Farmers Market Season Begins

Today is the first day of the Menands retail farmers market. The Menands market starts so early because we do a really big spring plant business. There will be very little, if anything, in the way of local produce. There might be some asparagus, spinach, and/or rhubarb, and maybe some of the last of the storage crops like potatoes. Mostly it will be plants (flowers and vegetables).

I will have pork, but I am sold out of lamb and chicken. I will have a couple of my neighbor’s lambs slaughtered in a few weeks to carry me through until I have the first of my own slaughtered in July. I was going to buy them from her and bring them over here for a few weeks so that they were “mine,” but that is kind of silly, I think. Why stress them out by moving them to another farm for just a few weeks and add to my labor by needing to manage a pen of just a couple of sheep? The reality is that if I took possession of them with just three weeks to go, my neighbor raised them anyway, not me. Calling that lamb mine would be like shipping in a cow from Mexico, then feeding it on US soil for a few days, and then labeling the beef from that cow as “Produce of USA,” which you can do under the current COOL regulations. It’s a ruse, a farce. Instead, I’ll skip the BSing and just let my customers know that the lambs were raised by my neighbor. I would be shocked if a single customer had a single bad word to say about it. It is not a producer-only market, so there is no problem with that plan market management-wise.

I love going to the farmers market, although it will be interesting to see what my stamina is like this year compared to last year. I started the market mid-season last year, in July, I think. Last year I attended for fourteen weeks. This year it will be twenty-five. Market days are long long days. They start with chores at 5:00am and end when I get home and unloaded about 3:30pm, during which time I am constantly on my feet, other than when I am driving, and after which I need to immediately do a round of chores. The thing I like most about the market is talking to people that are as excited about local food as I am. I am especially interested in those people that are just making the transition from industrial to local food. When selling directly, I can see much more clearly the contribution my farming makes to people’s lives than when I sell wholesale. I see my pork in the freezer at my friends’ store, but I have only a vague and abstract sense of it as my own. It pleases me to see it in the case, of course. I just don’t feel as strong a connection to it and sense of purpose because of it as I do when I hand the packages directly to people at the market.

 

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.