That's false. Homogeneity makes it easier to harvest, process, and store crops. It also drives perfect competition which brings cost down on the commodity market.
Yes, the GP’s reasoning is faulty (actually, “imperfect” would be a better term), but things aren’t as clear as you put it either.
Homogeneity helps with trading commodities, no question. And commodities reduce risk by allowing a very wide fan out on both sides of a two sided market…which has advantages and disadvantages for all participants.
More along your argument, it also lets the farmer use capital better in the short term (you buy the equipment you need for your monocrop).
But if you have multimodal devices you have the opportunity to take advantage of more flexibility. You can do crop rotation to use less chemicals or to take advantage of trends in the commodity market. You can have a different mix of crops for the same reason (half corn, half row crops, though they re typically worth less). You have more flexibility to adapt to climate change. The commodity markets can handle all this, in fact they help enable it.
This isn’t magic wand — crop rotation doesn’t make sense if, say, you have an orchard. But mechanization also caused us to abandon growing multiple crops in the same field, which can have benefits and improve yield. It was just way too labor intensive. If we go back to individual “labor” (automated in this case) it could be worthwhile.
But there are also costs considered: no flexibility, thus no way to hedge risk. Think weather, plagues and diseases, funghi whatever: If you single crop is vulnerable, now all of it is affected. The use of pesticides and fertiliser is also not free, and monocultures need a lot more of that. Furthermore the giant tractors needed for monoculture tend to damage the soil they drive on, and require the ground water table to be fairly low.
Certainly the logistical challenge of multiple small harvests of varying products is there, but this is definitely more manageable with robots and computers than without.
And for a small close to population centers, if they can supply multiple kinds of produce reliably, they might be able to make orders of magnitude more money on the local market than on the commodities market.
gumby|1 year ago
Homogeneity helps with trading commodities, no question. And commodities reduce risk by allowing a very wide fan out on both sides of a two sided market…which has advantages and disadvantages for all participants.
More along your argument, it also lets the farmer use capital better in the short term (you buy the equipment you need for your monocrop).
But if you have multimodal devices you have the opportunity to take advantage of more flexibility. You can do crop rotation to use less chemicals or to take advantage of trends in the commodity market. You can have a different mix of crops for the same reason (half corn, half row crops, though they re typically worth less). You have more flexibility to adapt to climate change. The commodity markets can handle all this, in fact they help enable it.
This isn’t magic wand — crop rotation doesn’t make sense if, say, you have an orchard. But mechanization also caused us to abandon growing multiple crops in the same field, which can have benefits and improve yield. It was just way too labor intensive. If we go back to individual “labor” (automated in this case) it could be worthwhile.
tda|1 year ago
Certainly the logistical challenge of multiple small harvests of varying products is there, but this is definitely more manageable with robots and computers than without.
And for a small close to population centers, if they can supply multiple kinds of produce reliably, they might be able to make orders of magnitude more money on the local market than on the commodities market.
samatman|1 year ago
algoatecorn|1 year ago