Japan's space agency helps to target advertising with satellite photos of crops Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and marketing agency Dentsu have developed a means to use snaps captured by satellites to smooth out agricultural supply chains and enhance advertising. As explained in a Thursday announcment, JAXA and Dentsu worked with the Tsumagoi Village Agricultural Cooperative Association to …
Yeah, my fields are photographed annually from the air for, let's be honest here, tax purposes so the money grabbers can calculate the harvest value. I can slide on my app from 2023 back to 1945 to see the land status. Then there are all the other website dross I have to fill (nitrogen use, in production or maintenance down to each tree, manual harvest or machine) for other checks on volumes, again for tax purposes.
This is a bit different though in that it's trying to get from "field to fork" (hate that phrase) by increasing public awareness of product availability.
Farmer will still get screwed though by the usual middle men feeding frenzy.
Maybe because cynicism requires less thinking than scepticism? And that the end result of the two are often in alignment, so your brain's tendancy to efficiency pushes you towards cynicism by default. But don't worry, often a fuzzy mental jpeg is good enough.
The satellite data is only a proxy for the ground truth, the number of cabbages in the field. Which is proportional to the quantity of cabbage that will be available to consumers, x days in advance. If there looks to be a glut of cabbage 7 days in advance, consumers can be persuaded to eat more by means advertising or price reductions. Alternatively, a commercial kimchi (fermented cabbage) producer has a few days notice to ramp up production. Whatever, different parties are incentived to find efficiencies, and they'll have more data.
If the satellite data doesn't bring any net advantage because it is priced too highly, then stake holders (farmer, distributer, retailer, consumer, kimchi producer) wouldn't bother with it. Or a competing service can step in.
Our market economic system justified as a means of information transmission to determine prices.
What gets my hackles up is "advertising" at me. It will do nobody any good but the people selling the advertising.
I know my crop inputs, I know my labo(u)r and equipment costs (and insurance, fuel, etc. etc.), and I know what kind of profit I need to make in order to make farming worthwhile to me. I set my price for this year's crop accordingly. 99% of the time, the wholesaler or aggregator doesn't even question my price. They mark that up and spread it out amongst the retail set, who also mark it up to spread it out among the consumers, who buy whatever is tasty and ripe at this time of year.
Advertising just plain doesn't come into it. It's an unnecessary additional expense that does nothing useful (unless you're an otherwise useless "marketing" person who feels the world owes you a living ... or have become brainwashed into believing the bullshit they sell). Advertising doesn't increase the farmer's profits, or the wholesaler/aggregator's profits, and it definitely increases costs to the consumer ... without adding benefit to any of them.
My impression from the article is that the advertising in question would be aimed at consumers, in an effort to make consumption patterns more closely match production patterns. That's potentially good for farmers and retailers, and to reduce food waste. It's probably a wash for consumers; they lose out on glut-triggered price reductions, but may save an equal amount over the year due to improved efficiencies.
a bit like Terry Pratchett's Discworld's Sto Plains surrounding Sto Lat where they take their cabbages extremely seriously.
They "get angry if another country, rejects a shipload of cabbages full of caterpillars, which are honest proteins. "
South Korea given their national kimchi fixation such a focus on a key ingredient would be understandable.
A cabbage is just an overinflated brussel sprout and equally unappealing.
"South Korea given their national kimchi fixation such a focus on a key ingredient would be understandable."
It's not just South Korea that pickles cabbage. Far from it.
"A cabbage is just an overinflated brussel sprout and equally unappealing."
Wrong way around. A brussel's sprout is an under-inflated, multi-headed, mutant cabbage. They have recently been bred to remove most of the bitter flavo(u)r components. Try them again, tipped, tailed and halved, tossed with a bit of bacon fat, and roasted. Adjust for salt, finish with black pepper (and perhaps a bit of shaved Parmigiano Reggiano if you're feeling particularly yuppie today). Tasty.
Try it. Streaky bacon (lightly smoked, preferably), fried crisp but not glass-like, dipped in dark chocolate (the darker the better for this one ... NOT your favorite milky confection, use real chocolate or you'll just make a disgusting mess. Don't say I didn't warn you.). Finish with a light sprinkle of an aged, hard, dry, salty cheese before the chocolate sets. Sometimes I'll add a pinch of toasted sesame or flax seed. A friend sometimes finishes it with crumbled seaweed instead of the cheese. You wouldn't want to make a meal of this, but as a snack with a beer after work it's worth the minimal effort to make.
I say, I rather love cabbage.
Dice up an onion fine, sweat off in some bacon fat in a cast iron pan, add sliced cabbage, cook till tender, and toss in an entire kielbasa sometime along the way at that magic time that it's hard to explain to people.
Another favorite is cabbage alfredo.
That one needs a par-boil in water after slicing, then you bake with jarred alfredo sauce and sliced kielbasa at gas mark 4/350F till it comes out al dente.
Then, of course, there are the sweet cabbage and the sauerkraut pierogi.
And coleslaw.
Now I'm hungry.
Icon because of course a pint goes good with cabbage!
A former colleague of mine had spent his formative years behind the iron curtain and, during his national service, was fed almost exclusively on something he called "electric cabbage", apparently because of the phosphorescence resulting from its advanced state of decay. The only thing that improved its tolerability was his advanced state of near-starvation. Mind you, I can remember the days when the cooking of cabbage in Britain was timed by calendar.
"Mind you, I can remember the days when the cooking of cabbage in Britain was timed by calendar."
The trick is a small amount of white vinegar in the water when doing a par-boil. Helps out immensely.
Pretty much required for Gołąbki, along with shaving down the thicker stem part of the leaf with a paring knife. The cut off bits are then fried off as a chef's snack...
Decomposed glowing cabbage on the other hand, see the icon...
Love 'em or hate 'em (I quite like them, when they're prepared well), brassicas are among the oldest cultivated crops, I believe. Cabbage was cultivated in Asia at least four millennia ago. While it's not one of the Big Three,1 cabbage and its cousins have been a major part of what humans have eaten since before we invented agriculture.
1The crops that make up a majority of the plant matter humans now eat: maize, rice, and wheat.
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