Milking the farmers

exactly. i've toyed on and off for a while now of seeing if i could help organise one myself.

at the formation of australia, a number of such socialist (social responsibility) institutions were formallly instituted as government non-profits, and for precisely that reason: to redress known and/or likely imbalances of bargaining power. a few still exist, such as the wool board and the wheat board, which purchase ALL the wool/wheat, then bargain individually with purchasers of all sizes for the on-selling price. growers are not legally allowed to sell elsewhere domestically (fine internationally, iirc), in order to prevent "voluntary" optouts forced on individuals by large purchasing power (similar to the farce of the EU working time opt-out, which is mandated by most London employers) a lovely example of a short-term restriction (of choice) being a necessary long-term protection (against others' abuse).

(as some protections ceased to be necessary as the traditions in opposing subcultures shifted, they were dropped. it is no longer compulsory to be part of a trade union, for example.)

the UK presently needs similar in most agricultural markets. the prices to farmers of hard-to-export goods such as meat or milk are essentially set by a handful of national supermarkets. and specifically by a tiny group of inward-looking administrators, whose performance is only measured by their costs and ease of admin.

note they occasionally shift the price for PR purposes or to head off competition reviews. one such happened recently, when tesco's (iirc) "voluntarily" lifted its purchase price of milk by 3p (& the others followed suit), thereby nobbling the growing mutterings in the govt oversight body. the RESULTANT price is that 18p cited by the BBC...

by the bye, your spam trapper rejected my initial hyphen-less spelling of social-ist, due to the presence of cial-is (s/-//)

you might like to consider changing your regex to word rather than string, or putting [ ,;:-\.] before and after?

heh

in vaguely related news, you may enjoy this brief post and the note in the post immediately below re the price of local butchers' local meat's prices, sold (to their minds) at premium prices. certainly at premium prices to their standard commercial channels (assuming they're allowed to sell to them, which is not common):

Sal's Summer Steak Recipe

"I'd been astounded last week to buy in the town square's Saturday market a kilo of good local sirloin for £7. That's about a third or less of the supermarket price, and for much better meat. Some more local experimentive sampling was in order."

Come to think of it, on a tech note and completely unrelated to the topic at hand, you might be interested in the post above the link too.