Those costs are tiny, compared to all other costs. 'Local' is not a goal in itself (except for geopolitical reasons, but that's another topic). For fun, try to do the back-of-a-napkin math on how many bananas you can fit in a container, how many containers fit on a ship, and what percentage of the retail price that makes. Or how much it costs to ship a truck of lettuce heads from Spain to Northern Europe. Yes there are weird cases (flying roses from Eastern Africa to Europe?) but all in all, the costs are tiny.

The next thing then is, of course, that current costs externalize many hidden costs. Which is true, but look at efficiency gains of current gen freight ships, with sails made of solar panels and that sort of thing, and look at the economics of freight shipping - even at double the (shipping) cost, it would still be only a fraction of the retail cost.

Oh and marketing/sales costs for locally grown goods being low is straight up not true. Look at how hard it is for those small scale farmers to sell their wares, schlepping their old vans from farmers market to CSA collection point, and how much of their product goes to waste because of distribution inefficiencies...

The costs are tiny because right now they not internalize pollution and social injustice. Yes, “local” is not an end on itself but the same is true for “global”. Right now the cost of sending a banana to the other side of the world in a container is small because we are jeopardizing the future of the planet by not putting a price on CO2 emissions. Local food need to spend effort on Marketing because they are more expensive that monocultures, and the reason for this is that monoculture prices benefit from subsidies and not paying externalities. We need to fix this for the sake of future generations and if we do this local goods would be much more competitive and so much more effective in marketing.

Well that's exactly what I preempted and refuted in my second paragraph, and my third paragraph was about how, no, just making mass produced food internalize all their costs won't fix all the marketing and sales issues of 'locally produced food', for a broad definition of everything that encompasses...

> Every efficiency you gain in production scale you tend to lose in distribution efficiency.

How is that true in the case of robotic berry pickers?

To apply robotic berry pickers you normally need to produce in a large scale (many tons of berries). So you will need to distribute them. If you don’t apply the externalities of transportation and preservation of the food it would seem that this kind of production makes sense but it doesn’t. It actually less effective if you count for the costs of transportation, packaging and freezing.

Environmentally this is also known as “mix vs sort” and is almost a physical rule. If your are very good in mixing (making things at large scale), your tend to be bad in sorting (distributing things).

Here is the book that talks about it in the 1930 https://soilandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/0303critic/0303...

> To apply robotic berry pickers you normally need to produce in a large scale (many tons of berries).

Farmers could rent the machine. So the machine can travel instead of the berries.

Also, robotics is in many industries not competitive against cheap labor from low-wage countries. However, for agriculture that might be different, precisely because of distribution costs (e.g., it's expensive to ship fruits and vegetables from China).

I agree, we can apply robotics but always thinking in small scale farming, otherwise the gains in production will be lost in distribution. Sadly right now we are not paying for externalities of distribution so there is no incentive for thinking in small distributed economies.

There are more benefits of thinking small. We are creating a big interdependent and fragile economy. It’s seems robust but a black swan event - as Nassin Taleb would name - can provoke global disaster. Small scale economies are less exposed to this.