Agro-Food System

The term agro-food system, sometimes called agrifoods, captures the increasingly long and complicated path that food takes to get to our table. Although we may like to think that the food we eat comes from a farm, that is only one place among many involved in the system that produces our food. Most farming is possible only with industrial inputs such as tractors, combines, and chemical inputs (e.g., fertilizers, pesticides). Farmers often require loans of money (called “capital”) each season to buy what is needed to produce a crop. Farming is also dependent on energy to run the machines, pump water, produce fertilizer, and transport the finished product because most of the places where food is produced are not where consumers are located. Farmers need expert information on what and when to plant, how to diagnose and treat blights and pests, how to obtain and use weather information, and how to decide when and at what price to sell their crop. When we think about what goes into farming, we realize that farms are linked to and dependent on many other places such as places of industrial production, petrochemical and fuel production, banking centers, and universities and government where research and policy are created. Where and what is done with the outputs of farms is equally complicated.

Farm output can remain in its original form and simply be graded, washed, and shipped to consumers. But most food we consume in the developed world is not in an unprocessed or “raw” form. Most of the food we consume has been modified and transformed substantially by processing and been made durable through canning, freezing, or other methods. This is important because only with durable foods is long-distance trade possible. In fact, the distinction between agriculture and industry has become so blurred that many farm products transformed by an industrial process have become known by that industrial process, including homogenized milk, pasteurized cheese, and refined sugar. Agricultural products can be further industrialized by processing that breaks them down into their constituent parts. For example, a starch, a sweetener, oil, and protein can be extracted from grain. Processors attempt to break the product of the farm into as many parts as possible and then find profitable uses for them. These different “fractions” of whole farm products are then often used as generic inputs for manufactured foods or used in other industrial processes.

The producers of manufactured foods capture a greater part of the dollars spent on food and increasingly have an advantage over farmers. Manufactured food producers have flexibility in where they get their ingredients. For example, the manufactured food requires a sweetener, but not necessarily sugar from the sugarcane plant. It requires oil, but not necessarily oil from corn. It requires a starch, but that could be derived from a potato, wheat, or a number of other grains. The production of potato chips provides a good example of this substitution effect; producers can fry the chips in whatever oil is cheapest at the moment of production. This illustrates how producers of manufactured foods have flexibility in where they source their ingredients and how they can make places compete against one another and reduce farming into ingredient production for complexly constructed industrial foods. These characteristics of the agro-food system illustrate why farmers are at a disadvantage.

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