My buying practices have improved but your article lays it out simply and clearly, making me realize there's much more to be done. Thanks Chris.

The day of the family farm has just about run its race. The future may be managed farms instead of family owned. Listed on the stock exchange and run from Tower 42 in melbourne.

I note the author has a vested financial interest in undermining industrial farming. It's interesting that he/she seems more concerned about the welfare of the industrially-farmed animals that the availability of high-quality foodstuffs for those who cannot afford to pay the premium demanded by the less-efficient "organic" farmers and that no solution is offered to the problem of producing sufficient quantities to satisfy demand if industrial farming was to be superceded.

As for why we demand cheap food: it's hard-wired. For hunter-gatherers, the largest source of food at the least effort is a basic requirement. It allows members to spend more time on other things and to enhance survivability of their offspring. Agriculture arose because of this drive.

Our ancestors were all hunter-gatherers until agriculture developed about 10,000 years ago. Anybody who was more concerned with the "rights" of their prey animals or the way in which their food plants were grown than they were in getting as much as possible into their belly while it was available didn't survive for long.

It's only the fact that we have a very wealthy society supported by cheap energy that allows people like the author to spend the time criticising it.

Excellent article; and to add to your comments on the effects on farmers and the ways in which they find it necessary to "streamline" or "economise" in their production techniques, is something that consumers need to be made aware of. People like to "hate" animal welfare groups, but they do attempt to raise the issues behind factory farming.

The other side, which the author does not raise, is that the predatory pricing goes in both directions. Check the pricing trends of the goods in the middle section of the supermarkets, particularly Woolworths and Coles. In order to sustain lower margins in the produce areas of the store, they raise the prices of goods within the general goods sections.

Then there is the effects of the home brands and "Select" home brands which swamp the shelves and put the squeeze on regular suppliers. Just ask the workers put off from Edgells and Heinz canneries.

Australia has around 70% of supermarket sales at either Woolworths and Coles. Do you need to ask why I stick to my local IGA?

Well off, smug and opinionated, telling the rest of us how to live.

Spend your money how you like, but leave me to spend mine as I choose. It's none of your business, or that of the government's.

One needs to understand a little about the Australian food supply
chain to realise that the author is wrong in many of his assumptions.

What the farmer is paid, is often only a small percentage of the
final retail price and its about the whole supply chain.

The management at Coles have in fact worked wonders at making that
whole chain far more efficient and should be praised for that.
Coles has not dropped the price that they pay for milk to the processor.
In fact in WA they even increased it. Most milk is
in fact used for manufacture of cheese, milk powder etc and exported.
Those prices have a far bigger bearing on what milk processors decide
to pay farmers. So blaming Coles is a complete furphy.

Many of the products that our supermarkets do sell, are made by just
a handful of global multinationals. Nestle, Unilever, Kraft,Kellogs, etc.
What Coles found was that these multinationals were charging far more
more their products wholesale in Australia, then elsewhere. In the
end, consumers wore the price for the extra fat profits made in
Australia. So Coles set about to change that.

These are public companies, so we can scrutinise their figures.

Coles work on a net margin of 3-4c in the dollar, after all costs.
They rightly point out that the multinationals profits are far higher
then that, so there is every good reason to create home brands etc.

Why should I be upset if Coles are holding the multinationals to
account and are creating a more efficient supply chain?

But of course its easy, as the author has done, to shoot the messenger