What farm to table actually costs

Food & Farming · 2026-04-02 · 8 min read

By Ravi Patel, Sustainability & agriculture

Short supply chains remove the middlemen and hand their work — grading, storage, delivery, invoicing — to somebody who was farming.

The appeal is obvious: sell direct, capture the margin the distributor took, and let the customer meet the person who grew the food. The economics work more often than critics admit and less easily than the marketing suggests.

What gets underestimated is the labour transferred. Packing, grading, transport, market stalls, invoicing, chasing payment and answering messages are a job, and they land on evenings and weekends after the farming is done.

Restaurants add their own constraint. A kitchen needs consistent volume and consistent size, which is precisely what a small diversified farm cannot promise, so the relationship works best where the menu changes with what arrives.

Aggregation is the fix that keeps being reinvented: a cooperative or food hub that collects from several small farms, handles logistics and presents one invoice to buyers. It restores a middleman, but one the farmers own.

The honest conclusion is that local food is worth its price for reasons of quality, freshness and where the money ends up — not because removing intermediaries is automatically cheaper. Somebody still has to do that work.

Tags: food, supply-chain, local

Ravi Patel — Ravi reports on agriculture, food systems and sustainability for ESPYCRUX, with a habit of following the money before the technology. He grew up around a family farm and it shows in the questions he asks.