The most charitable interpretation is that farmers are simply not as optimized as grocery stores, resulting in a higher overall cost.
This also applies to wineries: buying a bottle directly at the cellar door is almost always more expensive buying it at $LIQUOR_SUPERSTORE, but the people plonking down $100 for a bottle don't care, so this is a perfectly sensible pricing strategy.
You can't find out what something is going to cost until after you've eaten it. You have to have food consumption insurance to get things at reasonable cost. Food insurance companies charge astronomical rates unless you're part of some group plan.
...meanwhile more than half of the gas price goes to the government, and people are notcing.
It's not a gas crisis, there's enough gas, it's a politics crisis.
If anything, they are losing money with inflation and the decreased demand that higher fuel prices will create.
In slovenia we had regulated gas prices until 2020 - https://www.gov.si/assets/ministrstva/MGRT/Dokumenti/DNT/cen... [docx]
If we look at the last price (top row), the price (without any taxes) was 0.395eur/l. Then they add (in column order) CO2 tax, "saving energy tax", excise duty ("trošarina"), "tax to help electricity production", and VAT (DDV), bringing the total price to 1.00eur. The total of taxes added is ~153% of the base price (0.395 without -> 1eur with tax).
For example, California charges both $0.539 per gallon AND sales tax. The latter varies based on city/county/district and is charged on the "after per-gallon tax" price.
The total sales tax in San Jose is 9.375%, so $6.50 at the pump includes $0.557 in sales tax. (The "at the pump" price includes sales tax.)
That's a total of $1.096/g state and local for $6.50/g at the pump.
Add in the federal $0.184/g and the total tax is $1.28/g on $6.50/g gas in San Jose.
There may also be permit fees.
I understand that a cow is a logistic process, where after slaughter, you have to get rid of the whole cow, not just the "best parts", but selling potatos is literally just packing a bag and weighing them, but nope...
Same with apples in the autumn, complain about low prices from companies, then not wanting to sell them at retail price (with two middlemen gone).
Far easier, more predictable and less wasteful of the animals to sell the entire lot to processors, who then deal with butchering, packaging and distributing individual cuts for them.
I could do one off short term programming contracts, but my customers would definitely pay much more for the overhead of me making a living that way vs simply getting a salaried job.
1) gas was ~1.5eur here, then it fell to 1.0eur during the plague, and there were zero price drops beacause of that, and when the price started rising to 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 eur, everybody (farmers, retailers) started complaining about increasing gas prices and how that will result in higher consumer prices (even before we hit the price a year before that).
2) farmers complain about low prices they get from processors (and retailers).. then you want to buy meat directly from them, and their price is usually a lot higher than in-store price (even though there are usually two or more middle-men between them and the store), and you cannot choose anything... want steaks? Want beef thigh? Hah, good luck.. you can only buy 10, 20kg+ of "mixed beef", where 90% is "meat for goulash" (hard, cheap cuts) and 10% bones for soup. So yeah... it's Aldi for me.
Also, there were farmers complaining that they had a bunch of food that they had to throw away because of the plague (eg. contract with school, school closed, a few tons of salad had to be thrown out)... noone offered for people to come buy stuff directly from them at whatever cheap price,.. in the meantime in-store prices were relatively expensive for that same salad.