#Agricultural product

[shree-1r]

[dhana-1lakshmi]

[indosaw]

As leading Agricultural product manufacturer in India, we are committed to delivering high-quality solutions to meet global farming demands. Our extensive range of farm equipment and machinery is designed to enhance productivity and efficiency in agriculture. Our expert team is dedicated to providing top-notch customer support and ensuring that our agricultural equipment meets the needs of farmers worldwide.

[economicsresearch]

page 564 - okay, I can't let it go yet because it is all just churn, like the cutaway of this popular rapid in the Adirondack Mountains of north-east America.

I'm too annoyed with myself to actually explain my thinking here, so I'll just leave some breadcrumbs for you to figure out the metaphor.

-AI

-consumption and regurgitation

-ouroboros

-diminishing returns

-diminished humanity

-swim in an innocuous river

-pulled into a faster current

-no matter how hard you swim the shore is out of reach

-trapped in the churning water gasping for breath whenever you break the surface for a frantic second

-smashed against rocks having your skin gouged and peeled from your body as your blood flows into the river's roiling waters the world goes grey then black because you've swallowed too much water and not enough oxygen

-diminished individual

[rjzimmerman]

Food as You Know It Is About to Change. (New York Times Op-Ed)

From the vantage of the American supermarket aisle, the modern food system looks like a kind of miracle. Everything has been carefully cultivated for taste and convenience — even those foods billed as organic or heirloom — and produce regarded as exotic luxuries just a few generations ago now seems more like staples, available on demand: avocados, mangoes, out-of-season blueberries imported from Uruguay.

But the supermarket is also increasingly a diorama of the fragility of a system — disrupted in recent years by the pandemic, conflict and, increasingly, climate change. What comes next? Almost certainly, more disruptions and more hazards, enough to remake the whole future of food.

The world as a whole is already facing what the Cornell agricultural economist Chris Barrett calls a “food polycrisis.” Over the past decade, he says, what had long been reliable global patterns of year-on-year improvements in hunger first stalled and then reversed. Rates of undernourishment have grown 21 percent since 2017. Agricultural yields are still growing, but not as quickly as they used to and not as quickly as demand is booming. Obesity has continued to rise, and the average micronutrient content of dozens of popular vegetables has continued to fall. The food system is contributing to the growing burden of diabetes and heart disease and to new spillovers of infectious diseases from animals to humans as well.

And then there are prices. Worldwide, wholesale food prices, adjusted for inflation, have grown about 50 percent since 1999, and those prices have also grown considerably more volatile, making not just markets but the whole agricultural Rube Goldberg network less reliable. Overall, American grocery prices have grown by almost 21 percent since President Biden took office, a phenomenon central to the widespread perception that the cost of living has exploded on his watch. Between 2020 and 2023, the wholesale price of olive oil tripled; the price of cocoa delivered to American ports jumped by even more in less than two years. The economist Isabella Weber has proposed maintaining the food equivalent of a strategic petroleum reserve, to buffer against shortages and ease inevitable bursts of market chaos.

Price spikes are like seismographs for the food system, registering much larger drama elsewhere — and sometimes suggesting more tectonic changes underway as well. More than three-quarters of the population of Africa, which has already surpassed one billion, cannot today afford a healthy diet; this is where most of our global population growth is expected to happen this century, and there has been little agricultural productivity growth there for 20 years. Over the same time period, there hasn’t been much growth in the United States either.

Though American agriculture as a whole produces massive profits, Mr. Barrett says, most of the country’s farms actually lose money, and around the world, food scarcity is driving record levels of human displacement and migration. According to the World Food Program, 282 million people in 59 countries went hungry last year, 24 million more than the previous year. And already, Mr. Barrett says, building from research by his Cornell colleague Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, the effects of climate change have reduced the growth of overall global agricultural productivity by between 30 and 35 percent. The climate threats to come loom even larger.

It can be tempting, in an age of apocalyptic imagination, to picture the most dire future climate scenarios: not just yield declines but mass crop failures, not just price spikes but food shortages, not just worsening hunger but mass famine. In a much hotter world, those will indeed become likelier, particularly if agricultural innovation fails to keep pace with climate change; over a 30-year time horizon, the insurer Lloyd’s recently estimated a 50 percent chance of what it called a “major” global food shock.

But disruption is only half the story and perhaps much less than that. Adaptation and innovation will transform the global food supply, too. At least to some degree, crops such as avocados or cocoa, which now regularly appear on lists of climate-endangered foodstuffs, will be replaced or redesigned. Diets will shift, and with them the farmland currently producing staple crops — corn, wheat, soy, rice. The pressure on the present food system is not a sign that it will necessarily fail, only that it must change. Even if that progress does come to pass, securing a stable and bountiful future for food on a much warmer planet, what will it all actually look like?

[curiosity-killed]

I think my biggest question for the whole trigun universe is how so many goddamn pianos made it into space. My second question is about Knives’ pipe organ on a spaceship

[blujayonthewing]

unfortunately spiders are a pretty popular part of traditional gnomish cuisine

[coachbeards]

you know that episode of leverage where Eliot meets that little boy in the hospital whose father is abusive, but he can’t tell anyone because his dad knows the cops, they come over to their house to play poker, etc……that’s how I feel little beard was btw

[dhana-1lakshmi]

[r0bita]

Crossbreeding plants, veggies, and produce has been a thing for centuries, but a lot of people seem to mistake those practices with being exclusively associated with non organic and gmo stuff which is unfortunate and also confusing.

Like... lemons and large corn don't come from nature my guys... we did that... but they're not tainted because we did that.

They're tainted because of capitalism.

[teenagefeeling]

people are so unfair to vegans i've said it before and i'll say it again

[economicsresearch]

page 564 panel a - I sound so lame! The ideas are valid but my writing is so BORING.

I miss the good old days when I would write is that a bat? under an array of data lines that may or may not have looked like a bat. And maybe I would say something about the Lapp School of Economics use of the bat in their divination rituals, more animist than economist.

[cafffine]

why did someone. to my face. just defend the ‘honey is not vegan’ argument by saying “yeah but honestly it’s commonly known to vegans that the honey bees that are used for mass produced honey aren’t native to a lot of the places they’re farmed so it’s just another animal product doing damage to the-”

PLEASEEEEEEE look at me right now and tell me that the millions of acres of soy beans in the midwest are a nonharmful fully native peace and love product. tell me that with a straight face.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from DeSmog Blog:

With its unparalleled purchasing power and exacting demands, fast food has long shaped agricultural systems in the United States, Europe, and China. But as major American fast food brands, like KFC, expand into so-called “frontier markets,” taxpayer-funded development banks have made their global expansion possible by underwriting the factory farms that supply them with chicken, a DeSmog investigation has found. 

In all, the investigation identified five factory-scale poultry companies in as many countries that have received financial support from the International Finance Corporation (IFC, the private-sector lending arm of the World Bank Group), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), or both since 2003, and that supply chicken to KFC. A sixth company has benefited from IFC advisory services but has not received financing. 

A review of press accounts, financial disclosures, and the companies’ websites shows this support aided these firms’ KFC-linked operations in up to 13 countries in Asia, Africa, and Europe. 

In Kazakhstan, both banks helped a Soviet-era poultry factory become a KFC supplier. In 2011, the IFC lent poultry company Ust-Kamenogorsk Poultry (UKPF) invested $2 million in refurbishing housing for chickens, among other projects. In 2016, the EBRD made a $20 million equity investment in the company’s parent, Aitas, to finance the construction of a new facility to raise and process poultry. In 2018, two years after announcing the financing deal, UKPF revealed it had become a supplier to KFC in Kazakhstan. The EBRD sold its stake in the company in 2019. 

In South Africa, the IFC helped one KFC supplier bolster its operations across the region. In 2013, the bank loaned Country Bird Holdings $25 million to expand existing operations in South Africa, Botswana, and Zambia. Country Bird supplies KFC in all three countries, as well as Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Three years later, in 2016, Country Bird also became KFC’s sole franchisee in Zambia.

In Jordan, the EBRD’s technical support and a 2015 loan worth up to $21 million helped poultry company Al Jazeera Agricultural Company upgrade its facilities and expand its retail presence. Al Jazeera claims to produce half the country’s restaurant-sold chicken. It includes the local franchisees of KFC and Texas Chicken (known by its original name, Church’s Chicken, in the U.S.) as clients. 

With this Global North-financed fast-food expansion comes a host of environmental, social, and health concerns in regions often unprepared to field them.

“It’s so clear that these investments are not consistent with any coherent notion of sustainable development,” Kari Hamerschlag, deputy director for the food and agriculture program at Friends of the Earth US, told DeSmog. 

Providing Financial Security for Fast Food Suppliers 

Both the IFC and the EBRD are financed primarily by the governments of developed countries for the benefit of developing countries. The IFC was founded in 1956 under the umbrella of the World Bank Group to stimulate developing economies by lending directly to businesses. Founded in 1991, the EBRD was formed to support Eastern Europe’s transition to a market economy. Since then, it has extended its geographic reach to include other regions. 

Development banks often finance companies and projects in regions that more risk-averse commercial banks tend to avoid. The idea is to help grow a company’s operations and lower the risk for private sector investors. 

Both of these development banks’ investments cover a range of sectors, including manufacturing, education, agribusiness, energy, and tourism. Because large agro-processors, such as poultry companies, can transform bushel upon bushel of local crops into more valuable products, like meat, they make especially attractive clients. 

The world’s largest restaurant company, U.S.-based Yum! Brands, owns KFC, and calls the fried chicken powerhouse, which oversees more than 30,000 locations across the globe, a “major growth engine.” 

[chinesegal]

As for "industrial agriculture", sheep in the us and pretty much everywhere are raised on traditional pasture where theyre free to roam and graze. "Intensive" industrial style farming like with pigs and chickens dont apply to sheep farming.

Source: https://www.sheep101.info/farm.html