I’m thinking about the meat industry for example. Sure, there are a lot of farmers, sure they have a lot of animals on each farm, but to me it seems people consume meat at a higher pace than an animal has time to grow to be an adult before it is made food.
Same I am wondering for bananas. It takes some time for it to grow, and if millions are a regular consumers, how can we still have so much available?
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It’s somewhat like cutting your hair. You lose a lot of hair, but you’re producing so much that the lost hair is a small portion of the overall hair.
If humans eat, say, a million bananas a month, and bananas take a year to grow (numbers made up for demonstration).
That means if you have 12m bananas, you cover the whole year. All you need to make sure is to have 12m bananas to start with, and to produce 12m every year. Taking a year to grow only affects how many you need to grow at the same time.
Another thing to point out in addition to the other comments is that cattle, for example, don’t really grow to be adults.
Because we grow millions of them.
We kill over 100,000,000 chickens a *day*. And we supply that by *hatching* that many a day.
Doesn’t matter if they take a year to grow as long as you started growing them a year before you need them.
Even the biggest average beef consumers (Argentina) consumes around 50kg of beef per year per person. The average global meat (all kinds) consumption is about 50kg per person per year.
A beef cow takes less than 18 months to grow (typically). The population of beef cattle is around 1 billion. An average beef cow provides around 200kg of meat. Chickens only take 6-8 weeks to grow and provide 1-1.5 kg of meat per bird and there are more than 30 billion of them farmed. These are certainly big numbers.
A banana farm produces around 100 tons per year per hectare. A farm produces more bananas in one hectare in one year than a single human would eat their entire life. Humans consume about 100 million tons a year – so this is a nice round number of 1 million hectares of banana plantation (average). Although it is hard to picture, the US, China and India have EACH more than 100 million hectares worth of farmland. The total cropland used in the world (not counting grazing for cattle etc) is 1.5 BILLION hectares. Bananas are not even 0.1 percent of this number.
We are simply able to produce hell of a lot of food.
With modern agricultural methods and technologies, we can produce incredible amounts of food per farmer per acre. Todays farmers are pretty much THE most productive humans who have ever lived.
>Same I am wondering for bananas. It takes some time for it to grow, and if millions are a regular consumers, how can we still have so much available?
The gist is that a lot of work goes into ~~guessing~~forecasting what people will want to eat, drink, buy, etc. in the amount of time it takes to make the good. If demand spikes, then that’s a problem because you can’t just double banana production, for example. That’s where the pricing comes in. If demand goes up, supply stays the same, it has two effects. In the short term, it helps manage the short supply. Someone who bought a whole pack of bananas a week and thew out 2-3 bad ones on Friday will suddenly stop doing that, they’ll buy less. People will also seek other, cheaper alternatives. In the long term, it incents other suppliers to enter the market and increase the supply, which will eventually drive down price, even if not to the original levels.
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