You might be talking about an effect of post harvest handling and shipping. Tomatos, for example, are not allowed to mature on the vine. They're picked stone green and then treated after the fact to be as red as possible. Additionally, main cultivars are often ones bred for their appearance and amenability to this process, and often enough to the detriment of their taste/content. The combined effect is that you get a piece of food bred for looks and transportability that hasn't quite finished it's life cycle and so hasn't metabolized or converted all of the stuff that we expect to find in it. They're water balloons.
With livestock, I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about. Though I can guess at some little tidbits here and there. Yellow skinned birds contain carotenoids not present in white skinned birds. The chicken that built the poultry industry in the us was a yellow skinned bird - but it takes 24 weeks to reach maturity. The white skinned bird that consumers prefer, the cornish cross, takes 8 weeks to reach twice the size. In cattle, grass fed beef tends to be less fatty...and that can be consequential for our health as well.
Traditional ag or alt ag has a pr problem, largely of it's own making. From a marketing perspective, satisfying luddite impulses and ideation is a winner - but from a production perspective, it's a non starter. It's not so much that producers want to go back to scratching at the earth with sticks and broadcasting nothing but heirloom seed. We can't do that. We'd still be able to grow enough food if we did - but we wouldn't know how to monetize it for the producer. There's a reason that agricultural systems at that end of technology tended to rely on a massive and captive labor force and strong central planning by specifically trained elites. It's not so much that we want to get back to traditional methods as we want to exploit traditional interactions. Those interactions we've replaced with oil. That can be fertility, it can be irrigation, it can be pest control, it can be post harvest process and storage and delivery.
The biggest chunks are going to come out of storage and transport. The best investment for a small mixed farm right now isn't land, and it isn't a tractor. It's a walk in cooler. Followed close behind by a trailerable drip irrigation system. The only way to carve into that chunk is by re-distributing production. All of the tomatos in the us can't come from a couple counties in california, florida and mexico in a world where food miles as a carbon reality are tied to policy or taxation. By default, this would solve the water balloon problem, as the main reason those cultivars are grown and grown in that way boils down to the necessities of long range transport. This is already how local producers compete with conventional ag. By providing a more mature product with a longer shelf life.
Or, at least, this is the methodological advantage. People have to be sold. It's not enough to have a better product, you have to help them understand how consuming your product makes them a better person, or more closely aligns with the person they are. That's where luddite marketing comes in. It's not unique to alt ag. Guys who sell ice cream made in factories with no human employees like to warble about the good old days in the commercial spots.
With livestock, I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about. Though I can guess at some little tidbits here and there. Yellow skinned birds contain carotenoids not present in white skinned birds. The chicken that built the poultry industry in the us was a yellow skinned bird - but it takes 24 weeks to reach maturity. The white skinned bird that consumers prefer, the cornish cross, takes 8 weeks to reach twice the size. In cattle, grass fed beef tends to be less fatty...and that can be consequential for our health as well.
Traditional ag or alt ag has a pr problem, largely of it's own making. From a marketing perspective, satisfying luddite impulses and ideation is a winner - but from a production perspective, it's a non starter. It's not so much that producers want to go back to scratching at the earth with sticks and broadcasting nothing but heirloom seed. We can't do that. We'd still be able to grow enough food if we did - but we wouldn't know how to monetize it for the producer. There's a reason that agricultural systems at that end of technology tended to rely on a massive and captive labor force and strong central planning by specifically trained elites. It's not so much that we want to get back to traditional methods as we want to exploit traditional interactions. Those interactions we've replaced with oil. That can be fertility, it can be irrigation, it can be pest control, it can be post harvest process and storage and delivery.
The biggest chunks are going to come out of storage and transport. The best investment for a small mixed farm right now isn't land, and it isn't a tractor. It's a walk in cooler. Followed close behind by a trailerable drip irrigation system. The only way to carve into that chunk is by re-distributing production. All of the tomatos in the us can't come from a couple counties in california, florida and mexico in a world where food miles as a carbon reality are tied to policy or taxation. By default, this would solve the water balloon problem, as the main reason those cultivars are grown and grown in that way boils down to the necessities of long range transport. This is already how local producers compete with conventional ag. By providing a more mature product with a longer shelf life.
Or, at least, this is the methodological advantage. People have to be sold. It's not enough to have a better product, you have to help them understand how consuming your product makes them a better person, or more closely aligns with the person they are. That's where luddite marketing comes in. It's not unique to alt ag. Guys who sell ice cream made in factories with no human employees like to warble about the good old days in the commercial spots.
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