Where does that extra money that we now pay for groceries go?
There was a huge boom in profits starting in 2022 through to today. We’ve never seen profit-taking like this. It was an unbelievably great time for corporate Canada. When you break it down by industry, most of those profits were going to oil and gas. For example, in the supply chain of potato chips there’s diesel used to farm the potatoes, cook them, and move them to stores. A lot of that increase didn’t go to the grocery store selling the chips. It went to energy companies.
There was a graph of food price vs what farmers got paid. Farmer goods prices have been almost flat in comparison to big chain food prices rising continually with a drastic spike for COVID onward
But also remember that the cost of energy is nowhere near 100% of the cost of making pretty much anything.
If you doubled the cost of something because the price of a fraction of it doubled you’re absolutely a thief. That’s what these companies are doing; bad math to steal from stupid people*.
*Anyone can be a stupid person, including those with advanced engineering degrees. Hell, it’s almost more likely for them.
I know what you mean by your wording so I’m not jumping on that, but it’s worth noting that like, eating isn’t a luxury or something that smart people do or rich people or dumb people or whatever. If you have a grocery store in a town/country and it’s the only store (or the vast plurality of realistic options that are all owned by the same company with different faces), you basically don’t have a choice but to submit to this weird “math”, no matter how smart or dumb you are.
It’s not about who’s buying the end product, it’s about who is supporting the people and politicians who use that flawed reasoning to get support.
“The carbon tax will mean that your food price will double” is a massive lie, and should be a major factor is disqualifying whoever says it as being someone to take seriously. Unfortunately, people hear that gas will have an added $0.114/L and believe that that will mean immediate financial ruin for everyone across the country. Politicians that support controlling the rampant greed of companies aren’t getting support while the thieves are and that’s fucked up.
Electrifying farm equipment has huge engineering hurdles. They need a massive amount of power, which would mean very large and incredibly expensive battery packs. Those batteries would take either a long time to charge, or high current charging stations.
During seeding or harvest the machines often run for 16+ hours a day, and are literally out in the middle of a field. Where is the super-fast charging station going to go? They can’t easily travel all the machinery back to home base every night, and there’s no way it makes economical sense for a farm operation to get chargers installed at every field.
These are not necessarily insurmountable problems. There are a number of similarities to trucking, for example, and that’s an industry that’s starting to see electrification now. But the logistical problems are much harder than trucking. The biggest reason that John Deere etc… aren’t making electric tractors right now is that no one would buy one, because no one has any infrastructure in place for it.
Part of the reason is likely that farming equipment is bloody expensive. A new combine harvester can cost nearly a million dollars, and there aren’t a hell of a lot of used electrical machines on the market yet. Each farm will have several machines that currently run on gas or diesel. How many can the average farmer afford to replace how fast?
Are there any electric tractors/combines on the market, let alone used ones? I mean industrial sized, not small yard work equipment.
EDIT: OK, yes, there are some small electrified tractors available now. Fendt has a line available to customers, John Deere has a prototype, etc… But they are the smallest size of industrial tractors, meant for work like greenhouses, feeding livestock, municipal work, etc…
There was a graph of food price vs what farmers got paid. Farmer goods prices have been almost flat in comparison to big chain food prices rising continually with a drastic spike for COVID onward
But also remember that the cost of energy is nowhere near 100% of the cost of making pretty much anything.
If you doubled the cost of something because the price of a fraction of it doubled you’re absolutely a thief. That’s what these companies are doing; bad math to steal from stupid people*.
*Anyone can be a stupid person, including those with advanced engineering degrees. Hell, it’s almost more likely for them.
I know what you mean by your wording so I’m not jumping on that, but it’s worth noting that like, eating isn’t a luxury or something that smart people do or rich people or dumb people or whatever. If you have a grocery store in a town/country and it’s the only store (or the vast plurality of realistic options that are all owned by the same company with different faces), you basically don’t have a choice but to submit to this weird “math”, no matter how smart or dumb you are.
It’s not about who’s buying the end product, it’s about who is supporting the people and politicians who use that flawed reasoning to get support.
“The carbon tax will mean that your food price will double” is a massive lie, and should be a major factor is disqualifying whoever says it as being someone to take seriously. Unfortunately, people hear that gas will have an added $0.114/L and believe that that will mean immediate financial ruin for everyone across the country. Politicians that support controlling the rampant greed of companies aren’t getting support while the thieves are and that’s fucked up.
Okay I really don’t understand why this wouldn’t push for electrification?
Is it because the big machines they need is made by monopolies like John deer and they refuse to go electric?
Electrifying farm equipment has huge engineering hurdles. They need a massive amount of power, which would mean very large and incredibly expensive battery packs. Those batteries would take either a long time to charge, or high current charging stations.
During seeding or harvest the machines often run for 16+ hours a day, and are literally out in the middle of a field. Where is the super-fast charging station going to go? They can’t easily travel all the machinery back to home base every night, and there’s no way it makes economical sense for a farm operation to get chargers installed at every field.
These are not necessarily insurmountable problems. There are a number of similarities to trucking, for example, and that’s an industry that’s starting to see electrification now. But the logistical problems are much harder than trucking. The biggest reason that John Deere etc… aren’t making electric tractors right now is that no one would buy one, because no one has any infrastructure in place for it.
Part of the reason is likely that farming equipment is bloody expensive. A new combine harvester can cost nearly a million dollars, and there aren’t a hell of a lot of used electrical machines on the market yet. Each farm will have several machines that currently run on gas or diesel. How many can the average farmer afford to replace how fast?
Are there any electric tractors/combines on the market, let alone used ones? I mean industrial sized, not small yard work equipment.
EDIT: OK, yes, there are some small electrified tractors available now. Fendt has a line available to customers, John Deere has a prototype, etc… But they are the smallest size of industrial tractors, meant for work like greenhouses, feeding livestock, municipal work, etc…