record profits as prices exploded.
Some of the farm payments appear to be for the loss of foreign markets, specifically China for sorghum, due to the trade war. USAID was also mostly an excuse to buy up cheap grain from the Plains for export so prices might drop here from the loss of that as well. But more broadly I think it's not even so much the end of cheap food right now as the end of the single global market for food. This is the first piece I remember of yours where my situation in the US was not nearly identical to yours in the EU. Here the commodity prices are basically back to pre-covid levels and energy prices including natural gas don't seem to have spiked as badly (I think it took awhile to get LNG online for exports?). Now we don't see that reflected in the grocery store at all (so they must have enough high price markets to sell elsewhere), but it looks like the farm sector will probably need more government payouts to stay afloat due to low prices, which is I guess pretty normal at this point.
It would seem climate is already starting to bite for some crops. Maybe I'm biased writing this two weeks after a dust storm, but Kansas had the worst wheat harvest in 50 years in 2023 thanks to back to back drought years. That's not unheard of for the plains of course but the slow march of getting wiped out every 5 years instead of every 10 will have an effect at some point. I also read, but you might be in a better position to know, that record drought was responsible for reduction in the olive harvest in the last few years. Changing rainfall patterns also seem to be hitting cocoa and vanilla production as well. Cocoa I know was already suffering from aging orchards which the farmers don't make enough to replace and would also take several years to produce. Citrus in Florida is also getting hit by stronger hurricanes but was already suffering from citrus greening. I guess at this point it's more a case of climate change not making growing impossible (yet) but chipping away at the margins of what would otherwise have continued to work as what was once record outliers in terms of weather become more frequent. And margins afterall are what drive prices.
Higher food prices are something I've anticipated for awhile (though I still don't enjoy as a consumer) but getting support for them and local farms is going to be pretty tough when most people's income is getting rent extracted for housing.
I have been doing landrace research for almost 30 years. The original idea was that landraces (locally adapted crops - both plant and animal) have a greater flexibility to adapt to changing weather and climate patterns. In the course of doing this research, I have come across many things. For example, my original Flame Buttercup squash reliably splits into component parent varieties every year, as well as the type specimen. This is even though I select seed from type specimens only. I have done some line breeding back to the original Buttercup strain over the years, but the result is the same. As another example, my original landrace corn was a mix of two sweet corn and two flint corn varieties. After the first year I dropped the flint corn landrace in favor of the sweet corn. A taste test on cornbread indicated little difference between dried sweet corn and flint corn. (Connoisseurs may disagree!) I have lots of other examples.
I get no funding from this research, but I have been able to create a lot of varieties. I explain my methods in my books (available on Amazon) but you can also watch videos by Joseph Lofthouse on YouTube. I have done a couple of videos over the years for YouTube but they are just raw footage and very short. I am not a filmmaker.
The key to adapting to higher food prices is threefold: 1) Eat lower on the food chain. This means a flexitarian diet, where one eats some meat but mostly plants and staple grains. This will also allow you to pay more for quality as your food bill goes down. 2) Grow as much of your own food as you can. Start with a small amount, say 5%. If you have absolutely no gardening experience, you can join a community garden or even volunteer with someone who has an allotment. 3) Go to your local farmers market and find a grower close to you with whom you can volunteer and get paid in food.
The current industrial food system is not your friend. Support the alternative small-scale farmers. The "last farmer standing" will likely be someone very close to you.
I'm working on landraces for sorghum (flour, syrup), tepary bean (protein), and sesame (oil). I'm outside the native range for tepary and it's almost too wet here some years, but looking ahead for crops that can take heat and drought. Sunflower is native and an argument could made for it, but it's easier to process the sesame on a small scale.
Haven't gotten to corn yet other than a few rows of sweet corn in the garden. I've started nixtamalizing corn for masa first, so while corns do yield different results sweet vs flint vs dent will just depend on what I can grow well and dry for storage reliably year over year. Wheat is a little demoralizing as I can still get local flour at the big box store quite cheaply and I don't have any dedicated processing equipment for it.
For fruit working on figs (die back to the ground and fruit once in late summer, but with warmer winters that might change in 20 years), and also selecting local varieties of mulberry and bur oak that yield well or seem healthy on comparable sites, though I don't know if that's truly developing a land race.
We try and focus on eating plants and grains, with tofu and tempeh and have chickens for eggs. Prices are just out of whack, I used to save a lot of money cooking our food but now you can sometimes get fast-casual or prepared food for less than what you would spend on the ingredients!
I grow about only around 5% of our calories but around 15-20% of our food by value depending on the year. (Former CSA farm site that I've scaled back but still is fairly intensive vegetable production in summer plus some canning) so I guess I'm setting myself up to be the last farmer standing! But stuck with scaling up since I'm not able to live on any of the land I have access to right now, so somewhat limited with livestock and doing more grains that take up more space. (And calorie crops are pure money losers at a farmers market)
I am impressed, especially as you are working on a broad base. For the corn, I suggest you push it as much as you can. Barbara McClintock discovered transposons in corn back in the 1940s and got the Nobel Prize for her work in 1983. These "jumping genes" move around on the chromosome arms as well as in their position on the DNA zipper. This is an indication of how flexible and adaptive corn really is. By the way, you can see the expression of the transposons in stripes on the corn seed, usually red or blue strips. There are YouTube videos on this too. One experiment I did was to plant my red corn a month later than normal in mid-June just to see what would happen. It was stunted in stalk size but completed its growth cycle. The next year it grew higher when planted at the right time, but did not immediately go back to full size. Glad you are thinking about future climate and weather conditions. All the best and keep up the good work!