On the death of my family's dairy farm (2019)

Since you are producing your own food you obviously get something to eat before anyone else and you only have to sell your surplus. The only problem with owning a farm as a hedge against hyperinflation is the government may be highly corrupt and repossess all farms and thus cause a food shortage that way. Something you won't own during a crisis may not be a good hedge after all.

Think of it this way. There is an art piece that is being produced millions of times and people even buy it multiple times. It's a commodity because it's consistent. It's always the same.

If every art work was different then it wouldn't be a commodity.

The same applies to specific brands. They are a niche commodity. Each pack of milk is identical. The amount of milk you buy is the same in each pack (within tolerances of course). You don't care which cow ended up producing the milk. If each pack of milk was labeled with the cow it came from and each pack had a different quantity of milk it wouldn't be a commodity.

This happens everywhere in all industries. Incentives problem. Also agency problem at work.

Current American-style capitalism absolves responsible leadership from low-incidence, high-impact events. The Overton Window has continuously shifted the low-incidence rate from 1 in every extremely-high-number-of-years (sometimes measured in centuries), to in some instances 1 in every single-digit years. They aggressively tout returns to shareholders in the past, then throw up their hands and yell, "Hoocoodanode!?!?!".

To compound matters, there is a malignant, Karen-style American management trend I see where those who do plan ahead and execute on that plan are actively punished when the plans fall short in any way. The response should be: "Wow, I'm sure glad we saved/profited/benefited during that adverse event/period from planning ahead and setting aside, let's work together to figure out how to improve those cards even more because it is obvious it is a winning hand."

Instead, these Karen managers jump down the throats of those who made the hard decisions. First, at the time they made the decisions, for "wasting shareholder resources" on "long shot, unprofitable, black swan" events. Then again when those decisions pay off, they don't sit down and shut up, much less help everyone learn from their error in judgement by admitting to it. They double down to hide their judgement error, by finding flaws in planning ahead, harrumphing indignantly, "Well...you should have known it would turn out like this!"

This is how 3M leadership, despite committing funding towards entire factories and their attendant staffing and logistics chains in mothballs for manufacturing PPE in a crisis, for years, despite successfully onlining them during the pandemic, despite that entire product line hardly being a blip on their 10-Q's, still got raked over the coals by backseat drivers who wanted nothing to do with that entire process when it was being set up but during the pandemic demanded perfect execution.

That kind of "summer soldier and sunshine patriot" leadership of being scarce when the hard decisions are made and being loud to be perceived as "in the know" when reality doesn't mesh perfectly with the results of hard decisions taken many years in the past is extraordinarily toxic to American business, and is a massive cultural failing of American boards to recognize and excise these negative leadership styles.

This also is why ebullient, optimistic, positive leadership styles are so coveted by long-term, sustainable, effective leadership teams. Such teams are in the minority (though ever-so-slowly growing), which is why the adverse dynamics are found in so many industries.