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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The Rise of the 'Locavore'
  • Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 21:40:01 -0600


May 20, 2008, 10:10PM
The Rise of the 'Locavore'
How the strengthening local food movement in towns across the U.S. is
reshaping farms and food retailing

Drive through the rolling foothills of the Appalachian range in southwestern
Virginia and you'll come across Abingdon, one of the oldest towns west of the
Blue Ridge Mountains. If it happens to be a Saturday morning, you might think
there's a party going on—every week between 7 a.m. and noon, more than 1,000
people gather in the parking lot on Main Street, next to the police station.
This is Abingdon's farmers' market. "For folks here, this is part of the
Saturday morning ritual," says Anthony Flaccavento, a farmer who is also
executive director of Appalachian Sustainable Development, a nonprofit
organization working in the Appalachian region of Virginia and Tennessee.

It's a relatively recent ritual. Five years ago, the farmers' market wasn't
as vibrant and it attracted just nine local farmers who sold a few different
kinds of veggies. Today, there's a fourfold jump, with 36 farmers who
regularly show up with a dizzying array of eggplants, blueberries, pecans,
home-churned butter, and meat from animals raised on the farms encircling the
town. It's a sign of the times: Hundreds of farmers' markets are springing up
all around the country. The U.S. Agriculture Dept. says the number of such
markets reached 4,692 in 2006, its most recent year of data, up 50% from five
years earlier. Sales from those markets reached $1 billion.
New Niches

The rise of farmers' markets—in city centers, college towns, and rural
squares—is testament to a dramatic shift in American tastes. Consumers
increasingly are seeking out the flavors of fresh, vine-ripened foods grown
on local farms rather than those trucked to supermarkets from faraway lands.
"This is not a fringe foodie culture," says Flaccavento. "These are ordinary,
middle-income folks who have become really engaged in food and really care
about where their food comes from."

It's a movement that is gradually reshaping the business of growing and
supplying food to Americans. The local food movement has already accomplished
something that almost no one would have thought possible a few years back: a
revival of small farms. After declining for more than a century, the number
of small farms has increased 20% in the past six years, to 1.2 million,
according to the Agriculture Dept.

Some are thriving. Michael Paine, 34, who started farming in 2005 on just one
acre in Yamhill, Ore., today has six acres of land and 110 families who buy
his lettuce, cabbage, peppers, and eggplants. "I like to surprise my families
with odd varieties of tomato or an odd eggplant variety, and they love it,"
says Paine.

Patrick Robinette saw a growing interest among Americans in specialty beef,
and in 2001 started raising 10 cows at Harris Acres farm in Pinetops, N.C.
Soon his grass-fed beef was in high demand. He now raises 600 head of cattle
and delivers beef to the North Carolina governor's mansion. He has standing
orders from 37 restaurants, three specialty stores, and six cafeterias.
Large Retailers Act

The impact of "locavores" (as local-food proponents are known) even shows up
in that Washington salute every five years to factory farming, the Farm Bill.
The latest version passed both houses in Congress in early May and was sent
on May 20 to President George W. Bush's desk for signing. Bush has threatened
to veto the bill, but it passed with enough votes to sustain an override.
Predictably, the overwhelming bulk of its $290 billion would still go to
powerful agribusiness interests in the form of subsidies for growing corn,
soybeans, and cotton. But $2.3 billion was set aside this year for specialty
crops, such as the eggplants, strawberries, or salad greens that are grown by
exactly these small, mostly organic farmers. That's a big bump-up from the
$100 million that was earmarked for such things in the previous legislation.

Small farmers will be able to get up to 75% of their organic certification
costs reimbursed, and some of them can obtain crop insurance. There's money
for research into organic foods, and to promote farmers' markets. Senator Tom
Harkin (D-Iowa) said the bill "invests in the health and nutrition of
American children…by expanding their access to farmer's markets and organic
produce."

The local food movement has not been lost on the giants of food retailing.
Large supermarket chains like Wal-Mart (WMT), Kroger (KR), and even Whole
Foods (WFMI) depend on their scale to compete. Their systems of buying,
delivering, and stocking are not easily adapted to the challenges of
providing local food, which by its nature involves many diverse groups of
farmers. People have gotten used to eating tomatoes and strawberries at all
times of the year, and many parts of the country are too cold to produce them
in the winter. Thus, even Whole Foods, which bills itself as the world's
leading retailer of natural and organic foods, has committed to buying from
barely four local farmers at each of its stores.

Wal-Mart, which in the last couple of years ran a "Salute to America's
Farmers" program, says that buying from local farmers not only satisfies
customers' desires, but also fits the company's commitment to sustainability
and cutting down on food transportation. However, the company admits that
local farms can never take over the produce aisle completely. "It gets
complicated since not every state grows apples and lettuce, and even when
they do, it doesn't grow at all times of the year," said Bruce Peterson,
formerly Wal-Mart's senior vice-president of perishables, in an interview 17
months ago. He has since left the company.
Broad Agenda

Nonetheless, all the giants are devoting a small but growing share of shelf
space to locally bought produce. Some are even inviting the farmers into the
store to promote their goods. "Obviously supermarkets don't want to lose that
business," says Michael Pollan, author of the best seller The Omnivore's
Dilemma. Neither Wal-Mart nor Whole Foods will quantify how much business
they get from locally grown food.

The very definition of "local" food presents a ceiling of sorts for
successful small farmers. If they start shipping more than 250 miles or so,
they cease to be local and their appeal vanishes. The optimal solution is to
locate near densely populated areas, but that's where acreage is scarce.
"Land prices are very expensive around metro and urban areas, which is a
barrier to entry," says Pollan. He thinks the solution will be for farmers to
look for ways to farm more varieties of food (BusinessWeek.com, 5/21/08).

The local food movement has many of the same hallmarks of the organic foods
movement, which sprang up in the 1970s to place a premium on foods grown
without pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. Indeed, almost all of today's
small farmers use organic techniques. But many consumers believe that organic
foods, though seemingly healthy, may still damage the environment. For
instance, organic fruits that are grown in Chile and Argentina and then
shipped halfway around the world require fossil fuels and carbon emissions to
power tankers and trucks thousands of miles. Instead of just focusing on
pesticides and chemicals, consumers who have been educated by movies like An
Inconvenient Truth now pore over "food miles" and "carbon footprints." The
message seems to be: If you buy organic, you care about your own body; if you
buy local, you care about your body and the environment.

As more and more consumers take those values to the store with them, the
impact is being felt far from the predictable centers of "green"
consciousness. In Bloomington, Ind., supermarket chains such as Kroger still
dominate, but an upstart called Bloomingfoods Market that specializes in
local fare lately has been stealing market share. Today the cooperative has
7,000 shopping members, up from 2,000 five years ago. It works with 180
farmers to offer everything from strawberries and persimmons to squash and
shiitake mushrooms. "We're seeing a real renaissance," says Ellen Michel,
marketing manager for Bloomingfoods.

As the local food movement grows more mainstream, it's showing up in
unexpected places. Corporations such as Best Buy (BB) in Minneapolis,
DreamWorks (DWA) in Los Angeles, and Nordstrom (JWN) in Seattle are providing
local options in their cafeterias. "We try to purchase as much as we can from
farmers in a 150-mile radius," says Fedele Bauccio, CEO of Bon Appetit
Management, which runs more than 400 cafeterias for companies like Oracle
(ORCL) and Target (TGT).
Blossoming Interest

As many as 1,200 school districts around the country, from Alabama to Iowa,
have linked up with local farms to serve fresh vegetables and fruit to
children. Colleges such as Brown, Cornell, the University of Montana, and the
University of California at Berkeley are buying from their state's own
producers. Last year, Iowa's Woodbury County mandated that its food-service
supplier buy from local farmers for places where it serves food, such as its
prison and detention center.

And in hundreds of towns, people are signing up for CSAs, or
community-supported agriculture organizations, where they pay a local farmer
for a weekly supply of produce during the harvest season. In 2000, there were
around 400 farms that had CSA programs; today there are more than 1,800
nationwide. Families typically pay a farm $150 to $650 each year in return
for a weekly basket of vegetables, fruit, eggs, meat, or baked goods. In New
York City, where 11,000 residents participate with 50 farms, the demand is so
high that there's a wait list. And in some inner cities, like the Bronx, a
borough of New York City, organizations are training community gardeners to
grow vegetables like collard greens, herbs, and beets for their community,
changing food habits in the process.

"We are even teaching people how to prepare seasonal produce," says Jacquie
Berger, executive director of Just Food, a nonprofit that helps fresh-food
growers sell to residents in the Bronx.

That may be less of an issue in more pastoral settings such as Abingdon. But
residents of the Virginia town look forward to Saturday at the farmers'
market, mingling, passing out petitions, and letting the kids snack on
berries while their parents shop for the week's groceries in a fresh setting.
"There's a groundswell of interest not just for vegetables and fruits, but
also eggs, poultry, and meat—people want it close to home, as fresh as
possible, and produced sustainably," says farmer Flaccavento.






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