Growing your own veggies.
Let’s say that we, the tax payers, built a really large conveyor belt system to bring veggies to everyone’s home. This conveyor belt delivers veggies to the customer’s door from the grower via system of transport and distribution.
This is run by a separate company from the supermarket. In a normal situation the homeowner buys their veggies from the supermarket and has them delivered to them straight from the grower through the system.
The customer pays the supermarket full retail price for the veggies and the supermarket then pays for the transport to the distribution centre where they are packaged and sorted and also pays for transport to the home via this conveyor belt. Factored into that price is the fact that some of the veggies fall off the conveyor belt along the way and some are thrown out at the sorting stage.
Let’s say the homeowner is also growing some veggies for themselves and sometimes they produce more veggies than they need at a particular time. They then get the veggies they grow themselves and clean them and package them and place them on the conveyor belt to send to their next nearest neighbour.
The supermarket charges the neighbour for the veggies at full price including the conveyor belt charges and packaging etc. They then pay you, the homeowner who grew the veggies, only the same amount they would pay the large grower. They also pay you an allowance factor for spoilage and losses. Yet you have washed and packaged them and you only sent it 50 meters up the conveyor belt.
Who is making an extra profit here? Well, the company who runs the conveyor belt is charging full price to your neighbour and doesn’t have to pay for packaging and sorting. The veggies also only went 50 meters up the road and the company didn’t pay you for the fact that you only used 50 meters of the conveyor belt. The homeowner feels hard done by because he contributed to the supermarkets supply but was short changed by the cost of transport from the farm gate to the distribution centre and further short changed by the fact that he has sorted and packaged the veggies already which is normally done by the distribution centre. Yet the homeowner is paid for the fact that there is no spoilage because the veggies only travelled a very short distance to their neighbour.
SOST believes that the homeowner should pay for the fact that they used 50 meters of the conveyor belt but should also be paid a fair price for all the costs that were avoided. Also the supermarket should get to make their full margin either way.
This would encourage more people to grow their own veggies and then would mean that the large grower could export more of their veggies to other states, who are a hungry export market, at premium prices. A large part of the community agrees that it is a great thing that we can produce our own veggies and share the excesses with our neighbours in this way. In essence this is a fair and equitable deal for everyone concerned.
John Thirgood, www.facebook/saveoursolartas
