The Farm and The SKU
Over the last few days, I’ve had a bunch of conversations with people who own farms, or run services for farms or do market linkages. Most saw the Yourstory article covering Beforest farms and wanted to explore a partnership, or a collaboration or one kind of another.
It’s heartening to see so many different efforts on the farming front. There are indeed problems aplenty and lots of experiments and solutions needed.
What struck me very very hard during most conversations was the massive disconnect between nature, and the market. The former is about diversity and abundance, and the latter about supply chains, logistics, and cold storage. And high value “SKUs”.
Let me explain with a few examples.
Someone grows herbs. And extracts oils. Is doing well, and has growth targets because of a very large investment in machinery. The setup can obviously process a certain set or range of things and needs more of those to grow.
Another group uses tech, a team of agronomists and has linkages with some high end restaurant chefs and similar consumers who’d obviously need a predictable supply both in terms of what is grown and how much of it. Obviously, it’s more profitable to grow a few exotics under controlled conditions than a large variety of native food in a natural context.
Others are trying to solve the gap between the supply and demand in a more real-time way such that the shelf life becomes less of an issue, and there’s better traceability.
All of this — consumer demand, supply chains etc — today work on a “I need n of X” premise. Supply chains and storage solutions favour and need a lot of a few things.
They end up looking at the farm as a factory, and at food broken down into individual SKUs.
But food, nutrition, and natural growing systems do not lend themselves to the SKU thought process too well. We end up making the entire process too extractive, destructive and expensive. We need diversity on the plate, on the farm and in the soil — for health, for better ecosystems and for continuing to grow food at with low costs and efforts. The very fundamental disconnect is in starting from a recipe/ingredient need and aggregating a demand atop this, creating pressure on growing methods and the soil. Instead, a change in behaviour that works with “what’s available today”, and increasing the abundance and availability — not at the level of a specific SKU but as food groups as a whole — would benefit consumers and growers, and more critically the ecosystem in which these are grown.
How do we make this switch? How do we marry these worlds, to start with?
