There’s no denying that our current food system in the United States is in trouble. With the worsening climate crisis affecting crop yields, the pandemic limiting the labor force, and the war in Ukraine driving staggering inflation, we need alternatives to a largely homogenized system and fast. Now more than ever, we need a localized system that supports the rapidly shrinking population of small to mid-sized family farms, makes food more accessible, and provides full transparency to people who increasingly demand justice, equity, and accountability for the quality and source of their food. Over the past few decades we’ve turned to alternative methods like farmer’s markets, community-supported agriculture programs, and most recently, food hubs. But there’s an emerging method that may just be the key to forming strong, localized food systems.
Enter the small-farm-supporting grocery store, otherwise known as a Farm Stop. A Farm Stop is a mission-driven entity that supports small-scale farmers by sourcing agricultural products from nearby producers, and by operating on consignment. Most people, when they hear the word “consignment” think of clothing or antique stores, but it can also be applied to sourcing local agricultural products, supporting small-scale farmers, and strengthening local food systems. A good example is the Argus Farm Stop in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This year-round grocery store works with over 200 local farmers and producers. Argus gives the producers they work with 70 percent of the retail price, and takes a 30 percent commission to maintain its operations. This ensures that farmers get the real value for their products.
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Photo Credit: North Coast Opportunities’ Caring Kitchen Project
With farming being the root of the nation’s food supply, former President Barack Obama’s administration launched a federal Local Foods, Local Places (LFLP) program in 2014. This initiative was designed to help communities develop creative approaches to tap into their own food producers and bolster their region’s economy.
Spearheaded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the program has since provided direct, technical support and expertise on how best to integrate entrepreneurship, environmental management, public health, and other considerations, to more than 125 communities nationwide, to develop specific regional projects targeting access to local food. That includes farmers markets, community gardens, cooperative grocery stores, and food hubs that improve environmental, economic and health outcomes.
“The program was a real boost for our community,” said Sherene Hess, Indiana County, Pennsylvania commissioner. Indiana County, located in west-central Pennsylvania, was one of 16 communities selected in 2018.
LFLP was born out of the former Livable Communities in Appalachia program, which was established to promote economic development, preserve rural lands, and increase access to locally grown food in Appalachian towns and rural communities. That program halted in 2014 and was replaced by LFLP, which continues the focus to support small towns and rural areas nationwide. Outside of the EPA and USDA, LFLP is supported by the Department of Transportation (DoT), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), and the Delta Regional Authority (DRA).
There are three phases within the LFLP program: plan, convene and act. In the planning phase, the community and federal agencies develop a steering committee to outline goals for the project and identify other community stakeholders for community-based workshops…
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The flaws of an industrialized food system have, yet again, been exposed—this time through a cyberattack. On May 30, 2021, a cyberattack caused JBS, the world’s largest meat processing plant, to close nine meat processing plants in the United States. Although the shutdown lasted for only a day, analysts report that even short stoppages impact meat prices. Disruptions like the cyberattack highlight the problems with an industrialized food system and the need for policies that support local food systems.
A more pronounced disruption occurred over a year ago when Covid outbreaks forced many meatpacking plants, food processing plants, and farms to close for several weeks and months. The Food and Environment Reporting Network reports that as of June 21, 2021, at least 91,140 workers have tested positive for Covid-19; at least 464 workers have died. In addition to these tragedies, the pandemic forced farmers to euthanize animals and dump milk because while production continued, meat and milk processing did not.
The meat industry, like other agricultural sectors, has become increasingly consolidated over the past four decades. Four giant companies, including JBS, control more than 80% of the U.S. beef supply. Poultry, pork, dairy, and field crop operations have experienced similar consolidation. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports that there were 2.02 million U.S. farms in 2020, down from 2.20 million in 2007, and 6.8 million farms in 1935, with the largest farms accounting for more than 70% of the cropland in the United States. The number of Black farmers has decreased to just under 50,000 in 2017 from its peak of 1 million in 1920.
My title is a quotation from archaeologist Francis Pryor’s book about ‘prehistoric’ Britain, but it serves well enough as a summary of the general argument in my own book about our likely global future, and the need to refocus the household from a place of economy to a place of ecology1. Pryor suggests that early farmers in Britain grew mixed crops including vegetables in small provision grounds from which livestock were fenced out, provision grounds that were associated with small houses accommodating a handful of people. In fact, he argues that small-household sedentism stretches far back into the pre-agricultural Mesolithic in Britain, and we know that it’s been a common arrangement in agricultural and non-agricultural societies globally down to the present.
I’ll discuss in later posts the social and political implications of such household arrangements. Here, I’ll just raise a few points about their ecology that I touch on in my book, mostly in Chapter 7 (‘The apothecary’s garden’).
There are basically four reasons why I think a garden homestead commends itself as the habitation of the future (and, apparently, the past). First there’s an input-output circularity that’s ecologically efficient. The food and some of the fibre and medicines that the household occupants need is conveniently right there outside the house, and the waste products of the house – food scraps and human waste – are conveniently located as inputs into the garden to build its soils and organic matter.
Second, the garden requires a lot of human labour, which is most efficiently and effectively delivered when it’s associated with where people live…
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small farm future, chris smaje, garden, home, garden homestead, food production, local food production,
Leander Jones looks at the role of community supported agriculture as a 21st-century antidote to the destructive and increasingly fragile corporate agricultural model
Members of the Basta community supported agriculture collective working the farm. Image courtesy of Hof Basta.
In the past few decades fundamental flaws in the global food system have been increasingly thrust into the public eye. The rise of industrial agriculture – combining increased use of fertilisers and pesticides with aesthetics-focused crop modification and long-distance transportation – has led to devastation of the environment and turbocharged an extractive model that thrives on exploitation of the world’s producers. The relentless quest to maximise production – and profits – per acre is destroying the very land on which this production depends. It is akin to setting your house on fire to save on energy bills.
The fragility of food systems is being exposed by the Covid-19 crisis as global production and transportation have been rocked. The UN Food and Agriculture programme has warned of ‘biblical’ famine threatening hundreds of millions of people.
Making space
Alternative models of non-industrial food production have historical roots stretching back decades and are numerous in their iterations. Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is one example. As a practice it seeks to connect consumers directly with producers, with the aim of fostering community, creating fair exchange and sharing risks. The idea’s growth and popularity correlates with the rise of environmentalism.
Basta (‘Enough’ in Italian) is a CSA collective that has been running since 2013 near Berlin. The founders, Anna and Olli, bought a plot of land with the help of the Kulturland Genossenschaft (Cultivated Land Cooperative), in which small producers pool their resources to buy land and take it off the market. Individual farmers pay a yearly tariff back to Kulturland, while the land is owned in common.
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This is the crisis of modernist culture – the ability to create ourselves as individuals and protect ourselves from the vicissitudes of the non-symbolic world, set against the ability to alienate ourselves as individuals and offload the consequences of our self-creation onto other people (including future people) and the non-symbolic world. In view of the other crises we face, the only convincing way I can see of transcending this crisis is to start making ourselves as individuals in less materialised ways that are more engaged with the Creation, the non-symbolic world, around us. The small farm future I describe is the most convincing form I can see that transcendence taking.
One reason the prospect of a small farm future sits awkwardly with modern culture is that it flouts a sense of progress. Small-scale agriculture was what people did in the past, but we’ve now progressed beyond it. It’s hard to shake off this view because when we think about history through the lens of modernity we tend to use spatial metaphors with binary moral overtones. We move forwards, upwards or onwards, we lift people up out of poverty, we support progressive ideas and we don’t look back – but when we do, we see backward societies where a lot of people farmed.
In one sense, such objections are easily dealt with. A small farm future needn’t be the same as a small farm past. We don’t have to go back. But that’s not quite good enough, because the culture of modernity involves a sense of radical rupture with the past, and a wholly new destiny for humanity – a destiny that’s regarded as better than everything that went before it, largely because people quit farming, left the countryside and got busy with their modernist life projects.
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“We would die from starvation. It’s that simple.” Or so TV botanist James Wong recently tweeted in response to the title question, taken from a BBC feature. In this post I’m going to make the case that we wouldn’t, that it isn’t simple, and that in fact our chances of starving are probably higher – albeit in some quite unsimple ways – if we don’t start eating more food from local farms.
A good many of the comments under James’s tweet rehearsed various misconceptions about local food, so in a change to my intended programme I feel the need to put another side to the story in this post. If what I write here whets your appetite, so to speak, I cover these points in more detail in my forthcoming book, A Small Farm Future.
So…to answer the opening question, it’s necessary for some definitions – who is ‘we’, and what exactly does ‘local’ mean? Many of the commenters under James’s tweet took the question to mean ‘what if we, the inhabitants of Britain, only ate food that was grown in the country?’ which seems a reasonable starting point. If ‘we’, so defined, had to do this tomorrow, we’d probably struggle. But to me, the larger question is could we do it if we wanted to, given time to prepare?
Various commenters invoked the lessons of history in support of James’s assertion, correctly pointing out that Britain hasn’t been self-sufficient in food for two centuries. But what this tells us is that self-reliance hasn’t been a priority of national food policy over that period, not that it’s impossible. This raises the interesting question of why that’s so and whether it might change in the future, points I’ll come to shortly. First, though, it’s worth asking whether Britain could conceivably feed itself if it so wished.
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A haul from the Author’s urban farming operation in Portland, Sept. 15, 2007 (Photo C.H.White)
Massive flooding and heavier than normal precipitation across the US Midwest this year delayed or entirely prevented the planting of many crops. The situation was sufficiently widespread that it was visible from space. The trouble isn’t over yet: Hotter-than-normal temperatures predicted to follow could adversely affect corn pollination. Projections of lower yields have already stimulated higher prices in UN grain indexes and US ethanol. Additionally, the USDA is expecting harvests to be of inferior quality. Furthermore, the effects of this year could bleed into 2020; late planting leads to late harvesting which delays fall tilling, potentially until next spring, when who knows what Mother Nature will deliver.
Accuweather’s characterization of this as a “one-of-a-kind growing season” is literally true only in terms of its exact circumstances (given increasingly chaotic events) but not in its intensity (which will surely be exceeded). Prudence would dictate that we heed this year’s events as a warning and get serious about making preparations for worse years. Literal cycles of “feast or famine” have marked agriculture since its birth and sooner or later we will experience significant shortages here in the US, if not from the weather, than from war or lack of resources.
The Midwest floods and their possible repercussions for the food supply got some attention in the news (though not enough). One of the most common suggestions I saw on social media was: “Plant a garden!”
If only it were that simple.
I used to be a small-scale organic farmer so take it from me: totally feeding yourself from your own efforts is very, very challenging. Though some friends and I tried over multiple seasons, we never succeeded, or even came anywhere close.
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A year has passed since Hurricane Maria first made landfall in Puerto Rico, destroying homes, roads, and vehicles in its path—and taking thousands of lives. The island languished for months as an insufficient emergency response campaign attempted to restore basic services like water and power. After a recent independent study, the official death toll was raised from the initial 64 to 2,975; analysis done by The New York Times, citing malnutrition and other food-based ailments as possible culprits for surging mortality in the storm’s aftermath, estimated that number could be over 4,000.
How could this happen? By taking out the island’s infrastructure like highways, trucks, gas stations, and more, the storm also wiped out its agricultural supply lines. Puerto Rico imports about 85 percent of all its food, producing just 15 percent of what’s consumed on the island.
In the wake of the storm, people stood in lines for hours and walked barely-stocked aisles looking for canned, non-perishable foods. Many relied on emergency responders and Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) meals, made of packaged and processed foods that require little to no preparation, like the beef jerky and crackers you’d expect to find in a vending machine. In harder-to-service rural areas on the island, the threat of starvation loomed large.
“They say that during Maria, Puerto Rico only had enough food for one week,” says Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, who became an international figurehead after calling out President Trump for his inadequate response to the crisis. “I hate to say anything positive about Maria. But what the hurricane did was force us to look at the realities of life here and how our dependency on the outside weakens our ability to ensure our people are taken care of. Maria made it evident that we need agricultural sovereignty.”
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At the upcoming 9th International Public Markets Conference in Barcelona, we will discuss multiple approaches to the issues surrounding markets and market culture. Why do markets matter? How can we preserve and expand local food culture? How do we address the complex economic challenges facing markets today, and what strategies can we implement to expand global policy support for markets?
Despite their many benefits, public markets, particularly in the context of developing countries, can be endangered by many forces – and often by a combination of forces. Real estate pressures can devastate a market, for example, when cities allow prime sites to be redeveloped by the highest bidder, or when investments in supermarkets or large retail centers take precedence. Markets can lose their local authenticity when forces like tourism work to undermine or displace local producers, farmers, and patrons by producing an imitation of the original site. In war-torn countries or those under siege, markets are often targets for destruction. Less extreme threats include the unsafe or unclean conditions that can result from a market’s neglected infrastructure or lack of security. Because endangered markets often do not have the management capacity or resources to improve or re-invest, they become easy targets for removal or demolition.
The good news is that with focused local action that is sensitive to an area’s existing cultural fabric, struggling markets can once again become vital centers of commerce and community. Below are two very different examples of this process, both of which will be highlighted at the Barcelona conference.
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Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts
Members of the Basta community supported agriculture collective working the farm. Image courtesy of Hof Basta.
