Valuing Food

[parsley]

Time and time again, farmers allude to the fact that the food we grow is sold too cheaply.

How do we cange that paradymn?

Just four ideas to begin with, for you rip apart:

1. If we want to sell food for a high price we should ourselves place a higher value on food. Do you?

2. Differntiate the difference between expensive food crops and cheap non-food volume crops.

3. Stop bragging about buying the cheapest food you can find on this forum.

4. Examine labels.

5. Make good use of your marketing dollars ie The CWB can legislatively buy foreign crops and market them with Western canadian marketing dollars. Shouldn't that stop? Pars

[dave4441]

THe problem is that for the most part we do not sell food, we sell grain. That is the issue. We seen on earlier post that people take the value of the grain on their farm and subtract that from the value of the destination market and feel that the difference is profit. The problem with that is it does not recognize the costs from moving the product from grain on a farm to food in a destination market. Grain is worthless on a farm and is not food.

[parsley]

"Grain is worthless on a farm and is not food."

What a statment.

From a farmer.

You know what Dave? Consumers want farm food. They want less processed food. They want whole food. They want live food. They want uncontaminated food. They want fresh food. They want traceable food.
From a farm

Farmed by a farmer they can actually call, and say, "Hello".

That was my personal experience, as a farmer, for a decade, dealing directly with consumers, on the farm, face to face, every day. They like farmers and they want to SUPPORT farmers. I referred them to conventional farms, as well. Pars

[countryguy]

Food is not too cheap. It's just the piece of the pie that the farmer gets is too damn small and always getting smaller.

[wmoebis]

According to the Gov't and others. Farming is not an industry it is a supplier to an industry.

[skhadenuf]

Dave quit bullshitting it doesn't cost twice the product to put it in a container weigh it and send it over seas that is a fact. that is something us farmers need to expose more of I gave the canary and pea examples they are pennies a pound nobody eats a bushel of peas at one sitting and no birds eat a bushel of seed yet the people selling it get over a bushel value from fractions of pounds, come on man we all have seen the how many beer come from barley and how many bread loaves come from a bushel they could double what they pay us and it would effect the consumer a few cents, but everyone up the ladder hires their accountant nerds that calculate how to squeeze every fraction of a penny out of us we as farmers are too stupid to say f you and get together and do something about it.