There is a quiet engineering decision tucked inside Joseph's plan that the Torah narrates in a single breath but the Targum lingers on. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 41:35 describes the process: collect "all the produce of those good years that are coming," gather it "under the hand of Pharoh's superintendents," and then — crucially — "set the produce in the cities to be kept."
Distributed storage, not a single silo
Joseph does not centralize the grain in one monumental royal warehouse. He distributes it. Every city becomes its own granary. The later verse (Genesis 41:48) clarifies the principle: "the produce of the fields which were round about a city he laid up therein." Grain grown near a city stayed near that city. The logic is brilliant. It reduces transport costs, protects against single-point failure (fire, vermin, theft), and ensures that when the famine hit, every population center had local reserves. The Aramaic paraphrase, which reached its final form in the seventh or eighth century CE, preserves this detail because it mattered: a famine plan is only as good as its last mile.
The takeaway
Abundance hoarded in one place is a single target. Joseph's wisdom was to scatter the surplus so that no village was more than a short walk from its own salvation.