Small, local, and diverse are antifragile qualities - farms with all their eggs in one basket are suffering, and those with optionality and flexibility are thriving. Like many things in life.
In the US there are three major meat producers that dominate the market and thus when they go down, so goes the meat. Europe on the other hand has lots and lots of smaller producers, often focused on the local area, and no one dominates. Right now in Europe there is no meat shortage. Distributed production is less likely to be disrupted. It's less cost effective (from a pure business perspective) but much more robust in the face of problems.
True, I recently bought a cow through a local initiative. Best meat I ever ate, the taste of the steak is unmatched.
In the EU meat that lays a half year frozen in the refrigerator is stilled called fresh. So when meat is imported frozen from Argentina filled with water and packaged for the supermarket it is sold as fresh meat. Going back to first principles with meat you realize the differences when you taste it, no need for a fancy sauce or spice rack.
Local and diverse are in conflict. Local is actually a fragile quality because disasters tend to be localized. It's only really antifragile when politics get involved (think pissing matches over masks and respirators).
I wonder how this compares with the situation in Amsterdam. I have no big numbers, but a lot of the better Amsterdam restaurants use small-scale[0] local organic produce, and since the lockdown, you can now order a box of random local produce that would normally have gone to those restaurants. They contain lots of interesting stuff (we order one every week), and they also made a special Mother's Day breakfast box.
Of course we also order delivery from those restaurants to help them stay in business. I have no idea how well they're doing, though.
[0] Small scale is probably relative. They're not massive factory farms, but they're well known and you find their products almost everywhere. They don't sell their own products at a stand at a market somewhere, so maybe they're medium-scale.
This works if you're close enough to the rich farmer's markets and suburban customers around NYC. Vermont cheese makers, which also once supplied the restaurants of New York and Boston, have had a different experience. This comes from an email newsletter published by someone on the Vermont Cheese Council (who urged recipients to spread the word, so I am sharing it here):
As restaurants in NYC and Boston started closing their doors, specialty cheese shops and wholesales distributers that sold artisan local cheeses started simultaneously seeing 50% drops in sales overnight. I started calling cheesemakers around Vermont to learn how the situation was impacting them. My job took a turn, shifting from trying to support best practices for makers in Vermont to trying to ensure that as many makers as can are able to get through the COVID-19 impact without shuttering their businesses.
I try to call a few cheesemakers every day to see how they are doing, and we’re facing a range of challenges. Some are trying to reduce cheese production, so that production doesn’t exceed demand. This means reducing incoming milk quantities, which means diverting milk produced by dairy animals to another buyer (since those animals keep producing milk every day!) or, in some cases, selling animals off. Others are facing stock issues: Limited aging spaces – meaning that if they continue to make cheese and can’t sell it, eventually their aging spaces will fill, and their animals will still continue to make milk … and they will be back to the previously expressed need to reduce incoming milk.
Alongside the production challenges, there are other issues. The gooey, runny, high moisture texture that makes camembert-style cheeses a delight to enjoy also comes with a short shelf life. These cheeses often need to be eaten fairly quickly when they are ripe, or they will quickly deteriorate in quality beyond where one would want to eat or sell them. For those makers who focus on making these softer cheeses – they have inventory that is sitting in aging cellars without its usual consumer audience.
... So to summarize the situation, it’s like this: Imagine we had a three lane highway going into NYC with cheese instead of cars, then two lanes closed down. We have … a massive cheese traffic jam. We (Vermont Cheese) would normally sell hundreds of thousands of pounds of cheese from our mid- and smaller-sized makers over the next four months…and currently we are selling around half (or perhaps less than that) compared to what we’d normally sell. On other words, we have a BIG cheese traffic jam – one that will grow to likely be hundreds of thousands of pounds of cheese if people don’t buy it – or if makers don’t stop making it (and again - the milking animals will keep producing milk ...).
Online sales can only go so far. Some people won't order online, and certain produce and dairy products are not suited to UPS deliveries, especially when the temperature rises. Unless more distant producers can make the long round trip to the NYC and/or work out wider grocery distribution, they're going to suffer.
> This works if you're close enough to the rich farmer's markets and suburban customers around NYC.
Absolutely, or if you already have some sort of distribution in place. Non-essential workers have more time on their hands to go to these markets. These markets tend to sell better in wealthier areas to begin with and their customers, faced with fewer options online and at the supermarket, are willing to pay extra. I wonder if the markets in Elmhurst are as flooded with people.
A co-op I used to work for has trouble keeping up with their demand but mostly because they focused on supermarket distribution. It seems that farms with a semblance of a retail presence or trusted brand are doing well (e.g. Central Milling, these stalls). I have little sympathy for certain farms that are suffering right now (e.g. CAFO's). I do worry for the now unemployed workers that are not present in this article, the animals, and those in processing.
As a solution, I would love to see more food supplies and restaurants selling larger bulk amounts at discount. That could bring in a new set of consumers, and reduce the number of trips/exposure.
A restaurant could sell 10 meals worth for 10 * original_price * 0.5 and make more per order plus use up more ingredients. Farms could sell cheese by 5lb packs, eggs by the dozen dozens, meat by 10lb packs, etc.
It's not worth the whole ordeal of going to a restaurant to get a small portion of food, pay the same price as a sit-down experience, and be hungry again in a few hours.
Friends of ours own a cheese farm (as well as a dozen cheese shops in Amsterdam), and they're also struggling. They keep making cheese because the farmers supplying them cannot turn off their cows, but sales are in the gutter, especially since tourism has always been a big part of their business.
So they're just dumping their cheese now at extreme discounts, and are focusing more on their webshop (I'm not entirely sure they even had one before; the webshop could be entirely new), and they donate a lot of cheese to food banks.
They make some amazing, interesting cheeses, and with the discount, they're extremely affordable, so we're ordering cheese from them and sending them to people who could probably use some cheese in their life. It's a nice way to help two people at the same time.
If you know where to look, this crisis offers some great opportunities to learn about local companies and supply chains. Stuff that used to be business-to-business, or have other reliable customers, is now looking for new customers. Of course lots of people have enough trouble of their own to discover this. You need to be flexible to adjust to the crisis, but it's hard to be flexible when you're suffering. So reach out if you can.
Absolutely, agricultural producers are struggling. But this email has a significant flaw - livestock do not just magically produce milk. It is a response to childbirth, and then continued milking. Stop milking, they stop producing.
Admittedly, they then need an entire breeding season to start again, so there clearly are logistical problems to worry about. But the idea of an unending milk supply simply isn't one of them.
New York's dairy farmers are PAYING to dump their milk. Demand has slackened to the point that they are bottling it and giving it away and even paying waste water treatment plants to dispose of it.
[+] [-] karl11|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldcode|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lowdose|5 years ago|reply
In the EU meat that lays a half year frozen in the refrigerator is stilled called fresh. So when meat is imported frozen from Argentina filled with water and packaged for the supermarket it is sold as fresh meat. Going back to first principles with meat you realize the differences when you taste it, no need for a fancy sauce or spice rack.
https://www.koopeenkoe.nl/
[+] [-] dehrmann|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcv|5 years ago|reply
Of course we also order delivery from those restaurants to help them stay in business. I have no idea how well they're doing, though.
[0] Small scale is probably relative. They're not massive factory farms, but they're well known and you find their products almost everywhere. They don't sell their own products at a stand at a market somewhere, so maybe they're medium-scale.
[+] [-] ilamont|5 years ago|reply
As restaurants in NYC and Boston started closing their doors, specialty cheese shops and wholesales distributers that sold artisan local cheeses started simultaneously seeing 50% drops in sales overnight. I started calling cheesemakers around Vermont to learn how the situation was impacting them. My job took a turn, shifting from trying to support best practices for makers in Vermont to trying to ensure that as many makers as can are able to get through the COVID-19 impact without shuttering their businesses.
I try to call a few cheesemakers every day to see how they are doing, and we’re facing a range of challenges. Some are trying to reduce cheese production, so that production doesn’t exceed demand. This means reducing incoming milk quantities, which means diverting milk produced by dairy animals to another buyer (since those animals keep producing milk every day!) or, in some cases, selling animals off. Others are facing stock issues: Limited aging spaces – meaning that if they continue to make cheese and can’t sell it, eventually their aging spaces will fill, and their animals will still continue to make milk … and they will be back to the previously expressed need to reduce incoming milk.
Alongside the production challenges, there are other issues. The gooey, runny, high moisture texture that makes camembert-style cheeses a delight to enjoy also comes with a short shelf life. These cheeses often need to be eaten fairly quickly when they are ripe, or they will quickly deteriorate in quality beyond where one would want to eat or sell them. For those makers who focus on making these softer cheeses – they have inventory that is sitting in aging cellars without its usual consumer audience.
... So to summarize the situation, it’s like this: Imagine we had a three lane highway going into NYC with cheese instead of cars, then two lanes closed down. We have … a massive cheese traffic jam. We (Vermont Cheese) would normally sell hundreds of thousands of pounds of cheese from our mid- and smaller-sized makers over the next four months…and currently we are selling around half (or perhaps less than that) compared to what we’d normally sell. On other words, we have a BIG cheese traffic jam – one that will grow to likely be hundreds of thousands of pounds of cheese if people don’t buy it – or if makers don’t stop making it (and again - the milking animals will keep producing milk ...).
Online sales can only go so far. Some people won't order online, and certain produce and dairy products are not suited to UPS deliveries, especially when the temperature rises. Unless more distant producers can make the long round trip to the NYC and/or work out wider grocery distribution, they're going to suffer.
[+] [-] wigl|5 years ago|reply
Absolutely, or if you already have some sort of distribution in place. Non-essential workers have more time on their hands to go to these markets. These markets tend to sell better in wealthier areas to begin with and their customers, faced with fewer options online and at the supermarket, are willing to pay extra. I wonder if the markets in Elmhurst are as flooded with people.
A co-op I used to work for has trouble keeping up with their demand but mostly because they focused on supermarket distribution. It seems that farms with a semblance of a retail presence or trusted brand are doing well (e.g. Central Milling, these stalls). I have little sympathy for certain farms that are suffering right now (e.g. CAFO's). I do worry for the now unemployed workers that are not present in this article, the animals, and those in processing.
[+] [-] whathappenedto|5 years ago|reply
A restaurant could sell 10 meals worth for 10 * original_price * 0.5 and make more per order plus use up more ingredients. Farms could sell cheese by 5lb packs, eggs by the dozen dozens, meat by 10lb packs, etc.
It's not worth the whole ordeal of going to a restaurant to get a small portion of food, pay the same price as a sit-down experience, and be hungry again in a few hours.
[+] [-] mcv|5 years ago|reply
So they're just dumping their cheese now at extreme discounts, and are focusing more on their webshop (I'm not entirely sure they even had one before; the webshop could be entirely new), and they donate a lot of cheese to food banks.
They make some amazing, interesting cheeses, and with the discount, they're extremely affordable, so we're ordering cheese from them and sending them to people who could probably use some cheese in their life. It's a nice way to help two people at the same time.
If you know where to look, this crisis offers some great opportunities to learn about local companies and supply chains. Stuff that used to be business-to-business, or have other reliable customers, is now looking for new customers. Of course lots of people have enough trouble of their own to discover this. You need to be flexible to adjust to the crisis, but it's hard to be flexible when you're suffering. So reach out if you can.
[+] [-] codingdave|5 years ago|reply
Admittedly, they then need an entire breeding season to start again, so there clearly are logistical problems to worry about. But the idea of an unending milk supply simply isn't one of them.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fragmede|5 years ago|reply
https://gordonzola.net/2020/04/02/diary-of-an-essential-work...
[+] [-] cwhiz|5 years ago|reply
It’s just a failing of our supply chain systems. Lots of cheese is sold out on grocery stores in NYC.
[+] [-] dehrmann|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flyingfences|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/05/10/852512047/as-food-supply-chai...
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] engineer_22|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fastball|5 years ago|reply
Uh, is it though?