okmatewanker

This is the same Jeremy Clarkson who thinks that young people should work the fields, paid for with taxes, as part of a National Service scheme, right?

What a bell end!

For people who don't know how agriculture works:

Grainaries buy from farmers, high supply and low local demand. Grainaries generally don't have competition. That means grainaries set the price and farmers don't have any negotiating power.

The grainary is now in charge of one thing and one thing only: logistics. The grains need to be distributed over a vast amount of distance, usually by train or by boat. You almost never see a grain elevator unless it is adjacent a railroad.

I fully expect Jeremy Clarkson to have never baked a loaf of bread in his life.

I'll occasionally bake a loaf of bread, here in my home kitchen. I can't do it with only wheat flour, I need water, salt, sugar and oil as well. So I have to pay my municipal waterworks, a salt miner, a sugar beet farmer, a rapeseed farmer, a wheat farmer, and whatever you call a yeast maker, plus their adjacent industries (I don't by sugar beets, I buy refined granular sugar, etc) and multiple truck and train drivers who move all of those goods in their various states of manufacture around the continent.

Then I've got to bake it, I have an electric oven so now the local energy concern gets their cut. It's that, or get a gas oven and cook with natural gas (fossil fuel methane), or misuse my backyard grill and cook with fossil fuel propane, or get out my axe, fell a tree and build a fire, which is labor intensive on my part.

Sometimes, watching Jeremy's Farm, there's an amount of "I didn't think it would take this much knowledge or skill." Because jackasses like me with 40 square feet of vegetable garden and some packets of seeds from the home center manage to make food. How hard can it be to scale that up to hundreds of acres? Modern farmers need a bachelor's degree, you need to know about plants and animals and soil and all manner of shit to be a farmer. "Put seeds in ground, plants grow." Yes, but actually no.

Sometimes it's "He's still The Orangutan from Top Gear." He buys a tractor that's way too big and then struggles to drive it, lol.

A lot of times it's "I don't think rich TV man actually understands how society works, people have just done shit for him his entire life."

I like Clarkson, but fuck that guy. Welcome to actual capitalism

I'm not a farmer, I'm not a baker, I'm just a bread eater, but even I knew that 1kg was way too much wheat for a single loaf of bread. Turns out, yup. 1kg makes 2 loaves.

How does that change things? Well it means a loaf of bread contains 12.5p of flour, not 25p. So, instead of a loaf from a grocery store being about 5x as much as the price of the flour it contains, it's 10x as much.

Having said that, This isn't just a "capitalism" thing. There are many steps between the farmer selling raw wheat and a loaf of bread appearing on a store shelf. Many of them are unchanged since ancient times. I'm sure baker in the Middle Ages charged enough for his loaves of bread that he'd make a reasonable profit and that was centuries before capitalism was a thing.

In the modern world there are different facilities for every step. There's transportation which costs something at multiple stages. There's winnowing and milling the flour. There's buying and shipping the other ingredients. There's mixing the dough. There's baking the dough. There's packaging (and possibly slicing) the bread. And finally, there's the grocery store. To be useful, a grocery store basically has to be in a built-up area, which means high real-estate and related costs. It also needs to make enough margin to pay people to stock the shelves and cashiers to sell the loaves. The only truly modern part from all that that didn't exist in the Middle Ages is sales and marketing. Paying to send out emails or a flyer or whatever to advertise their items. My guess is that most of those steps operate on razor thin margins and make up for it by doing huge quantities.

Now, it's true that the system has flaws and inefficiencies. One glaring example is the lack of competition at many stages in many countries. In Canada, there are so few grocery store chains that the existing ones were able to literally fix the price of bread. So, of course when that happens both customers and farmers get squeezed.

I wonder if there ever was a "golden age of farming" when farming was a comfortable lifestyle. It seems to me that it has always been a very difficult career. If anything, it's probably at its best now under "capitalism". That isn't to say it's an easy job now, just that as difficult and stressful as it is now, it was even worse in the past.

It would be interesting though, just as an intellectual exercise, to imagine a perfectly fair world to figure out what the perfectly fair ratio is between the price of wheat and the price of a loaf of bread on the store shelf. If everybody were paid the exact same rate for their labour, and there were no excess profits generated that went to owners / landlords, how much of the final price of a loaf of bread on a store shelf should come from the raw ingredients of wheat, water, yeast, oil? How much goes to the baker? How much to the delivery drivers? How much to the shelf stockers and cashiers? Imagine it's a wood-fired oven, how much of the price of a loaf of bread goes to a lumberjack, even though their involvement in the whole process is really indirect?

"Mind you I'm just a simple country farmer, but..."

Jeremy Clarkson is a racist, abusive piece of shit

He’s not the sharpest egg in the attic, is he?

Well Jeremy, somebody makes bread out of it.

Honestly, I fucking like Clarkson.

Is he sometimes obnoxious? Yeah. Wrong? Definitely.

But like the role he's playing he's playing fucking amazingly. He's an entertainment person who doesn't have an entirely closed mind even though there's definitely a lot of shit in it. And he isn't overly political. Like he understands he can influence opinions a bit but he would never try to become a real politician. Would he?