home » The future of your food — a look at local food systems

The future of your food — a look at local food systems

by Paula | 16 October 2008 | permalink | comments [2]
Tags: food, peak oil
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A couple weeks ago, Sharon Astyk shared a selection of alarming accounts from Great Depression I, in which a lack of credit/money created a tragic absurdity: countless tons of food of every kind rotting or being thrown away by farmers, while people at the far end of the supply line ate garbage and road kill, or starved, because no one could afford to ship goods from the country to the city. Her fear is that these scenes will be repeated very soon, and I share her fear.

Sharon writes:

The wheat crop is being planted right now — and next year’s food depends on this year’s credit. High energy and fertilizer prices have already eaten up much of farmer’s profit for this year — the point at which it is no longer feasible for farmers to grow our food is not so very far away, nor is it really so alien to imagine that again we might see the failure of the linkage between city and country, the poor digging in the garbage, the farmer unable to plant, unable to keep their land, or throwing food out to rot.

She’s absolutely right, but her answer is unworkable given the current state of local food systems. Sharon proposes:

More of us need to grow food, but more importantly, we will need to create direct ties between country and city, so that farmers and urban dwellers can skip middlemen who add costs and lower payments, and get what they really need.

Local food systems are something I’ve been studying fervently for a couple years now. I would not claim to be a bona-fide expert, but I do think I have a better handle on things than your average bear. To see why this is unworkable it’s necessary to understand the state of local food systems.

Globalization has completely destroyed the infrastructure that used to bring local and regional farmers’ goods together with city buyers. Some progress has been made in the past decade via farmers markets and CSAs — which have been growing at a comparatively tremendous clip — but this infrastructure is wholly separate from the existing system of grocery stores from which the vast majority of people get their food and other necessities.

There are many, many grocery stores that would very much like to cash in on the local foods craze right now but they can’t because of the lack of infrastructure. Their operations are tooled so that they can place a few gigantic orders each week with a few gigantic distributors or with their own distribution divisions. Grocers are not set up to deal with hundreds of small farmers all growing different crops harvested at different times — this is a logistics nightmare for them, and would consume so many resources there wouldn’t be any left to run the store.

The flip side of this coin is farmers markets and CSAs. I think we need to acknowledge straight up front that having dozens or hundreds of local small farmers driving their goods to three or more farmers markets each week, and/or distributing CSA shares all over town, and/or requiring subscribers to drive 30+ miles into the country to pick up their shares, is a seriously inefficient use of liquid hydrocarbons and will not be sustainable for much longer. Moreover, farmers selling via CSAs and farmers markets are able to cover their costs because they’re offering specialty goods: heirloom tomatoes, obscure breeds of chicken, blue corn, blood-red carrots and the like. Currently these fetch a premium price and certainly some farmers will be able to continue making a living selling such things to the upper class. But in short order, demand for pauper foods is going to balloon in direct proportion to the number of diesel trucks that can’t make their grocery store deliveries. In this case, CSAs and farmers markets will represent a massive bottleneck in the supply chain because they are just too small to handle the volume of subsistence food that will need to get through. Simply growing the number of farmers markets and CSAs is no help, either; this is an even further inefficient use of liquid hydrocarbons that will further drive up food prices or prevent goods from getting to people at all. And we’re right back where we started.

The “answer,” if there is one, is to funnel local and regional farmers’ goods into the existing grocery store system to maximize distribution reach and fuel efficiency, and to minimize the up-front costs of building an entirely new infrastructure. For a population center of 100,000 people, this shift could be made in less than two growing seasons and for an investment of less than $200,000 — but it requires one of those despicable middleman thingies.

The middleman, in this case, is a food broker. His job duties include:

• Maintaining a running and up-to-date catalogue of all the farmers in the area, where they’re located, what they’re growing, how much they’re growing, and when they expect to harvest;
• Maintaining a running and up-to-date catalogue of all the grocery stores and other food retailers in the area, including where they’re located and their sales volumes;
• Mapping the shortest distances between individual farmers and individual grocery stores; arranging the most fuel-efficient delivery routes and methods between farmers and grocery stores; procuring the trucks, biodiesel, rail car leases, labor, and other requirements for making deliveries happen;
• Scheduling pick-up and delivery of foods as they’re harvested, and keeping grocers informed as to what’s coming and when;
• Keeping accounts so that the grocery stores pay what they should and farmers receive what they’re due. This could be done on either a pass-through basis or by purchasing goods from the farmers outright and reselling them to the grocery stores.

The food brokerage would have to take a cut of the money that passes from grocer to farmer, it’s true, in order to cover operating expenses. But what is the community getting for this cost? 100,000 people now have access to at least some food, and the area’s farmers have access to buyers so that they can make enough money to plant next year. The broker has also created a number of jobs, kept at least a few grocery stores in operation which means at least a few more jobs, prevented a monumental waste of fuel, and in general mitigated all-out catastrophe. That seems like a pretty good bargain to me.

I have given this issue a lot of thought — enough thought to come up with the $200,000 and 100,000 people figures — and I just don’t see any other way to relocalize food systems for less cost or in any shorter time frame.

The biggest stumbling block in all of this is government regulation that dictates what farmers can and cannot grow. A farmer just outside the city who’s growing industrial soy is not free to simply switch his crop over to cabbage, potato, and rutabaga if he’s getting reimbursements from Uncle Sam, which is almost certainly the case. Doing so can potentially result in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fines which could in turn cost him his farm. It may be that such regulations become unenforceable in the future but as it stands right now, farmers running operations over a certain size pretty much have their hands tied. If you want a political issue to champion, freeing farmers from the clutches of Monsanto, Cargill and ConAgra via that stinking heap of shit we know as the Food Bill will do more good than all the false hope and spare change in the world.

Finally, I just want to make a quick note about those despised and hated middlemen. Middlemen are not the enemy, nor are they a drain on the economy. What middlemen drain are the profits of huge corporations which universally prefer to sell directly to consumers and keep the retail markup for themselves. When dealing with a middleman such as a local retailer, manufacturers have to sell at wholesale price to the retailer who in turn adds a markup to cover the costs of buying whatever goods he’s selling, and of paying the bills, wages, and other expenses involved in keeping his operation going. Downtown areas get hollowed out precisely because middlemen get cut out of the equation. A healthy local economy requires many middlemen; these are the people who run shops, restaurants, and other businesses that keep people employed and money circulating in the community.

The distaste for middlemen is the result of various marketing campaigns during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Back then middlemen were called “jobbers” and manufacturers just hated them because they cut into profits. So the manufacturers began doing things like creating brand names for their goods to cultivate customer loyalty to the product, not the seller, who was often someone’s neighbor and a pillar in the community. At that point manufacturers were able to convince consumers to save money by “cutting out the middleman” through mail-order catalogs and the like. So, keep that in mind — the evil middleman is every bit a marketing fiction as the notion that diamonds represent marriage or that handguns have something to do with the Wild West.

comments

1. Thanks for this.

   Ecotrust has been working on setting up a ‘middleman’ system to connect producers and distributors (http://www.ecotrust.org/foodfarms/). It’s still in its infancy, but I know of a few farmers who have been using their service.

   The farms growing under farm support programs still has options, even under the current flawed system. While a wholesale conversion of a subsidized soyfield will probably not happen, the price of those commodities is high enough that the subsidies aren’t that high these days, and getting out of the contract shouldn’t be a big deal.

   — rich · 22 October 2008, 00:03 · #

2. Here in New Zealand we had until the early ’80’s a very useful wholesale auction system which involved generations of market gardeners and producers in daily auctions of the very best local produce. Perhaps this same end could be achieved via the web but the nature of farming is a hands on activity and depends on direct communications.

   — Ralph lawrence · 29 April 2009, 04:18 · #

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