A few years ago, my partner went to the Golden Gate Produce Terminal in South SF on a whim. It wasn’t entirely clear if members of the public were welcome, but no one seemed to notice or care.
While perusing the stocks, my partner happened upon a smiling vendor with a big knife standing beside a pile of boxed avocados. He said, “You have to taste my avocados!” as he sliced open a petite dark green fruit. My partner accepted the cube offered on a toothpick and gingerly placed it onto his tongue. Upon closing his mouth, the cube seemed to spontaneously melt into one of the most buttery, savory, rich substances he had ever tasted. Needless to say, my partner brought home a big box of avocados that day.
I was skeptical when he first told me the story, but we quickly had a knife and spoons at the ready and were digging in to a ripe specimen. He wasn’t lying after all, this was among the best things I had ever tasted, similar to an excellent piece of salmon sashimi but… better. I confess to you that we ate that big box of avocados in a week or less, our intake only limited by the rate at which the fruit became ripe. We aren’t normally gluttonous people, but those were some amazing avocados.
We eat store bought avocados several times a week, but I unfortunately haven’t had a single one in the years since that was even a hundredth as delicious as those wonderful fruits. If anything, the flavor and quality seems to be on the decline. We often joke about sneaking back into the produce terminal to find avocado man and his delicious avocados. Maybe one of these days…
>We eat store bought avocados several times a week, but I unfortunately haven’t had a single one in the years since that was even a hundredth as delicious as those wonderful fruits.
I find the quality of avocados (and pretty much everything else) varies by the season. As you get closer to California's season for avocados, they taste better and better. Once they have to travel further, they start being more hit or miss.
I haven't tasted one as good as the ones I ate off the tree in Kenya. Although, almost everything there seemed to taste better.
The biggest problem is most fruit is picked before it's ripe. It keeps longer on the ship and gets ripened with gas when it is unloaded at the destination. We pay lots of money to get fooled here in north europe.
Avocados do not ripen on the tree. They need to be pulled off in order to ripen properly. You need to pick them at the right time so they have the right amount of oil content.
Try to find some what they call “bacon avocados”. They’re really rich and creamy. Massive too. I’ve only seen them a few times in Southern California, Ojai in particular.
I found this that ships carefully packed boxes of unripe ones (within US only, so no good for me.. but maybe someone in the US might like to try this?):
They don't breed true, but it's not nearly as bad as that video makes it out. I've grown dozens of avocados from seed over the years, and the majority of them have good fruit.
They aren't the same as the parent I know (and who knows what variety they pollinated with) but it's still a lot of fun to plant one and see what you get. Worst comes to worst, you'll still have a good rootstock!
> So it's likely that his avocados cannot be found elsewhere.
Well, according to the video, there is a 1/10k chance an avocado tree is good each time you "roll the dice." For a sense of magnitude, there are only seven types grown in California [1]. So if he is the only source of that avocado type he's sitting on a gold mine.
Had a similar experience with mangos. For me in Western Europe a mango is this rather tasty yellow fruit. Turns out in India mangos are orange and taste so much fuller, sweeter and better overall (even after having been on a plane, this was a gift from a colleague) I basically stopped eating mangos here.
Wow, was picturing a perfectly ripe avocado reading this :)
One place I know has great avocados are fruit stands in San Diego, particularly North County during summer. They grow them all over the hillsides and sell for cheap by the roadside.
A few months ago I started on an avocado-a-day diet--half at lunch, half at dinner--and shortly thereafter developed really bad heartburn. Turns out avocados are very high in fat and are known to cause heartburn if you eat too many in a short period of time. So buyer beware, avocados are only healthy in moderation!
It's highly improbable that your heartburn was caused by the fat in a single avocado. An average Hass fruit weighs 140g and thus contains about 23g of fat, and most of this is unsaturated. You'd consume about the same amount of fat if you'd eat a single slice of bread with butter and cheese.
Given the globalization of Mexican cartels and avocados being a staple export of theirs, I am curious to see the outcome. Will the cartels go to Africa or will they stomach the shrinking margins on their product?
Downvoting pattern on HN is the weirdest thing, even weirder than Reddit sometimes.
I can feel what kind of the comments will be downvoted but can't pin down why. The best I can come up with is that certain comment will be downvoted when the "mood" (not even narrative) of it doesn't fit with the others.
Is there research or a startup working to genetically modify tropical fruit trees into a form that would be easier to cultivate in greenhouses. There doesn't seem to be any good reason why an avocado can't grow on a vine or even on a seaweed.
Such fruit could be cheaper and higher quality as it would be local and could reach ripeness on the plant. And it will be less susceptible to anti-gmo activists, because unlike usual GMO that benefits growers, or benefits customers in a non-obvious way (like golden rice), it will benefit directly customers who will be getting delicious tropical fruit which now they can taste only when traveling.
Funny enough, there was a time (and still is) in Chile where avocados were so overpriced that one guy went to the car store and used them as currency to buy one.
Interesting. I lived in Israel for a while, and there Rose farms shifted to Avocados due to cheap roses from Africa. You generally find Israeli Avocados here in Germany.
I wonder what happens if there is an influx of avocados from Africa.
EU has very protective market when it comes to food. Israel has probably resources for compliance with all the regulations. But there is big motivation to stop cheap imports from Africa.
In 2019 EU imported 11.3 billion eur worth of food from Africa, mostly tobacco, cocoa beans etc.. Citrus was only 0.5 billion eur. In overall EU food imports it is only 10%. We also exported 9 billion worth of food to Africa.
Hardly enourmous, given Africa agricultural potential and production.
The problem with agriculture in Africa is that the seasonality is pretty bad. Instead of 4 seasons you have the really wet season and the really dry season. The insects truly suck too.
This is why Europeans settlers failed to colonize Africa, except for the southernmost part.
The thin skinned ones I know about are much more fragile, but also much more tastier (creamy). Nowadays I can only find thick skinned ones at store though, and you gotta be careful picking the ripe one when it is due which is hard to plan.
Just an anecdote of what I remember seeing in New Zealand recently...on the northernmost tip...huge intensive avocado farms being set up....kind of sickening really but very much in tune with their economy which seems intent on ruining their environment for a a few export dollars (in this case sucking up aquifers and inviting in salination, in other cases such as dairy farming polluting the said aquifiers so they can sell dried milk to China)
My point is that on a historical level you create ecological disasters so a certain middle class can survive in artificial comfort while sending stuff to other countries so their middle classes can live in a similarily artificial environment
I recommend Rotten on Netflix [1] that has an episode about Avocado farming. The whole series is super interesting anyway and explores modern day issues such as lack of water, climate change and globalisation.
Personally I was very unimpressed with this documentary, especially the episode on avocado farming actually. It felt like they were trying to create a story out of nothing.
The fact is that crops take water to grow. All crops do. Avocados are on the higher side when looked at water used per pound (though not the highest), but they are still nowhere near the level of animal products. Avocados are also one of the most (if not the most) calorie-dense fruits, which means that their water per calorie is likely in line with most other fruit.
What exactly was the point Rotten was trying to make? That avocados are popular so now they are being grown more? who cares? You could say the same thing about literally every other fruit and vegetable on the planet.
Interestingly, I saw a video recently that argued that the majority of water consumption for animal products comes from green water (aka direct precipitation) and the majority of that water is released back to the ground in the form of urination, which makes it less taxing to aquifer systems than crops like avocados and almonds, which are extremely water intensive and primarily consume groundwater drawn from subterranean water systems by artificial irrigation systems.
If water used in agriculture – including water sucked out of aquifers from wells – were appropriately priced, (a) water-intensive crops would move to places where water was more abundant, and (b) ways would be found to reduce water use.
Growing e.g. alfalfa, rice, cotton, or almonds in California (not to mention beef/dairy production) happens partly because water for agriculture is artificially cheap, not reflecting its true costs.
I agree with you about alfalfa, rice, and cotton, but the central valley has the best conditions in the world for growing almonds. About 50% of the worlds production comes from there.
In that case, almond farmers should still pay closer to the true cost of the water. This would likely slightly raise world almond prices but it would encourage farmers to find ways to reduce water use, without fundamentally compromising the industry.
is there a source for that besides youtube? all the scientists, UN, environmental orgs, etc. seem to be in agreement that animal products use the most water.
Yes, and most animal feed is human inedible stuff like grass and corn stalks. The water used to produce these is rain water that would fall and drain or evaporate from there either way.
Animals poo and pee. Their feces increases nitrogen levels in ground. Which, if done en masse, is terrible for the soil. Look at the problems The Netherlands is facing. Veluwe is deteriorating.
IIRC didn't it also raise the issue of the cartels getting into the avocado business and threatening/kidnapping owners of orchards etc? Was there any truth to that?
Call me skeptical but most of the documentaries on Netflix are just entertainment. Selective filtering of facts, build up to a “gotcha moment”, all wrapped up in a tidy bow.
They are about as balanced and factual as a Facebook.
It’s really a disease. I see a lot of conversation about falsities flying around on Twitter and Facebook, but Netflix documentaries are extremely bad. Even the super famous Tiger one when the pandemic started was extremely lopsided and omitted tons of context and facts.
The latest one about the Cecil hotel is hot trash. They take an interesting story about the missing woman, entertain ridiculous conspiracy theories, interview so called “Internet sleuths” (what the hell?) only to wrap up at the end with “yeah, no mystery, she had a mental illness”.
Reminds me of the YouTube video that take 15 min to explain a 30 second concept.
They were a thing in Kenya and Tanzania and Zimbabwe too, at least 10 years ago. And super delicious. A couple times, our driver stopped by a tree on the side of the road and we just picked a few and ate them right then and there as a snack.
I don't understand this avocado obsession of recent years. What's the sudden interest? "Avocado on toast" - what's that about? Some sort of dig? Or people genuinely think this is exciting? I grew up with a couple of avocado trees in my garden from '80-ish, but it's not like it was a rare earth mine. This makes as much sense to me as people getting excited about oranges; genuinely confused.
Mexican avocados were banned from import to the United States for over 80 years until 1997. Before that, the supply of avocados from California was seasonal and limited which discouraged restaurants from putting them on their menu and generally kept them more a novelty. Ironically, having a strong consistent supply increased demand. Also, Mexican avocados are generally far superior to those from California.
I remember avocados from the 90s as being rock hard and mostly flavorless. Perhaps they were better locally, but I never had a tasty, buttery soft avocado until the 2000s.
I couldn't disagree more! I won't buy an avocado with a label from Mexico or Chile because they are so watery / flavorless. I also happen to live in Carpinteria, CA, where our local avo's are second to none.
Perhaps they don't export the good ones, I've enjoyed very much going to the markets in Mexico and asking for avocados for eating today and also slightly less ready ones that will be perfect tomorrow. The fruit sellers know exactly what to give you, they are perfect every time. A splash of lime juice and chili powder.. True culinary happiness.
Like many fruits and vegetables, I’m guessing quality has to do with how early it has to be picked before the ideal picking time in order to transit to the destination.
Almost all fruits and vegetables in the US taste better on the US West coast, in my opinion, and I suspect it’s because you’re closer to the origin (Cali/Mexico/WA/OR/the rest of Central and South America) so the fruit/vegetables take less time in transit and therefore don’t have to be picked so early.
> having a strong consistent supply increased demand
This is a very pronounced effect across all sectors of the economy. It's really not that surprising. It's similar to the old traffic engineering adage that expanding highways expands traffic in equal measure - such that it is often futile to add extra lanes to existing congested roads.
When something becomes cheaper/easier to use, demand often rises to the point that the new equilibrium is similar to the old one, as new opportunities open up to use X product that were previously unexplored due to constrained supply
> Mexican avocados are generally far superior to those from California
Maybe that's true for the ones shipped eastward.
Here in the SF bay area, I find California Hass avocados are superior to those available from Mexico and Peru. They're easy to peel and the flavor is fantastic.
If you want to reduce you intake of animal produce but still have fatty meals your choices are limited. Avocado, olives, nuts and some oils are exploding in popularity due to this I believe.
For last 20 years in the US, we have been recovering from decades of misinformation about the “dangers” of fat. The avocado is one item that benefits from a return to nutritional sanity.
That shift has laid the foundation for items like avocado toast or Chipotle’s guacamole to help popularize avocados.
There are lots of other factors, I’m sure. But it helps that they’re tasty.
Avocados weren’t really marketed at all until the mid-90s and were also shunned by some due to high fat. It was a niche food almost completely considered a side for mexican cuisine. It has been expensive outside of growing areas for a while, hence the jokes about asking for guac at Chipotle and always being warned it costs another $1.39. I’d guess part of the expense is that it has a relatively small window between being unripe and too ripe.
My understanding is also that it can take 20 years from pit to fruit-bearing-tree, so supply will tend to lag behind demand (which has grown globally.)
Only un-grafted avocados take a long time (and typically it's more like 10 years to fruit, not 20). Grafted cultivars vary in precocity, with some (e.g. Lamb) fruiting in the year after grafting and others (e.g. Sir Prize) taking many years to start fruiting.
Awesome, thanks for the info/correction. I remember many attempts in my childhood for family members to raise a tree from a pit and they never got very far.
Ok, thanks. I was in sub-Saharan Africa, so zero exposure to the Mexican aspects, and I don't recall anyone ever giving a damn about fat content in anything. We also had banana, pawpaw, and guava trees - avos were just one of the standard fruits.
Yeah, in the US avocado is seen more as an ingredient in savory food items, not as a fruit.
No one answered you about avocado toast, but it's literally what it sounds like. Slice some avocado, put it on toast, typically with a poached egg and some seasonings of choice. It's seen as a quick healthy meat free breakfast or lunch that still has a sort of richness to it. It became a fad with younger people after restaurants realized it could be a real money maker.
The previous responses cover what are probably the most important factors, but I think it’s worth adding that avocados are also touted as ‘super foods’ in multiple trendy diets (eg keto).
They're very filling, high in fat, low in sugar, and they taste good. You're basically eating a relatively healthy block of fat, to me it's sort of like asking "why do people like bacon?" - for the obvious reasons, salt and fat.
By contrast, oranges aren't something I'd indulge in. They have much more sugar - ~10x what an avocado has. They're acidic. They're not particularly filling (low fat / protein content).
Lots of marketing on the back of the recent embrace of good and healthy fats. They irony of the whole avocado and toast fad is the inclusion of the toast which more often than not is unhealthy...trigger the anti-anti-carb comments.
I too was also lucky enough to grow up with a hand full of avocado trees that fruited every year, and I say that even though I never really cared for them personally, but to this day I do incorporate avocado oil into my salads and wish I had acquired the taste for eating the avocado itself.
I think the marketing has died down but for a while I Felt it was almost on par with the kind of submarine marketing both pizza and tacos get as a favorite food of the masses.
Processed food is full of oil, and consumers are seeking healthy options while producers voraciously production growth, moving from oil to oil, seeking profits and sales on the trends of diets.
I stopped eating chips with canola oil and only get the ones with only avocado oil, because the canola is rancid for my belly
Cowspiracy. Seaspiracy, now this? What am I supposed to eat!?! Hyperbole aside, buying food that is actually sustainable and has no ethical concerns seems very difficult.
There is a very large percentage of the population that does not have access to a farmers market... often times they don’t even have access to full service grocery stores that have fresh fruits and vegetables at all.
That study seems to have many deficiencies. First, it is a county analysis. If you look at the distribution of farmer's markets, it seems to follow the population density of counties in general: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2010/geo/popul...
Secondly, the data comes from the USDA which seems highly dubious. For example, Armstrong County in PA has "0" farmer markets for the purposes of the study even though they have 120 farms with direct sales. Even a cursory Google search for a community inside Armstrong has a farmer's market three times a week: https://www.farmersmarketonline.com/fm/KittanningFarmersMark... . The data and methodology of the study is clearly flawed.
Finally, "living in a county with a farmer's market" is not really a measure of accessibility. Just because you live in a county with a farmer's market, it doesn't mean you can get to it easily. Even a neighboring county might be more accessible.
Overall, the methodology of the paper is highly dubious. But even if the point remains "farmer's markets are not accessible for many Americans", the takeaway message is not that farmer's markets are a pipe dream. The takeaway should be that the focus on globalization of the agricultural supply chain in search of the cheapest food has put us in a precarious spot as a species that many people can't participate in sustainable food because the roots of society has relied on access to cheap food from elsewhere. It's a red flag warning to change our policies, not a sign to give up.
To the other people who down voted my original comment that the solution is easy. It truly is, we simply need to pay more for food. We need to actively choose a more robust system versus the cheapest. I would never ask the government to subsidize farmer's markets, but simply removing subsidies on existing products that would double the cost of specific food items would go a long way for aligning the market to start to grow more stuff locally. We won't solve any climate issues by spending less money.
You hear that, single-mother-of-three? Stop eating unsustainably and just go pay a 20 percent markup for whatever food is available down at the local farmer’s market. It’s not that hard! Just make more money.
What about those who find such markets price-prohibitive? Those who live in food deserts?
Cheap unsustainable food or sustainably priced food is the decision we all have to make. Unfortunately, the government subsidizes some of the worst food industries in the name of providing "staples". We can't feed 8 billion people Wagyu beef for every meal. Yes, the world needs to eat more lentils. We can't complain that eating sustainable is "hard" when we really mean "it is 50% more expensive". Great, Disney World every 7 years instead of every 5. For the families that truly need help (which is the minority), we have programs to assist. But instead of giving them government cheese, let's push for locally sourced ingredients. But again, that's "hard".
> For the families that truly need help (which is the minority)
20% of the US population recieves wellfare payments - and a good proportion of those above this lowest quintile are precarious at best. I would go so far as to say that more than half of people absolubtely cannot afford a 50% price increase on food. Not to mention the additional labour and complexity involved in cooking food from raw & healthy ingredients. It cannot be overstated just how much "brain fog" one experiences growing up and living the life of those less fortuntate - it really is incredibly difficult for someone like this to just decide one day to not have their usual frozen pre-cooked microwave meal and instead learn how to make a vegetarian lentil curry, and a big part of that is the percieved difficulty of cooking and the psychological barrier of learning something new - it really is hard for a lot of people to feel the agency in their lives such that they can simply "decide" to learn something new like that.
Now I'm not saying this to simply be contrarian, or to say that we can't do anything about this at all, but rather we need to approach the issue with large quantities of empathy and human understanding. Government funded cooking programmes pointed towards those with little time and money and that helps teach basic skills without talking down to people would be a good start, but realistically something like that would only work if they became popular - it would require a very talented face/crew that have passion for their mission.
If those who can afford it would do it, like the well-off people frequenting hacker news, that would be a start. That would drive up demand, make it worth for more farmers to do this sustainably, eventually driving those costs down, and thus making it more affordable for lesser income people. And it's not black and white, in each iteration more people can afford it. Similar to electric cars.
It's easy to armchair-philosophise those things away with "oh but poor people wont ever have the money, so screw it". With that attitude we'd never hav gotten electric cars. Or solar power.
There’s no armchair philosophy here, nor the defeated apathy you seem to be responding to.
GP posted a ridiculous, condescending, one-sentence solution to the issue of sustainable eating. I used hyperbole to try and highlight how out of touch they are.
The whole point is that the problem is, in fact, hard.
There's what I call the "cheap shoes fallacy" at play here.
When you buy cheap shoes, they break quickly, forcing you to buy another pair, ultimately costing more over time than if you had just bought good shoes to begin with.
The same applies to food. When you buy cheap food, it will nourish you only a little bit, forcing you to buy more of it, ultimately costing more over time than if you had just bought good food to begin with.
Cheap, industrial food contains the minimum amount of actual food to pass for grub, and is laden with artificial flavorings to fool your brain into thinking you're actually eating something, when you're not.
> When you buy cheap shoes, they break quickly, forcing you to buy another pair, ultimately costing more over time than if you had just bought good shoes to begin with.
This is only a "fallacy" if someone chooses to purchase the cheap shoes despite having the capability to buy good shoes.
Being poor is expensive. If you can't buy good shoes you're stuck in a feedback loop of making do with cheap shoes. The same goes for many items and services. There's not a good option for a lot of people close to their margins.
You can always go without shoes for a while to save up for good ones.
A lot of the things people don't even consider giving up are non-essential. There's a strange hoarder mentality where poor people are unwilling to sacrifice anything at all, even if it led to future improvement.
It's another fallacy, I think. When you're hungry it wouldn't occur to many to voluntarily fast. Sugars fool humans well. Artificial flavorings fool them even better.
Note the core of my argument: $1 of good food sustains you longer than $1 of bad food. What good food is so expensive per smallest unit sold that anyone couldn't switch to it?
No, this is not true in the least. Research has been done that shows that cheap, mass produced produce is just as nutritious as organic produce that costs several times more.
The research is mixed and inconclusive. A 2019 meta-analysis by Kurzgesagt [1] claims that organic food is slightly more nutritious with increased levels of antioxidants.
I'm not trying to downplay the difficulties of helping less privileged people eat well, but you should know many cities have programs that specifically make efforts to put farmers markets in food deserts, and often accept EBT/SNAP at above cash value (or with heavy rebates) - if these kind of programs don't exist where you are, perhaps consider petitioning whatever group runs your local farmers markets to see if they might be possible to introduce.
Bringing up impoverished people every time someone asks what one should be eating doesn’t answer the question and it’s exhausting to watch
“Avocados are healthy and—“ “Umm, try living in a food desert with three jobs!”
Yes, it sucks for those people, but pointing out poverty doesn’t silence the conversation about nutrition for the rest of us who can afford some cheap vegetables.
Yeah, but if the conversation starts with “large agribusiness is unsustainable and needs to end”, you can’t propose a solution that doesn’t feed the entire population.
But when someone posts a one-sentence solution to a difficult problem, and frames it in the most condescending manner possible (eg “It’s not hard.”), it’s difficult not to respond with a low-effort (and very real) counterexample.
I’m curious what the “unsilenced” (???) conversation would continue to look like in your opinion- seems to me like the “not hard” comment of the original response implied not much conversation was left to be had.
The big trick is not to get yourself in the situation of being a single mother with 3 kids for starters. Of course you can’t do the best for your kids with 3 of them on your own.
If it is done by big agrobusiness, it is bad for the environment/poor people. This is a constant that won't change. The only good food is done by local farmers.
Even the latter statement has to be hedged, unfortunately (e.g., see the Dust Bowl), though it is more often the case. It really comes down to sustainable vs. unsustainable practices.
Yes, you have to be careful of people's romanticism around farming. A single small farm may not cause much damage, but millions of small farms can easily.
The key with small farms is that they have "skin in the game" and also the feedback loop is faster since they are often on the land and see the effects of what they do.
I find it hard to believe that large farms don’t have “skin in the game”.
I would think that they manage their farm land as an investment. It isn’t easy to move to a different area due to labor, equipment, investment into the ground, etc.
If anything, I’d expect a small farm operation to easily relocate should the land become less productive.
Sustainability is often about long-term productivity, not short-term productivity. A piece of land that's going to be in a family for multiple generations is a different thing from a corporate operation that is looking for quarterly or yearly gains. Yes there are some in the latter category that are thinking long term, but how often are they thinking one generation out, let alone multiple?
That's never made any sense to me. Why does the food become bad just because I'm farther from the farmer? The environmental emissions from transport are minimal, so that can't be it.
Are you trying to say eat from grown by a small farmer?
But that's no good either, small farmers are less efficient. Or maybe you are valuing something else over environmental efficiency?
Agriculture at extreme scale is less efficient. It’s basically a mining operation with food as an output.
Where I live, we buy summer crops from local farms about 30 miles away. The farmers sell for half of retail, and make about double. They are fairly large operations with a diverse set of products and have a sustainable, smart approach to farming — most have been in business for hundreds of years and plan to remain.
The monocropping of the Midwest is creating a desert, period. We’ll be importing corn in my lifetime. Vegetable crops in the Colorado irrigation corridor are vulnerable to climate change.
What happens to grain crop production when the Ogallala Aquifer is depleted?
What happens to the “miracle in the desert” in California and Arizona if climate changes significantly reduces snowfall in the Colorado River watershed?
IMO, we face risks that are real, and short term economic forces and incentives will affect our ability to adapt. I live in the Northeast, and it’s important that on a regional basis agriculture is an industry that is vital and can grow.
A farmer with 20-30 cows tends to have a quite close connection with their animals. They often have a small plot of land they can use as pasture and the barn is not super-optimized to squeeze out the last square centimeter for effiency since there are no scale effects where it would have any noticeable effect. Each animal is a being they have often times have a connection with, and empathy for. Most small farmers I know can describe to me quite vividly the personality of each individual of their animals. They care.
Big dairy industry looks different. A big farm with 1000 milking cows is hyper-optimized for maximum profit. There is not enough pasture to go round, so depending on regulations of the country, the animals may never go outside ever. If you can save 1% on buying in cheaper food, even if it comes from half a continent away, you do it since that's easily a six-figure savings. If you can increase stocking density withing law limits, you do it. If you need to use less sand or can get away with cleaning their water bins less often, you do it. Each animal is a number that turns food expenses into milk profits, that's it.
I don't know about the US but in Europe small farmers are often passionate, and you have to be because you are a business owner earning little money while having a lot to handle and nearly no holiday and leaving far away from everything. Many of them care deeply about their products and try to do things properly and sustainably even if it means less profit. The big farmers are more like regular business owner employing cheap labour and trying to maximize profit while caring much less about the impact. Note that small farmer can be very small indeed, many of them don't even have separate employees.
It is not an exact rule of course. There are many irresponsible small farmers who just inherited a small farm and run it poorly, and there's some big farms that do things very properly.
Big farm operations create damage in so many fronts. First, they extract a large portion of the profits from farming, making Wall Street very rich and leaving the rural population poor (this is true if the farming is done in America or in other countries). As a result, this takes land from the population to the hands big companies, with bad political results. Finally, the methods are bad for the environment too, because Wall Street fat cats don't have to live in the devastated environment.
So Nigeria, a country which imports maize, rice and tomato paste thinks it should devote its land to growing avocados. SMH.
There are times I wonder if Western capitalists invent and promote fancy new superfoods and whatnots so they can create agricultural and ecological stress in African and South American countries.
Simply create excuses where they can take land away from local staples to cause poverty in those countries and protect their own farmers subsidized production of basic foods.
Western capitalists did not "invent" avocados, nor are they "fancy new superfoods". People objectively like them a lot, and biologically, they should, they're creamy, fatty goodness.
It's simply a consequence of people wanting to (and being able to afford) good tasting food.
I guess they don't realize that "being able to afford" implies land which should be used for to produce staple foods for the poor in the producing countries is used to produce foods which Westerners can do without.
Why should Nigeria import rice and wheat and export avocados her citizens don't need, because the avocado farmers can retain export proceeds abroad, while the food importers profit from subsidized basic foods produced in the West?
You only have enough farms to feed half your people. You can feed half your people or export something twice as expensive and import enough food to feed everyone. That’s the whole argument of globalization. Everyone has different geography and cultures and thus produce what makes the most money since they can import anything they need from elsewhere.
While perusing the stocks, my partner happened upon a smiling vendor with a big knife standing beside a pile of boxed avocados. He said, “You have to taste my avocados!” as he sliced open a petite dark green fruit. My partner accepted the cube offered on a toothpick and gingerly placed it onto his tongue. Upon closing his mouth, the cube seemed to spontaneously melt into one of the most buttery, savory, rich substances he had ever tasted. Needless to say, my partner brought home a big box of avocados that day.
I was skeptical when he first told me the story, but we quickly had a knife and spoons at the ready and were digging in to a ripe specimen. He wasn’t lying after all, this was among the best things I had ever tasted, similar to an excellent piece of salmon sashimi but… better. I confess to you that we ate that big box of avocados in a week or less, our intake only limited by the rate at which the fruit became ripe. We aren’t normally gluttonous people, but those were some amazing avocados.
We eat store bought avocados several times a week, but I unfortunately haven’t had a single one in the years since that was even a hundredth as delicious as those wonderful fruits. If anything, the flavor and quality seems to be on the decline. We often joke about sneaking back into the produce terminal to find avocado man and his delicious avocados. Maybe one of these days…