- Transporting the grain from the field to the mill.
- Milling
- Transporting flour (and at least 3 other ingredients) from the mill to the bakery
- Baking, packaging
- Transporting the bread from the bakery to the supermarket
- Running the supermarket.
Turns out there is a difference between raw wheat and bread. More news at 8.
When farmers get paid too little for their effort, making these wild comparisons isn’t helping. It seems we’re about a year away from the conclusion “I stubbed my toe. This must be capitalism’s fault.”
What did you stub your toe on? Under which economic system was that object produced? Open your eyes, sheeple!
Don’t understand how he can be part of this industry and not understand it at all.
Or he does understand and is playing a victim. Second is more likely.
The second one for sure. But i would also argue that Clarkson himself is only part of the industry to some degree, because primarily he is still in the (quite successful) business of producing television. And while he is certainly learning stuff the actual act of running a farm is still primarily done by others.
On the practical farming side by Kaleb and on the business side by Charlie, who in this case would be the one understanding how the economics between 25p/kg weat and 1.25£ for a loaf of bread work.
It’s actually kind of crazy all of the rest of that happens for £1.25
Now if we do insulin in the USA, it won’t make so much sense. Capitalism!
Mass production and its effect on unit cost is amazing sometimes. But what is also lost is the transactions between each of those steps. Usually the ones that farm aren't the ones milling, baking, packaging, etc., so there are layers to consider as well, all reducing the unit prices because of the large scale.
- You do not need entire kilo of wheat to make one loaf of bread
That depends on the bread size? From a quick survey of bread recipes online, you need flour and water in a ratio of about 2:1 to 2:1.5. So 1kg of flour gives 1.5kg–1.75kg of dough. I don’t know how much water evaporates during backing, but I think an end product of 1.25kg–1.7kg is a reasonable guess. That’s about a standard sized loaf (to me).
According to Past Clarkson, if Current Clarkson can't make good money farming then Current Clarkson shouldn't be a farmer. Simple as that.
And that is because Current Clarkson is the worst farmer ... in the world.
Simple as
This dumbass was happy that government was paying him not to do anything with his land for that show he had called Clarkson's Farm or something. I wonder when it started to hurt him so he started to pay attention...
In the show, he started farming as a little side project during the pandemic. But he realised how much it sucked and how hard it was for people for which it is the sole source of income.
He's tried to help his neighbours with the shops and restaurants. I don't know how much of it is propaganda or not, but it seems genuine given his recent public statements about it.
If a stubborn bastard like Clarkson can change his mind about stuff like that, it's always good.
I didn't say anything bad about his recent statements. I've yet to see anything real and tangible from his alleged efforts. While he was happy to accept such grants of doing nothing with joy. To me he is nothing but a TV personality and nothing about him is genuine. He literally did a Trump move on his latest interview where he asked the TV reporter what percentage is paying inheritance tax and she said 4% and he run with 96% of the people is having difficulties and shit. And when the same reporter asked where he get his numbers he asked his lackeys who is not effected? He is in my eyes nothing but an attention seeking bastard. Because he is talking loud but doing nothing real.
He made millions via Amazon, he's farm never hurt his wallet.
It seems you're ignorant of what greed is...
He’s not the sharpest egg in the attic, is he?
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."
You don't have your own yeastmonger? Shame. Only way to go really.
that sounds like a d-tier supervillain
His show is entertainment, so he has this character who is semi- incompetent in everything. Yeah, he has this personality also, but not 100%. And some of what he does is just idiotic. The tractor is just him I'm that role.
But the show highlights a lot of important aspects. The skill of farming, the sheer amount of effort, the risk and how much you get for all that risk and effort.
For me it's a missed opportunity that the farmers didn't integrate the chain up like many stores have done down. That is buy the mills, bakeries and stores. Why can the grocery chains so it, but not the other way around?
His show is entertainment, so he has this character who is semi- incompetent in everything. Yeah, he has this personality also, but not 100%. And some of what he does is just idiotic.
The thing about playing a bafoon-ish, semi-incompetent character that uses racist encoded jokes, promoting a lifestyle of the bored rich elite is that at some point you have to come off stage and out of character.
When Clarkson comes off stage, he punches people in the face because he didn't get his din-dins or writes opinion pieces with racist encoded jokes and illiberal positions.
Exactly. What he never ever does is underplay what real farmers do. He's also using this platform to speak for them, and British farmers are largely supportive of his efforts in shining lights on problems they face every day.
But some people online hate the guy and have made their mind up before even bothering to read or try and understand.
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.
The good news is that, thanks to economies of scale, all of these consumer goods are incredibly cheap by unit weight.
The bad news is the we've privatized so much of the agricultural infrastructure and stuck so many middle men in between you and the raw labor that produce these useful goods, that the margins on cost are enormous.
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.
The beauty of industrial farming isn't in simplicity but yield. Nitrogen fixed fertilizer and modern irrigation and combine harvester mean a handful of professionals can do the work of thousands of amateurs.
But if you don't actually know what you're doing, or employ someone who does, all that investment is wasted.
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?
Yeah, "capitalism" is when a the private equity firm buys the farm and now instead of producing enough to live on, or even just "as much as they did last year, now they must show year over year profits.. Every year.. Forever
Nah, private equity doesn't care about profits every year forever. They want to squeeze the remaining juice out of something then throw it away. Something that's sustainably generating profits year after year is a pipe dream compared to what private equity does.
For them, it would be something like have the farm sell its land to an affiliated entity, so the farmer now owes rent on the land in addition to the other expenses. Take the money from selling the land and invest in farming a crop that's completely unsustainable but profitable in the very short term. Say something that needs so much water that the water table quickly drops and the wells no longer work after a few years, or something requiring massive amounts of expensive fertilizer. While that's going on, fire all the farm workers who do any kind of maintenance or planning work. It doesn't matter if the pumps stop getting maintenance, if the tractors are never serviced, if bills are paid on time. It doesn't even matter if mold starts creeping in or vermin start moving in, as long as it doesn't happen immediately. Arrange for the farm to pay the PE owners a management consulting fee that's so high that after paying rent and 100% essential costs, there's absolutely no money left. Eventually, when the farm collapses, declare bankruptcy and let all the creditors fight over the remains.
All while reducing costs, often by skipping steps and ignoring safety.
1kg of wheat ≠ 1kg of flour
Good point.
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 I look at my own family - my English quarter were all farmers and they did OK. They lived to a ripe old age (my gggg-grandmother died of "senility of age", she just got old and something stopped working) and had many children, all living in pretty flexible multi-generational units that allowed a flexibility to take in waifs and strays (an illegitimate child could work the land just as well as anyone else, so a grandparent or uncle would always find room for them). A ggggg-grandfather found himself at 63 with his wife and 7 or 8 kids dead, so he married a much younger woman and got a similar number of kids. He died at the age of 79. His grandfather died in 1767 at the age of 84. His father died in 1746 at the age of 90 (although he was a priest).
Meanwhile on my Dad's side, all his great-grandparents were born in Ireland and all his grandparents were born in Liverpool. The majority of his male ancestors from those generations died nasty deaths in their thirties, largely because the Industrial Revolution ground such people up and oiled the machinery of progress with their blood (literally so for his maternal grandfather).
So farming would have been a tough job but it was preferable to a lot of the urban options.
Yeah, that's probably true for some farmers. Life was terrible, but life in the city was even worse.
the Industrial Revolution ground such people up and oiled the machinery of progress with their blood (literally so for his maternal grandfather).
Literally? I wouldn't think blood would make for good oil for machinery, I'd have thought it was too sticky. And, since it's water based it will evaporate quickly at high temperatures, so it's not really suitable for most machines where temperatures can easily exceed 100C.
We're STILL coming out from under that shit. Me and my father have a wood shop, and I have to get after him about eye and ear protection. And yeah, he's an IT guy and I'm a mechanic, I was shown those gory training videos, he wasn't. Things I've heard him say, "I'm wearing my regular glasses," "It doesn't sound that loud, it doesn't bother me." Especially with hearing protection, I think he's just being macho. I've had sensitive hearing since I was a kid and sometimes I'll just sit around in my ANR headset not listening to anything just...shutting the HVAC and the fridge and the rumble of society out.
Lol, not discovers, just uses it a way that at this moment might serve him to further his own agenda.
It's just a business that has one "influencer" already on staff.
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!
"As an old guy who increased large sums of money in an agricultural tax dodge strategy, I demand younger people subsidize my costs so I can pocket bigger profits. "
Clarkson is a twat. Always has been. But at least when he was younger he was an entertaining, relatable twat. Now he's old, richer than sin, and entitled as fuck.
I think it's the same Clarkson who bought a farm to avoid inheritance tax?
This is the man who punched somebody in the face when service workers went home and he was huuuungy
Shoulda grabbed a Snickers.
Funny how THIS incident was a big deal but everyone ignored his years of racist comments
He must have farted and the air bubble allowed him to get a glimpse of the outside world.
I've not watched anything this person has been in, but every time I see him sharing his thoughts and opinions in publication he seems like a genuinely incurious, blathering moron.
He’s also a racist and assaults people over sandwiches
oh nice, fuck him then edit: ha! looks like I hurt a racist's feelings; guess what, fuck you too.
Now imagine him shouting "SPEED!" and "POWER!" a bunch and being totally stubborn and you've got about 90% of his TV work
Lemmy shitposter learns about protest.
Jeremy Clarkson is a racist, abusive piece of shit
Clarkson is going to Waitrose to get fancy bread. Aldi sell it for 45p. 25p to the farmer leaves just 20p which is split between transport, processing and what ever profit Aldi are taking out of it.
Clarkson not knowing the price of bread is one hardly a surprise.
Wait your bread is literally less than a pound? It’s like $4 here in Canada for shitty wonderbread and $5.50 for the fancy “baked in store” shitty bread
Low-end food is apparently way cheaper in the UK than in North America:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJDg3lMlmBU
There's been inflation since that video went up, so the prices aren't quite that good anymore. There are more recent videos from that channel you can watch to see more current prices though.
Yeah, though you can get bread a little over £1 it's the more luxury stuff. Most root veg, rice and oats are less than £1/KG and make up the majority of the volume of what we get, we usually spend about £30/week between the 2 of us on food. Most expensive purchase is usually cheddar, which is basically the default cheese here, the one we usually get is £5.42/KG.
That's a rough 65 ngl.
He looks better under acceleration
Your wording there needs work.
Jeremy Clarkson looks at his best under POWER!
It's hella odd moving to the UK because for the first time in my life I'm getting remarks on how young I look, meanwhile the hard water has made my hair look like if you got a bunch of cobwebs and lit a firework in it
I like Clarkson, but fuck that guy. Welcome to actual capitalism
