Sensible Farm Economics/Eat What You Grow
A few years ago, when the first papayas grew on one of the trees that we’d planted early on at the farm, we decided to “play farmer” and sell it. We realized the local “agent” price for it would be roughly a fourth of what the market price of papaya, even in nearby towns and markets, was. The fact that this was organic, additionally, was of course of no value to this transaction which could not account for it except as a mass produced commodity. The difference could surely be explained in terms of perishability, margins, risks, profits and all that, but the fact that hit us in the face was that the best economic use of that papaya was for us to eat it! We’d have to shell out something similar to it’s market value to purchase the same amount of nutrition and food, and likely inferior and less fresh.
This extends to everything a village, or a cluster of villages can produce. This holds true even if you don’t necessarily grow or produce everything yourself (esp value added stuff that needs time and skills) but buy it from someone in the village/cluster. (Yes, not everything can be replaced, but a whole bunch of things can!)
Growing your food, raw materials and producing what you need from that, whether at the scale of a farm or that of a neighbourhood, makes immense sense and indeed recognizes and accrues most value for the activity locally. Every transaction that reduces the produce to a commodity travelling on long supply chains is lossy except for rare, specialized products or raw materials, and sometimes not even that.
Localizing the economy, shrinking the distance between producers and consumers has immense value — economically as well as ecologically. This is a message and story we have to take to every farm, every village, every cluster, urgently, if we truly care about solving a whole set of problems connected with this ever increasing loss of value as producers of 1 or 2 ever cheaper commodities, which is what we’ve relegated most of our landscape to being today.
