[saalweachter]

Commodity agriculture is any agriculture where the products are sold into the commodity markets, basically -- corn, wheat, soybeans, rice, pork, beef, etc.

Commodity agriculture is all about scale and price; there are certain quality standards that must be met (your corn must have a specific moisture content; your pigs must weigh in a certain range and be free of disease) but there is no real competition on the quality of the good produced. You assume all hard red wheat is fungible, and buy and sell it by the ton.

Some products exist in both commodity and non-commodity markets -- you can produce pork for the commodity markets, or your can sell it door to door.

[MattGaiser]

> Commodity agriculture is all about scale and price; there are certain quality standards that must be met (your corn must have a specific moisture content; your pigs must weigh in a certain range and be free of disease) but there is no real competition on the quality of the good produced. You assume all hard red wheat is fungible, and buy and sell it by the ton.

Between regulations and grocery store standards, is that not basically all food?

[saalweachter]

By calories, certainly.

But fresh produce frequently exists outside the commodity market -- the individual grocery stores or chains have relationships with individual producers (or consortiums) to distribute their products.

Basically if your food is labeled with the name of the producer it isn't commodity agriculture -- for instance, bags of apples are frequently branded by the orchard which produces them, because the orchard is selling directly to the grocery store (maybe with a middle man or two doing the actual sales and distribution), and not selling into a generic "apple" market the way eg wheat producers do.