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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.
Totally healthy and normal I see nothing wrong
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.