Comment by void_mint | Hacker News Reader

Comment by void_mint | Hacker News Reader

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> This is Season 1 of my farm and we literally are turning customers away, despite our meat being ~2x more expensive than grocery store meat.

Congrats!

> Regardless of what highly-processed stuff large agribusinesses can or will produce, there will always be a great market for humanely-raised, carefully processed animal protein.

Yep!

> If anything, it's the Tyson and Smithfield Foods of the world that should be worried. Somehow, I don't think any of us are.

Great!

This entire post didn't really negate mine though. Your post ignored huge percentages of (most of?) the categories of meat and food that would/could be replaced by lab grown food. It's like saying "My mercedes is wondeful, nobody would ever want an _electric car!_." There will always be a place for luxury items. People that eat at McDonald's aren't getting luxury items. Low wage workers that eat 4 dollar per pound chicken from Safeway aren't eating luxury items. If lab grown food can (more) ethically service lower income people with a reduced environmental impact, we should go all-in on that advancement. Your farm can and should exist as a commodity for those that want to pay for it.

The goal of my farm is kind of like a principle espoused by Ben Hunt of https://epsilontheory.com. He said we should create a tax regime based on the principle that 1000 millionaires is preferable to 1 billionaire. (The tax regime he recommended is quite interesting to, something along the lines of a progressive, lifetime capital gains tax, say 0% for the first $1mm, then 5% for the next $1mm, all the way up to, say, 95% for everything after $100mm.)

Our regulatory environment encourages a small handful of very powerful and wealthy agribusinesses, with all the attendant horrors from absentee landlordism and contract farming and insanely-scaled slaughtering facilities. It could just as well encourage a distribution of small family farms (this is the case in much of the non-western world).

Part of the way we're encouraging this outcome is building a platform to help small farmers directly market to customers, capturing vastly more of the value of their product.

In any case, I thought your example was interesting with cars. Right now, we sell the equivalent of the Tesla Roadster version of chicken. High-end, pricey, targeted toward an upper-middle class customer. As we gain some small amount of scale, and as we encourage more competitors and build co-operative abattoirs, the prices will come down, and we'll never be cheaper than Tyson or whoever, but we might become not so expensive that it's a real reach.

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