Breakable wrote:

All good thoughts; but you might like to check out some of the analyses which consider the energy input for food production. It’s considerable, all the way from the agri-end (cultivation and fertilizer production and application) to transportation to storage (think refrigeration) and distribution. Energy is the currency you can’t avoid spending.

I get this much, but I don’t see profits here because of the huge amount of competition.
Basically what can happen, if producing food gets cheaper – prices will fall everywhere.
Unless a specific region adopts FF faster, which means it becomes more competitive.

Of course if transporting food all over the world is cheap, it means investing into regions where the production is cheapest makes the most sense.
So basically south africa? Deforestation is gonna get worse.
There should be lots more room for “gross margin” before hitting buyer resistence, at least. Cultivation is, of course, only a small fraction of retail pricing, but the distribution side will get lots of new “margin” to work with, too.

I think that the ones with first and best access to the cheaper energy will have the “competitive advantage”.

As far as deforestation goes, it’s a response in the tropics to cash economy agriculture trying to make fast money from, e.g., cane or other biofuels or slash-and-burn grazing, etc. (Most of the Northern Hemisphere is as heavily forested now as it was 200+ years ago, overall.) Efficiency will benefit all farmers in many ways, mostly by improving yields and profit from existing land. Distribution should become much cheaper, too. The U.S. has long paid many farmers not to grow, in order not to swamp the market. This has gradually come to be a distorted cash-cow for agribusiness as it manipulated the system, but the point remains that U.S. efficiency is pretty decent.

Further, the Israeli model of desert irrigation should become much more prevalent. Maybe the Sahara will grow grain again!

There are lots of hidden issues; there is risk of local producers being swamped by cheap “globalized” food distribution. Food aid, e.g., typically drives locals out of business because they can’t compete with free.

As each product, food included, that benefits from the energy price drop gets cheaper, this frees up resources, cash, and “human energy” to get involved in more things. What would you do if your personal cost of living as you now do dropped 40%? There’s a kind of implicit de facto deflation involved there.

The ripples will be storm waves!