That is a problem. I generally deal with small local buyers, but it's easier when they have relatively stable needs and expect to be able to buy more or less the same product at more or less the same price, year after year. I think that's going to be less viable as the effects of climate change continue to unfold. What worked ten years ago won't work today, and what works today may not work ten years from now.

Something I've been thinking about is how to have an internet farmers' market that doesn't suck. It's a logistical nightmare even before getting to things like food safety and disease tracking. Since cyclospora has been in the news I've been wondering how to have a better food distribution network that large-scale and small-scale buyers can get local produce from, and hopefully, with enough small-ish producers distributed over a wide area, the product offerings will be stable enough to attract enough buyers to cover the overhead of storage and distribution, quality and safety controls, etc.

But I do think there will have to be a cultural shift. There will still be staple crops, but I think which staples grow where is going to change and keep changing, as will which staples are the most economical for people in a given area. I think that's a mindset shift that will be hard to pull off as long as we keep treating this like a problem we can address tomorrow, because acknowledging that I need to change my eating habits is an acknowledgement that it's a big problem and it's here today. It'll happen eventually as staple prices get more and more unmoored from their historical patterns, but the sooner we can build a climate-change-acknowledging food infrastructure system, and get people on board with it, the blunter the impact will be.

I would gladly turn up and by grains from a big heap if it was a reliable and reasonably affordable option. I would even bring my own sacks. My bike should be able to store around 70L of grain, more if I get a trailer. Which if this became a reliable option I would possibly consider doing.

Very brief look suggests £200/ton or 20p/kg for oats as what a farmer gets paid. I would happily pay double that to have a pile I can bag up myself.

So I'm normally not a market person, but I think if you're starving you'll eat what you can fucking find.

I think we can stop at "Okay but we need to be able to do that". Capitalism, radical change, those are challenges for sure but the alternative is death. I assume, if I ever get anything off the ground, somebody with a megaphone is going to find a way to have a problem with it, either because they have their own sinister goals, or they are genuinely misguided, or perhaps they have a valid point and I really did miss something. In any case, I think the best approach is to assume what is necessary is possible and try to jump the hurdles as we get to them.

I think it would. I would love to have a coop tool library / repair shop / design shop. Something I want to get into is open-source ag hardware, and a co-op shop would be a good place to pilot designs without one individual having to sink hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into making a piece of equipment that may or may not work. Even without designing new stuff though, a shared equipment library would be nice.

The downside is that sometimes, people borrow equipment without knowing how to use it, and if you use farming equipment without knowing how to use it, you can destroy thousands of dollars worth of gear and/or get people killed. This happens occasionally even with informal loans among acquaintences, I've had my own close shaves. Almost literally, I've had equipment break and send pieces of metal flying right next to my head. I don't know how I would go about sending out that kind of equipment confident that the users were equipped to use it safely.

Oh, definitely agree with that. But for some reason I just feel like that's unlikely to happen, I just can't imagine a goverment doing something like this. It's just doesn't feel like something plausible, for some reason.

But yeah, even if it did happen, it's probably going to be the second option you mentioned at this point.

Takes more than talk to take down a totalitarian terrorist.