Excluding gasoline, headline inflation would have been 4.0% in June, following a 4.4% increase in May.
Canadians continued to see elevated grocery prices (+9.1%) and mortgage interest costs (+30.1%) in June, with those indexes contributing the most to the headline CPI increase.
The all-items excluding food index rose 1.7% and the all-items excluding mortgage interest cost index rose 2.0%.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/230718/dq230718a-eng.htm?HPA=1
There needs to be services that directly connect farmers with consumers. The grocery store serves as a middleman that’s honestly become rather useless given that many people use another middleman (Instacart, etc.) to actually get their groceries.
I’m open to building one and have a decent way of organizing logistics, but I have no idea how to reach out to farmers (who to reach out to, for what crops, and who is getting the most exploited by grocery stores).
Look up “Community Supported Agriculture” or CSAs. You typically buy a “share” at the start of the growing season and pick up a bunch of fresh, locally-grown, seasonal produce each week, or every-other week.
The Lufa model needs to spread across the country. They have a handful of urban greenhouses in Montreal, so a lot of the produce I buy is actually grown in the city, and everything else that they can’t grow themselves is procured directly from the producers/farms, not from a re-seller.
(although, fuck their labour practices, I very much wish they had competition in the city so they would be pressured to clean up their act in that regard, I hate that I feel like I have to compromise my values in some way in order to buy local and direct)
Lufa is good quality and fresh (usually), but it certainly isn’t cheap!
That doesn’t scale, and it’s sometimes even illegal. We /used/ to deal with market failure and make sure basic services were met by creating crown corporations. Imagine that the Westons had to compete with a public company that got basic food goods from the farms to stores at industrial scale and at break-even costs. Heck, it could even lose money in remote areas where people can’t currently access healthy food as the healthcare savings would be a great investment. It wouldn’t have to be fancy, and it wouldn’t have to include anything highly processed -just basic, healthy grocery goods that meet our needs. The capitalists would do fine, but would have to either actually be more efficient than the publicly owned system, or rely on premium goods for their profits (which they already mostly do anyway).
For some industries you can’t do this because of regulatory capture.
For example dairy. Dairy farmers are not allowed to sell to anyone except the cooperative, who does all the processing and then sells to stores. Since the dairy cartel is in bed with the grocery cartel, good luck breaking in.
Also fo meat, any meat sold in Canada must be inspected at a federal abbatoire. Guess who owns the abbatoires? The big guys, and they’re not going to sell to you because the beef cartel is in bed with the grocery cartel.
That can’t be universally true - you can buy meat from independent farms. Maybe you’re correct about logistics at scale, but at the individual farm level, you can definitely purchase meat.
Random link from Google.
Yes, unless it is poultry, in which case it controlled much like dairy (with an exemption for hobby-scale farms). Although the abbatoire problem remains, and good luck finding an abbatoire these days.
I buy turkey directly from an organic farm like 10 minutes away from my house…
No doubt, but are they breaking the law, or is the flock small enough to be within the exemption?
I don’t know, you didn’t link any laws or anything in your initial comment
Well, how many birds do they keep?
Small farmer here - we keep exactly one less production bird than the maximum legal requirement, as most farmers of our scale do.
Hm, so that means if we switch from dairy to plant based milks and reduce our beef consumption, that should temper our expenses. I don’t think our family is ready to go full vegetarian though. What is the situation with chicken and pork?
Poultry is supply managed, much like dairy. That said, tiny scale poultry farmers are exempted from needing quota, so as an individual you can likely find someone to buy direct from.
Pork, like beef, is open season. You may struggle to find a butcher legally available, however. They are booked up years at a time.
There are many.
I have done some consulting for a business that is trying to be much like Instacart for farm-to-consumer transactions. They have a strong niche customer base of those with a certain conviction, but I don’t see it ever being something the masses will use. I think you might be underplaying the service a grocery store does provide.
Well, I’m one. You have my ear.
I’m probably not the kind of farmer you need, though. I want to dump all of my product, which could be enough to feed hundreds of thousands of people or more (and my farm is small!), off at harvest and move on. You need mass distribution to be able to absorb that.
The farmers you find at farmers markets would be a better fit, I imagine. If you are serious about this, go there and talk to them. They’re usually friendly and interested in this type of thing. If you can help them better connect with the customer, they will be listening.