The first high-resolution map of America’s food supply chain | Hacker News Reader

The first high-resolution map of America’s food supply chain

fastcompany.com

186 pointsbenryon66 comments

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Clickbait title is clickbaity.

Direct link to paper:

"Food flows between counties in the United States"

Xiaowen Lin, Paul J Ruess, Landon Marston and Megan Konar

Published 26 July 2019. Environmental Research Letters.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab29ae

(Original link and title from: https://www.fastcompany.com/90422553/the-first-map-of-americ...)

And the map in question:

https://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/14/8/084011/downloadHRF...

Viewable online (above link downloads): https://imgur.com/gallery/E7eaf7l

I don't love that last link, it makes me just give up, why did you let me down, sending me to run around? Honestly I could just cry, I guess this is goodbye, because your lie hurt me!

User error or Imgur removal, not positive which. Apologies.

That imgur link is wrong ....

could've been worse.

Should have been a rick roll in my opinion, but nobody got my joke so far : /

HN isn't typically responsive to jokes.

Unless you count articles about WeWork.

At the risk of getting too meta, I think it's more about the purpose of the joke. If it points out something in a funny way, that can be appreciated, but if it's purely a joke (as seen on reddit, though reddit is of course not the only place), it's just not what people come here for. If you want to read puns or rickroll references in the comment threads, I don't think HN is the place one should be looking.

Specifically for u/SiempreViernes: I did understand the joke, but I did not upvote it because I don't think it is the kind of content I want to see more of. (But I did also not downvote because I think it received enough downvotes and I don't want to add more negativity.)

HN is typically responsive to jokes that are on topic, technical in nature, and/or make a good point. Rickrolling is none of those. As an example this joke [0] I made is currently at 6 upvotes despite being burried pretty deep, I can't see how many upvotes the joke it is a reply to has, but it is clearly highly upvoted (it probably has many more upvotes than my reply).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21411080

> HN is typically responsive to jokes that are on topic, technical in nature, and/or make a good point.

Also jokes that others can use as a launching point to nerd out about something.

E.g., I once made a joke about how the ships in the old days were some of the most efficient forms of transportation ever, because they got thousands of miles per galleon.

dredmorbius responded [1] with a short essay on the history of marine propulsion over the last couple of centuries, and how sail has many advantages over powered ships. Many others jumped in with long, thoughtful, well documented posts full of naval nerdery.

My joke got about 70 points, probably because people appreciated the responses.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7736579

Maybe you'll be happier with:

https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102376653178100454

I understood it and downvoted it. It is funny elsewhere but please don’t do that here.

Sorry about that. I thought I'd copied it right though Imgur redirected on me and I apparently got the wrong one.

The Mastodon version should work:

https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/103056466726303338

Actually: I've looked for the image by description on Imgur -- it doesn't seem to be there. I'd included the article title, authors, and source links. :(

"High resolution". Article has these scaled down to 320 x 240.

Even the "originals" are only 1020 × 1091. I'm not sure that counts as high resolution these days.

If your title says high-resolution and you fail that miserably maybe you need to rethink

I thought that the map in the Fast Company article were cropped, but the map from the original study seems to lack Hawai'i and Alaska, as well as Puerto Rico, American Somoa, Guam... and where else am I missing?

My takeaway from this is that the logistics network is very brittle and contains many weak points:

"A disruption to any of these [nine] counties [in California] may have ripple effects for the food supply chain of the entire country."

and

"... a lot of grain produced throughout the Midwest is transported ... via the waterways of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

The infrastructure along these waterways ... have not been overhauled since their construction in 1929. They represent a serious bottleneck ... If they were to fail entirely, then commodity transport and supply chains would be completely disrupted."

It would be interesting to know if the food logistics network of other countries have a similar scale-free topology with a handful of very important nodes and overlooked, but critical infrastructure. I'm guessing yes, they do.

Fresh produce is sensitive to logistic snags but aren't grains much more robust and thus able to better withstand delays caused by temporary infrastructure failures?

Only if it is temporary. A worst case lock failure will knock out river transport for years. Eventually you run out of wheat on the other side of the failure. Of course there are options, but they are vastly more expensive (ie thousands of trucks).

Rail will take over for barge before they would use trucks.

Rail will try, but doesn't scale as fast: tracks are not always running in the right direction, and the best maintained tracks are already busy. Eventually rail can have more capacity, but trucks can scale faster.

A Mississippi barge is about 1,500 tons capacity, a truck is about 25/26 tons, and each rail car is about 100 tons. Barges are grouped in 15 barge tows, and trains are grouped in 90 to 125 car unit trains.

Its a bit easier to get the trains than that many trucks. Also considering that can do barges can almost always do trains. Its not ideal and barge would be preferred, obviously.

>tracks are not always running in the right direction

If the alternative is to let the grain rot, it does not matter much what direction the tracks run in; all that matters is that the the rail network connects some destination willing to buy the grain with where the grain is now.

For grains and similar items, I guess it really depends on the amount of available storage on the supply side and the duration of the failure. The grains themselves might withstand the delays but the disruptions would still be present (demand side lack of availability and increased prices).

The reasoning is:

1. If the usual way is to always ship out the grains, then presumably the supply side currently lacks storage facilities to store a lot of extra grain. I doubt anyone can keep such facilities around and empty "just in case".

2. Whatever the supply-side storage capacity is, it could still fill up if the stores were not emptied fast enough. And here the emptying process was part of the infrastructural failure.

3. The use of alternative transports could help but would cost more, otherwise everything would be already transported using these methods.

Well, they would use rail or at worst truck, but grain is often stored outside in piles. There is a photoshopped picture of one of these piles with a skier with the title "Ski Nebraska". A lot of farmers also have non-trivial storage to get a better sale price. There is remarkable redundancy in the food chain.

Will grain piled outdoors survive for very long without getting moldy or attacked by animals which like grain (like birds)..? Maybe it does, I'm no farmer!

There is a certain amount of loss, but the grain needs to be good enough to ship to someone else and they will have a grain contract that lists factors they will accept. They do test for molds and other things[1]. There is a article[2] from 2016 on the practice or research "grain piles".

1) https://www.ams.usda.gov/publications/content/fgis-pdf-handb... (look at the grain inspection handbook)

2) https://agfax.com/2016/10/14/outdoor-piles-of-harvested-grai...

The concentration of traffic is an interesting element of this.

River transport remains huge. It's already impacted by low water (which railroads love: more rail shipments). Possibly also high water affecting navigability via both current/navigation hazards and low bridge clearances.

> My takeaway from this is that the logistics network is very brittle and contains many weak points

Fortunately, this isn't true, or at least hasn't been for 15+ years.

> ... a lot of grain produced throughout the Midwest is transported ... via the waterways of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers

Only because the price is lower. Grain shipment is extremely price-sensitive! [1]:

> Prior to 2003, containers were mainly restricted to specialty crops, which would not fill a hold in a ship, and feed ingredients like corn gluten meal, bone and meat meal The containerization of grain in the US began to pick up significantly in 2004 because of the spread that emerged between backhaul container rates and bulk shipping. The rates for bulk shipping increased because of the strong demand for scrap metal.

> The North American consumer demand for imported Asia Pacific manufactured goods also surged between 2003 and 2008. Consequently, freight rates for containers on the westbound traffic lanes fell as the volume of empty containers returning to Asia became excessive. During this period, grain could be shipped in containers from Chicago at $35/40 per ton, while bulk rates for grain at the Gulf of Mexico were $60/70 per ton. This provided the incentive for commercial bulk grain shippers to begin arbitraging the freight and moving grain exports in containers.

[1] https://file.scirp.org/pdf/JTTs_2015031815114293.pdf

Fantastic paper on containerization of crops. I had no idea this type of analysis even existed

I don't think most Americans appreciate just how much of the food they consume originates in California. Not just California, but in 6 or 7 counties located in the San Joaquin valley. I grew up in the middle of it in Tulare County and even I don't grasp the multibillions of dollars agriculture brings in. In the event of some megadisaster which cause the valley to stop producing or something happens to the transportation infrastructure on a massive scale, there will be a lot of empty produce bins and grocery shelves in the US and they won't be quickly refilled.

A project idea I've toyed with is "Where does X come from?", which would show someone, to some approximation, where the things they buy and consume originated, and the path they took to get there, and where their waste goes. Mainly this is inspired by my own curiosity, but also desire to better understand the impact my decisions have on the world.

I haven't pursued it due to lack of time and expectation that acquiring and reducing the data would be a monumental effort, but this looks like a good source for "where does [food item] come from", and has some useful-sounding source databases for tracking other items.

Some other resources I'd want to include: water, sewer, trash, electric (at least where the lines are and nearby power generation), and gas.

A few days ago I was listening to an interview on the radio, and the man said that Spain had a very inefficient food supply chain becuase the food would travel across provinces. He said that if the provinces would be able to self supply about 80-90% of their own food that would reduce massively the CO2 footprint. He gave some numbers which I don't remember, but they were quite massive.

Texas alone has a bigger surface than Spain, I wonder how much pollutes the transport of the food alone and how much could be avoided by producing food locally. The whole thing seems pretty wasteful...

People would have to stop expecting to be able to eat all vegetables and fruits at all times. Going to be a hard sell, especially in the northern half of the US that doesn’t grow anything in winter.

Improved local production doesn't have to reduce variety by necessity.

Yea, I've been curious about that with vertical farming. It's way less cost efficient but I'm wondering which is more efficient carbon-wise. It might be worth eating the cost to reduce emissions.

A county in Delaware being on the top ten for food inflow seemed odd. I assume this must be including raw grain, because the only thing notable about that county is that it apparently is nothing but chicken coops[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sussex_County,_Delaware#Econom...

Could it be because Delaware is a preferred location due to corporate tax laws? Please note that in this case, this is a non-rhetorical question on my part. Transportation and tax shelters are out of my areas of interest. just wondering if the graphs may be of parent company post office box numbers instead of loading dock addresses.

No, it is probably chicken coops. I'd guess that one country is responsible for most of the eggs in New York, all those eggs going out means a lot of chicken food going in.

Corporate tax laws just mean any significant company has an official address in Delaware, which amounts to a private post office that gets official mail for a few hundred companies and forwards it to the real headquarters which isn't in Delaware.

There are no tax benefits to bring incorporated in Delaware if you are physically located in another state.

There are legal benefits, most of which benefit management over all other stakeholders.

Could the state be importing to then export on ships?

I'm currently doing a literature review for a research project closely related to this exact topic. And they say reading HN is a waste of time! ;)

But seriously. This is a great example of what a lot of other research also points to: the growing vulnerability of the US food system to systemic existential risks due to geographic specialization, market consolidation, and decrease in network resilience of local food systems. This is important stuff. Glad to see food systems pop up here.

What risks are these? When was the last serious food shortage in North America?

Absolutely. But that's the not box to think in to see the problem. Sure, we haven't had that happen in recent memory. Soooo... if there were to be a problem then, that means it wouldn't look what like we think "food problems" should look like. What we see doesn't determine the problem space, the problem space suggests ways we may need to change our viewing angle.

By the time you're responding to a catastrophe there have already been system level changes happening for quite some time before that kind of observable "phase transition" from normal function to disaster even occurs.

We've gotten increasingly better at producing a particular type of highly optimized food and distributing it through just as optimized Just in Time/LEAN systems. Which is great and allows you to carry less "inventory waste" - we've managed to get down to now keeping about 75 days worth of food reserves globally - HOWEVER, the trade off to that type of efficiency is that introduces new sources of risk. It (by definition) removes a ton of redundancy from the system and severely decreases the resilience of the total system to any sort of shock - let along multiple coincident ones.

THAT then brings in our outdated ways of conceptualizing, preparing for, and mitigating risks across functional and geographic areas. If you're dealing with an issue as complicated the global food system it's not productive to just have individual risk calculations with insurance/consumer pricing baked in for individual scenarios. For example, in any particular area there may be an x% chance of a 1000 year flood. So if there are 5000 of those communities and the total system would have been able to withstand some number of 1000 year floods distributed between them in a normal year, what happens when you factor in that, for instance, our climate "context" is different than when lots of infrastructure was built? What's the ability of the system to withstand the normal amount of thousand year floods when you add in climate effects that may both cause more events and make each event more severe/destructive and there also happens to be a "bad year"/5-10% reduction in (mostly monoculture) cereal crop output or a case of African swine fever that kills 300 million pigs in China. Now factor in the systemic changes and consolidation leading to less redundancy in the food system and you've got a hard risk management problem on your hands.

A few case studies that may be interesting: https://www.bu.edu/pardee/files/2017/03/Multiple-Breadbasket... https://www.fcrn.org.uk/research-library/lloyd’s-emerging-ri...

A great video about food/ecological systems and co-benefits: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with...

How come the midwest is not in the outflows chart? I thought there was a lot of agriculture there?

also why isn't the central valley of California featured? pretty sure they produce more than los angeles county.

My guess is that things grown in California route through those places for export.The counties surrounding Fresno all have massive amounts of agriculture, but do their "business" at the hub (Fresno).

Fresno, Tulare (home of the World Ag Expo), Stanislaus, San Joaquin, Merced, and Kern counties are all on the top food outflows list and in the Central Valley of California.

EDIT - for a total outflow of 53.9 billion kilograms of food. Of course, this includes any flows between these counties.

A lot of the midwest (or the great plains) is devoted to feed corn and corn for ethanol, wheat, and soybeans. It's not california where you'll find fields of lettuce, for example.

With that said, there's no shortage of small farms growing most anything that can be grown in the area, but they tend to not be exporting anything beyond the local farmers market.

> However, our estimates are for 2012, an extreme drought year in the Cornbelt. So, in another year, the network may look different. It’s possible that counties within the Cornbelt would show up as more critical in non-drought years. This is something that we hope to dig into in future work.

Have a look at Riverview LLP, one acre of land to grow food for one dairy cow each year. Plus crop rotation. Multiply by 15,000 cows in central Minnesota. https://www.riverviewllp.com/crop-production.html

I was surprised to find that my county (Harris, TX) was one of the nine counties "most central to the overall structure of the food supply network".

Not much farming happens in this county, nearly zero industrial farming. In the few spots of undeveloped land a few people have some cows, mostly for tax purposes. One more thing, Harris encompasses most of the greater Houston metropolitan area. It's mostly city and suburbs. So what gives?

"We did this by looking for counties with the largest number of connections to others"

Ok, well there's very little farming in the surrounding counties relative to California and the corn belt. We're quite a ways from the Rio Grande valley (which does have quite a bit of farming).

So this still doesn't make sense.

It's probably a major importer then

From the article:

"At over 17 million tons of food, Los Angeles County received more food than any other county in 2012, our study year. It shipped out even more: 22 million tons."

I think that statement is backwards. The graphic shows Los Angeles with an OUTFLOW of 16.6b and an INFLOW of 21.9b.

Yep, I'm assuming the graphic is right because it makes zero sense that a metropolitan area could somehow grow more food than it needs.

I wonder if imports from the port of LA are not accounted for here and that is the 5 million ton delta we're seeing.

It doesn't look like there is enough flow eastward across the Appalachian Mountains to the heavily populated eastern seaboard.

There is a giant flow from KS to gulf coast TX. I assume those are grain exports?

Always disappointing to see counties used for comparison. Also disappointing to see totals instead of per-capita values.

What would you prefer?

They make statistical areas[0], granted they can be seen as too large to be meaningful. Rather, in this case, to determine flow, you have to use adjacency to determine "areas" of large concentration that may consist of a single county or multiple. A hard line on a county border can give inaccurate results.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_area_(United_State...

Per-capita doesn't make sense in this case. This is about the total flow of food. It again wouldn't make sense to say that a small town in the middle of no where with say 100 people who have the highest per-capita food export when in total they aren't even a drop in the bucket in importance to somewhere in CA or the Midwest that is an agriculture power house and accounts for most of our total food production.

But total flow is skewed when one county is an order of magnitude bigger than another in size. If you are going to compare counties which are not a fixed physical size, you at least need to account for differing physical size's effects on population or you can't reasonably compare. Were the counties a quarter of their current physical size, capita split and all, would they still appear as significant?

Much of this depends on data availability. I'd need to dig into the paper, but depending on reliance, USDA or SIC classifications by county (ZIP Code is also often available).

Data availability tends to drive much analysis and research.

Sure, and if you only have county-level metrics, then you can only perform analysis at the county level. But then you must be aware of the skew that represents in data, and make that clear. Presenting county-by-county analysis as definitive representations of flow, not accounting for physical size, does not give an accurate picture of real flow. Only to population centers and/or large counties, but large flow may be happening to many adjacent, small physical counties and this type of analysis of "core counties" would never know.

A serendipitous advantage of the cookie-cutter rectangular definition of many ag states' county boundaries is that regions are fairly strongly normalised for land area. And ag productivity, for some strange reason, correlates strongly to area rather than population, all else equal.

California would be an exception, though the distortions aren't particularly exceptional.

A rough eyeballing of the county-based graph (lower in my Mastodon reshare) suggests if anything that larger counties are less rather than more represented in high-significance areas. Most large counties tend to be both exceptionally sparsely populated, and agriculturally marginal.

San Bernardino County, in California, is a notable exception.

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