Supermarkets can sell 6 ripe tomatoes for £1 or a pineapple from another country for £1, if you tried to grow those at home (if you even had the correct climate) it would cost a lot more than that. for the location, soil, water, feed, making sure it’s got no pests, etc. How do supermarkets charge so little for stuff that requires so much to mass produce?
In: Economics
Farm equipment is expensive.
But farm equipment is VERY efficient.
You don’t use expensive farm equipment on small scale farms (naturally).
You make one sandwich, making that sandwich requires the following steps:
1. Get ingredients out of fridge
2. Apply ingredients to sandwich
3. Put ingredients away
That process takes, roughly, 5 minutes, with step 1 taking 2 minutes (getting out the ingredients), step 2 taking 1 minute (making the sandwich), and step 3 taking 2 minutes (putting everything away/cleaning up).
If you made two sandwiches, it wouldn’t take you 10 minutes to make two sandwiches, it would take you 6 minutes, because step 1 and step 3 would only be done once, but you do step 2 twice, creating 2 sandwiches, meaning that technically, each sandwich only took 3 minutes to make.
If you made 10 sandwiches using this method, it would take you 14 minutes, 2 minutes on each end to take the ingredients out and put them away, and 10 minutes to make each sandwich. Each sandwich, in that instance, took 1 minute and 40 seconds to make.
Now, let’s say you made 100 sandwiches, which would take 104 minutes, meaning each sandwich would take 1 minute and 4 seconds to make.
All of a sudden, a sandwich that took 5 minutes to make, now takes just over a minute to make.
Expand that out to hundreds and thousands of sandwiches, and optimise the time for each step, and all of a sudden you have a sandwich every 5 seconds, not every 5 minutes.
That’s why you can buy tomatoes for a pound and a pineapple for a pound, instead of one geezer growing a pineapple in his back garden for a decade, it was grown with another 100,000 pineapples on a farm.
And here’s another mind bender for you, you know how fruit takes time to ripen? Well, that pineapple probably left the plant completely inedible, and the long time it took to ship via sea cargo actually *ripened the plant in transit* meaning that the farmer didn’t have to sit on it for ages and then get it to you immediately, and the shipping process, in comparison to the cost (opportunity cost) of having them ripen on the plant or ripen in a warehouse, in comparison, actually cost a *negative* amount of money in shipping, because by being shipped, it’s being stored too.
That’s just one small facet of the global supply chain, and why it’s simultaneously amazing, and also stupidly fragile.
Making one thing is inefficient; making 100,000 things is more efficient
If a farmer grows and harvests 1 ton of vegetable; the farmer will gladly sell all 1 ton to a single buyer for a cheaper price than selling 1/5 ton to 5 buyers at a higher price
One sale that is guaranteed has value.
Since the single buyer is buying cheap they can sell cheap but still with a profit markup
The same way all economy of scale works. Virtually everything is cheaper/more efficient to produce at a larger scale. This is, at its most basic, why you can buy a t-shirt for $15 instead of waving up 6 months’ wages for a seamstress to hand-sew it. Mechanization dramatically increases the land area you can plow/plant/fertilize, much more than the increase in cost. It’s cheaper to build one massive storage facility than 100 small ones. Transportation is cheaper in bulk. A few people can do the white collar paperwork for a massive farm, that would take up a significant portion of the labor of all 100 farmers on their own 100 plots.
And, of course, they’re grown in poorer countries than the US. When a few huge multinationals own all the farmland they can pay absolute dirt wages and still get work, because there’s no one else to work for. Tbf, this is true in the US, too., most agricultural labor here is done by temporary migrant laborers who aren’t US citizens, and have little power to stop a company from mistreating them. But the “normal” wages in a poorer country are lower, and the shit wages there are *way* lower. When you’re shipping literal tons of pineapples in ocean tankers, the transport costs per pound are so little that it can be cheaper to harvest them in Latin America, ship them to Asia for canning, and ship them back to the US to sell, rather than grow and can them all in the US.
its kinda wild how much cheaper things get when u make em in bulk. its like the more tomatoes you grow the less each one costs. big farms have mad resources they buy in totes so they pay less per tomato then we would for a few. plus they got ways to deal with pests and all that that we don’t. yet, home grown stuff does taste the best tho so worth it for the experience
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