The Direct Marketing Minority

When you run in farming circles, one of the things you often hear when the discussion turns to marketing, especially direct marketing, is “I just want to farm.” In other words, the farmer just wants to be a farmer, not a marketing executive and sales person. He or she doesn’t want to go to farmers markets or have people out to the farm. He or she wants to raise animals (or crops) and just sell them all to a buyer, generally wholesale. My generalization is that one hears this most often from established, multi-generational farmers. Mostly, they seem to be interested in not making any large cultural changes, and I do not blame them. Bucking the dominant culture within which one lives or making large changes in one’s cultural habits is difficult. Doing so creates anxiety and uncertainty. It can make one feel a stranger, to oneself and one’s community members. Anecdotally, I believe that the majority of farmers out there “just want to farm.” It is only a minority, and I think a small minority at that, who are willing, interested, and able to embrace the direct marketing model.

It seems therefore to me to be a problem that the current public dialogue, driven primarily by media coverage and popular authors like Michael Pollan, is pushing a direct marketing “agenda.” All we hear about are farmers markets, on-farm sales, and CSAs, three things which leave the majority of farmers who just want to farm hanging in the wind. If you ask these farmers if they would like to be making higher profit margins (or profit at all) by capitalizing on the burgeoning “Buy Local” movement, they will of course say yes. They want to get out from under the auction house boot that has been mashing them deeper and deeper into the barnyard shit and away from the commodity market that has been grinding them down for decades. As a matter of democratic principle, therefore, it seems incumbent on the vocal minority to begin not only advocating for changes that are in line with the interests and cultural habits of the silent majority, but also encouraging whoever within the silent majority that is interested in doing so to speak up and let the community know what sort of marketing model they would like to see. This does not mean that the direct marketing model should be abandoned. I, for one, am a farmer that thrives in it, primarily because I was raised in a shmoozing culture. What it means is that profitable alternatives to the auction house and the industrial commodity buyer need to be created.

The funny thing about this idea is that it does not need to be created out of the blue. It merely needs to be re-created. Non-commodity wholesale is that part of the cultural memories of the farmer who just wants to farm that keeps him or her interested in it. The direct marketing model is the model that needs to be fabricated from scratch, woven out of thin air. It has never in the history of modern agriculture (from the 17th c.) been done. The real history, the genuine tradition, the marketing culture of the glory days of farming, when farmers made money enough to carry no debt and support whole families, is non-commodity wholesale. Farmers didn’t farm for retail customers, such a concept would have been absolutely foreign to them (they might have sold to the neighbors, but that is just something they did, not their way of making money), they farmed for the market, and back then “market” meant a wholesale market, not a retail market like what we have today. Every couple of days if they grew vegetables, and a few times a year if they raised meat, they loaded up their trucks and drove down to the market where wholesale buyers (who resell to large retailers) and purveyors (who sell themselves) bid and haggled to purchase the produce of their farms. By mid-morning, the truck was empty and the farmer was on his way back out to the farm with a pocket full of money.

My friend on the vegetable farm in town, who started farming just outside of Providence, Rhode Island thirty-five years ago, remembers loading up the market truck and driving it to market in the first few years of his time as a farm hand. The market was full of purveyors, who would buy by the pallet load a range of types of vegetables and fruit from however many different farmers they needed or wanted to. Then they would load up their own trucks, and each one would drive to his neighborhood in Providence, where they parked their truck on a corner and peddled their produce for the day. At the end of the day, both the purveyors’ and the farmers’ pockets were full enough to make a living. Mom and Pop at the neighborhood grocery, who might have been a purveyor themselves or bought from one of the wholesalers were making a living too. This happened in cities and large towns all over the country. People made a living in the non-commodity wholesale market, and it didn’t take special people skills or marketing savvy to do it. Buyers bought from you because you grew or raised quality stuff, not because you had a nicely appointed, stylish market stall and a catchy spiel.

If we want to create local-regional farm and food systems that are democratic, both in terms of their agenda and in terms of their distribution of income possibilities, then we need to broaden our view to include a renewed, reinvigorated, and in important ways, re-imagined non-commodity wholesale market model. We should of course continue to cultivate the direct market model, it is flashy, it is catchy, it feels good, and it is good PR, but the bulk of the weight of our effort should be in creating real, profitable non-commodity local-regional wholesale opportunities for the majority of farmers out there who “just want to farm.”

 

Pound-Gallons, Not Food Miles

In the early 2000s, a report from the Leopold Institute popularized the phrase “food miles.” The research detailed in that report showed that locally produced and distributed food uses less fossil fuel than industrially produced and distributed food because it has fewer food miles in it. Since the publication of that and subsequent reports this idea has become dogma and the phrase “food miles” has become a part of everyday language. The problem with the Leopold paper is that the comparison they did was for fully loaded local, regional, and national trucks. In reality, local, especially, trucks are not fully loaded, they are often mostly empty.

Awhile back I got some flack for a post and a follow-up post in which I argued against this food  miles dogma and claimed that local farm and food systems, as they really exist today, do not use less fossil fuel than the industrial one. I still believe the argument I made in those two posts. I also still believe that it is important to find ways to decrease, on a per pound basis, which was the basis of my comparison, the fossil fuel consumption of local farm and food systems, especially in distribution. I would like to propose that we abandon the concept of food miles in favor of the more revealing and accurate “pound-gallons,” a horribly ugly phrase, I admit. What matters in terms of fossil fuel consumption is not how many miles the food has traveled, but how many gallons of fuel are in each pound of food. (Pound-gallons can also be used to compare fossil fuel consumption between industrial and local food production as well [eg, tractor use]) The food miles framework is very misleading. The reality is that there are substantially fewer pound-gallons in 40,000 pounds of produce trucked 1500 miles (0.0075) than in 200 pounds of produce trucked 50 miles (0.021). At 550 pounds of produced trucked 50 miles, the local pound-gallons and the industrial pound-gallons would be equivalent. (See the link to the first post above to see the math)

Once we adopt pound-gallons and abandon food miles, we see that we have a long way to go before local farm and food systems are using less fossil fuel, especially in distribution, than the industrial system. We need to get substantially more produce on each truck and/or transport that produce substantially fewer miles.

How do we do this? Following are a few suggestions, but of course, this list barely scratches the surface.

1) Instead of imposing food miles limits at farmers markets we should start imposing pound-gallon limits. A farmer may only be twenty-five miles away (fifty miles for the calculation), but if she is only selling 200 pounds of produce, we would do better going to the grocery store and buying poison industrial crap, based solely on fossil fuel consumption.

2) Conveniently located farmers should start “truck pooling,” that is, sharing a market truck instead of driving five different half empty trucks to the same market. (Farmers being farmers, and the needs of a farm being the needs of a farm, this is never going to happen)

3) We should promote CSAs, but also impose pound-gallon limits on distribution points, and maybe even on member mileage for on-farm pick-up (very few people, especially urban and suburban people, currently drive more than, say, fifteen miles to the grocery store, so they shouldn’t be driving thirty miles to the farm). The number of shares dropped off at each distribution point would have to be enough to keep pound-gallons below the industrial average — remember, for the purposes of this post, the only consideration is fossil fuel consumption.

4) We should switch to a market system based on purveyors rather than farmers, which is the type of market being established in New York City at the New Amsterdam Market. Purveyors can easily truck pool (they would just hire a trucker) and they can themselves live much closer to the markets than can farmers (even if farmers were to truck pool, they would still need to get themselves to the market, mileage that needs to be included in the calculation). Such a system is especially important for getting local-regional farm produce into major metropolitan areas. (This is very much an ideological capitulation for me. When I got into this, I wanted every sale of every pound of farm produce to be face-to-face between the farmer and the customer)

5) Use third party certification systems to ensure that the farmers and distributors in a system of wholesale (totally faceless) local-regional production and distribution are actually doing what they say they are. While the interactions themselves would be faceless (neither the customer, nor the retailer would have met, necessarily, the farmer), the products could be labeled with the farm name, including contact information, and web addresses could be listed so that the customer could go to the farm website or get in touch directly with the farmer if s/he desired. The problem with this approach is the trustworthiness of the third party certifiers. Seemingly third-party certifiers are sometimes nothing more than fronts for Big Ag. (This is another, even bigger, ideological capitulation for me. I wanted to see the wholesale system done away with completely)

If we really care whether local-regional farm and food systems use less fossil fuel than the industrial system, then we need to stop using misleading concepts like food miles and take the idea seriously. The pound-gallon concept takes this idea seriously and it produces real, “actionable” data. The trick now is to imagine and implement ways to bring our local-regional pound-gallons below that of the industrial system.

 

More on the Buy Local Infrastructure: Part One, Constraints

Since Miriam posted her comment a couple of weeks ago asking in what ways I thought the failure to recognize the novelty of the buy local infrastructure was limiting the buy local movement, I have been trying to put together a post answering her, but I keep getting distracted. A new comment from a different person has come in asking me what I think that infrastructure might look like, so it is definitely time to write and publish this post. One reason that I have let myself be so easily distracted away from this post is that imaging alternatives to something as grand as farming and food system infrastructures is extremely difficult to do; it is much easier to point out the problem and then just move on. (This post will appear in two parts)

When imaging alternatives, the first question that needs to be answered is, do you want to imagine an ideal alternative or a real alternative? An ideal alternative ignores, or imagines away, the realities that constrain the attainment of that alternative. A real alternative admits, accepts, and works within the constraints of those realities, although more progressive real alternatives push against those constraints in the hopes of overcoming them. Ordinarily, I imagine ideal alternatives and leave it up to the people with organizational and activist skills to work them out. However, in this case, I would prefer to imagine a progressive real alternative.

The first thing to do is to admit where we are currently. In spite of the tremendous media coverage — especially from the New York Times — it has gotten over the past couple of years, the Buy Local market accounts for a tiny percentage of the overall market, about 1% (for reference, certified organic amounts to about 3% of the total market). What this means, essentially, is that no one is buying local. Of course, there are geographic and cultural variations; I am sure that the percentage here in the Northeast is higher than one but is it higher than five? I doubt it. One may (and might rightly) argue that the Buy Local movement is in its infancy and the reality is that the growth in buying local from year to year has been dramatic, and it won’t be long before a substantial percentage of the market is Buy Local. But, again, refer to the organic market to be brought back down to earth. Organic has been growing by about 20% per year for the past few years, all the way up to a whopping 3% of the total market. Additionally, it is important to note about that growth that organic has only grown that much because the vast majority of the 20% annual growth is in industrial organic, which I believe is only marginally more sustainable than industrial chemical food production. The reality is that the only reason we are talking about buying local is that we are in a cultural minority and that media editors (many of whom are amongst that cultural minority) have taken it up as the fad of the moment (a fad, incidentally, that we hope won’t fade).

Having admitted the enormity of the challenge, I would like to begin by describing what I see as the constraints on the development of the Buy Local movement. In all honesty, there are too many to name — our entire social, cultural, economic, and political organization militates against the cultivation of anything but an industrial capitalist farming and food system — but Rick sums up two of the most important ones nicely in his comment: “local community farmers’ markets can only support so many farms and only a small portion of the population, the 1-3% you mention, care enough to bother going to a farm to buy directly.” In other words, infrastructure and culture. The major constraints are the limitations of the current Buy Local infrastructure, especially as it relates to distribution (it cannot support enough farms, nor can it reach enough people), and a lack of cultural commitment to doing the work necessary to connect directly with farmers. The first thing we need to admit, accept, and work within therefore is that  the cultivation of a face-to-face alternative to the faceless industrial system is likely impossible, as much as I would like it to be otherwise. A robust Buy Local market will most likely continue to be primarily faceless, although one can hope that supermarkets will be replaced by Mom-and-Pop grocery stores, and that there will be a rebirth of local butchers along the lines of Fleishers. Instead of faces we will have narratives about the farms from which our food and fiber comes. As you react against such concessions, remember that I am attempting to imagine an alternative by which about 90% of the population would get its food; likely ten percent, or perhaps even more, will be committed to the face-to-face alternative of CSAs, farm stands, and farmers markets.

An additional constraint, one that must be acknowledged, and one that I would very much like to militate against, is that in our low-wage society (wages have not gone up since the early 1970s) a good percentage of the population simply cannot afford the higher prices of local-regionalism, especially meat, poultry, and eggs because they currently cannot even afford industrial prices. According to the Economic Policy Institute, in 2004 (the last date for which there is published data — new numbers should be coming out in 2009 for the 2008 analysis), 35% of all New Yorkers could not meet their basic family budget, which includes the following necessities only, not even a single night out for dinner or a movie: housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, “other necessities” (repairs, etc.), and taxes. It is not a matter, therefore, as Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame ignorantly and outrageously quipped, of poor people forgoing their “third pair of Nikes” or their Ipod in order to afford local-regional food. It is necessary for advocates of local-regionalism to advocate, at the least, for wages high enough that all people can afford the higher prices of local-regional food. Without a significant increase in wages, local-regionalism can become nothing but a niche market for relatively rich people.

Another constraint that needs to be acknowledged, and this is another constraint that can be pushed against, is that the current farming and food regulatory environment presents a significant barrier to the creation of a durable and broad local-regionalism, primarily because FDA and USDA regulations, policies, and bureaucratic scale are geared toward large-scale industrial agriculture. Regulations are one-size fits all, ignoring the fact, for example, that small slaughterhouses cannot cover the costs of certain regulations as easily as large slaughterhouses can. Furthermore, USDA and FDA are often (literally) unresponsive to small farmers and small slaughterhouse owners, and they frequently ignore their concerns, most often using the excuse of food safety, which has the (hopefully unintended) consequence of promoting the industrial ag agenda, which is almost always very much at odds with the interests of small-scale farmers and the cultivation of local-regionalism.

Finally, one additional, and extremely important, constraint needs to be brought to light: access for farmers to affordable land. While local-regionalism does not need to be de-centralized and non-concentrated by definition, most of its advocates and adherents would prefer to see hundreds to thousands of small farms providing food and fiber, thereby giving priority to the local in local-regional, in any given locality-region rather than a few dozen industrial-scale farms, which would necessarily tip the balance toward the regional. However, at present, and this will continue in spite of the foreclosure crisis, as a result of “sprawl,” especially in densely populated areas like the Northeast, land values are often well beyond the reach of small-scale farmers. Farmers cannot outbid developers for land. Without more land in agricultural production, a de-centralized, non-concentrated local-regionalism can never take off.

To sum up, the constraints we face to develop a broad and durable local-regional infrastructure are the limitations of the existing local-regional infrastructure (what little there is), apathetic or uninspired culture, unjust socio-economics, the regulatory environment, and access to affordable land. There are, of course countless other constraints, but these are a few of the important ones, some of which can be successfully pushed against, but some of which we will need to work within.

In part two of this post, which I won’t get to until Sunday because I have the farmers market tomorrow morning, I will outline in detail what I imagine a local-regional infrastructure will look like. I will cover the infrastructural categories of land, inputs, production, processing, and distribution/marketing.