News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a l... by vacri on Friday January 01, 2016 @08:31PM (#10824496)
> The fact that people aren't willing to pay for it tells us that they don't actually care as much as they claimed.

Or that they don't know. Supermarkets don't usually label their vegetables "BigCo" and "littleco". The problem with the 'market solves everything' approach is that it requires perfect knowledge on behalf of all parties.

Re:What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a l... by CountSessine on Friday January 01, 2016 @10:07PM (#10824769)
This is something I've often thought about with regard to organic farming.

A claim is often made that modern agriculture and growing methods can decouple food's nutrition from traditional signals of nutrition like size and colour and blemishes. I don't know how true that is, but it seems like there's a branding failure here - that we somehow need to be able to select fruit and vegetables based on which specific producers made them rather than vague and inherently porous regulations governing what can be called 'organic' or 'natural'.

Supermarkets might not like that - they'd have to better manage sales space to accommodate multiple known 'brands' of apples or oranges, but consumers would have a lot more reason to 'trust' self-interested brands of farms than they would an 'organic' commodity label. Any kind of a label that doesn't involve individual self-interested reputation but instead involves regulatory compliance is going to be gamed and ultimately ignored.

Re:What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a l... by crdoconnor on Friday January 01, 2016 @10:03PM (#10824761)
Large agricultural companies lobby the most to remove food labelling laws.

IIRC they just got rid of the necessity to put country of origin on food.