* As a tribute to the late Steve Jobs, we've reposted this article today to celebrate one of the world's greatest CEOs.Check your pantry shelves. Any supermarket-label products there?
If so, then according to David McKinna, the analyst whose views I reported on last week, you (and me, it turns out) are aiding and abetting a shift in power to the supermarkets, and so to corporate farming.
I won't recap that argument here, but it has a remorseless logic. It forecasts a time (now?) when supermarkets call the shots in local supply chains, and because they call the shots, Darwinian pressures favour big operations over small.
Dr McKinna's predictions are extensions of current trends, except on one point. He thinks that supermarkets will in future do most of their business with corporate farms.
That runs counter to repeated studies that show family-run farms are more efficient than corporate operations.
So amend that forecast from "corporate farms" to "big operations", and presume that many, maybe most of those big operations will be family-run enterprises.
Many family farms will also continue to play successfully in global commodity markets; others will find profit in strategies like organic certification or farmers markets.
But what about those in between; the family farms that continue to produce a commodity product at the mercy of supermarket pricing (or other negative terms of trade), without changing scale?
If you want to do it this way, it seems likely that you have two choices: collaboration, or extinction.
Collaboration doesn't mean a return to the co-ops of the 1960s or 70s, but it does imply a return to the co-op ethos, where growers take control of their supply chain.
There's a useful fable in the story of two companies in the computer business, Microsoft and Apple.
In the early years of this decade, Apple was a struggling minnow, Microsoft an unassailable corporate colossus.
Microsoft built its business on software that it licensed to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). The OEMs bolt together computers from commodity parts sourced cheaply around the globe, and buy the MS software as one of those components. Along with Microsoft, names like Dell and HP have flourished under this model.
Apple's strategy looks overly-complicated by comparison. It controls development of both software and hardware, and sells the result in well-designed packages, usually at a premium over the competition.
Apple's share of the global personal computer market was - and is - in single digits. But its belief in total in-house control allowed it to build the iPod, which came to redefine the MP3 player market; the iPhone, which redefined the smartphone category; and the iPad, which ... you get the drift.
Apple isn't alone in these categories. For instance, Google's Android smartphone platform, which operates similarly to Microsoft's licensing model, is currently on about 48 per cent of the world's smartphones.
Apple owns about 28 per cent of the global smartphone market - but it takes two-thirds of global smartphone profits, thanks its tight grip on its supply chain and consumer's willingness to pay the "Apple tax". Similarly, Apple sells a quarter of the computers sold by the world's biggest personal computer maker, HP, but it makes seven times HP's profit from each unit.
Apple's integrated approach is now allowing the company to price its products at a point that other manufacturers are struggling to match when they attempt to introduce Apple's level of innovation.
The result: Apple just became the biggest company in the world by market valuation, taking the crown from Exxon Mobil.
Not coincidentally, HP last week announced it was exiting the PC market. Among other things, HP's management cited "the iPad effect".
So what relevance does Apple have for farming?
It suggests that controlling the supply chain is a vital ingredient of profitability. When a company (or co-operative) can custom-manage every process to pare costs and maximise quality, new ways of innovating and profit-taking become possible.
(This principle isn't lost on the supermarkets, of course.)
But Apple's accounts wouldn't be looking the same if it wasn't for Apple's vision. It created products that no-one knew they wanted, until they appeared.
There's a hint here of a way forward for farmers willing to get together to build a different future.
It involves a return to old ideas of collaboration and product ownership, timeless management principles of cost-control - and the imagination to reinvent the business of selling food or fibre.
Hard? Definitely. But so are the alternatives.
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