"Isabella Woodhouse" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote:

"Billy" wrote in message

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There are other arguments against "industrial" agriculture but this is
the first I came up with.

They do not want to go out and separately negotiate
orders of corn of this magnitude from 100 separate small
farmers who can each only supply a ton of corn.

This is why the big agribusinesses thrive, it is the
presence of a market.

If you want to get rid of large farms and go back to
a lot of small farms, you need to figure out an efficient
marketing and distribution system.

Small farms in the US have had cooperative distribution systems since
the mid-1700s. I think I recall reading that even the Sumerians (or was
it the Babyonians?) had cooperative distribution systems for their
agriculture. Lack of distribution systems is clearly not the cause of
factory farming but it certainly was an idea worth exploring.


I don't think that the small farm co-ops can deliver the quantities of
basic grains - corn, wheat, oats, etc. - with the regularity that the
large commercial food processors need.

If you went to a co-op and asked them to sign a contract guarenteeing
you would get (for example) 200 tons of a specific variety of wheat,
every summer Aug 1st, for the next 10 years, I doubt that they would
be able to do it. By contrast an agribusiness that has vast tracts of
land in several different weather regions, very likely can do it. And
the breakfast cereal makers spend so much money setting up a production
line to make a specific product, that it isn't profitable unless your
making large quantities.

This isn't to say that there's not a market for smaller quantities and
that co-ops don't exist. It is just that there IS a demand for quantities
of such a large scale that -only- the agribusinesses can service that
demand, that is why they exist at all.

Ted