NEW DRIVING FORCES FOR OUR FOOD

In Business, November-December, 2004, Vol. 26, No. 6, p. 16

AMERICA IS HUNGRY
Of every dollar spent on food in the U.S., only 19 cents goes to farmers. No wonder there are now 3,100 farmers' markets today.

George DeVault

AMERICA is starving for food that tastes like food - food that comes from the family farm just down the road, not from the other side of the country or the world, for food that is fresh, not jet-lagged. America is hungry for food not drenched in pesticides, pumped full of antibiotics and covered with sealing wax. They want more control over their lives.
At least that's what Americans tell me and my wife every week at farmers' markets. Melanie and I have a 20-acre farm about one hour north of Philadelphia. It is both preserved and certified organic, where we raise vegetables and flowers. We've been direct marketers since we bought the place 20 years ago. We have sold at four different producer-only farmers' markets from South Street in Center City Philadelphia to one that opened last summer in our hometown of Emmaus, Pennsylvania. (See In Business, July-August, 2004)
In a typical week, we might talk -face-to-face - with 1,000 different people. We know most of our customers by sight, and many by name -their children, spouses and pets, too. And, every week, they all tell us the same thing: They are absolutely sick and tired of the tasteless supermarket produce. They don't trust it, either. In this age of globalization - and global terrorism - many say they are increasingly afraid of food from afar.
That's part of why we grow the widest selection possible in our part of the country. Our signature crops include sugar snap peas, garlic, blueberries, salad mixes of all kinds throughout the summer, red, white and blue potatoes on the Fourth of July, heirloom tomatoes, artichokes and flower bouquets that last a good 10 days. We extend the season from early spring to late fall with three high tunnel greenhouses.
Like most farmers in Pennsylvania and the rest of the country, we also grow soybeans, not for export or livestock feed, but for people. One pound of our fresh, vegetable soybeans - Edamame, they're called in Japan - sells for what a bushel of regular beans brings on world markets.
Americans may buy supermarket produce in the off-season, but they don't like it. Not one little bit. All winter long, Americans complain about cardboard tomatoes and strawberries that don't taste like much of anything. When the days start to grow longer in February, Americans are as hungry as a bunch of groundhogs, drooling for the first tender greens of spring. That's when they start bugging us with e-mails: When does the season start?

BOOM IN FARMERS' MARKETS
No wonder the number of farmers' markets has grown from a few hundred 20 years ago to more than 3,100 today. No wonder more than 19,000 farmers throughout the country are now making their living by selling only at farmers' markets. They are the future for much of American agriculture.
That's because traditional agriculture gets the shaft, while the rest of the food system gets the gold mine. Of every dollar now spent on food in this country, an average of only 19 cents goes to farmers, according to the USDA. That's down from 30 cents as recently as 1990. Except for a few upward blips, mainly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the farm share of the food dollar has been falling steadily for more than half a century, reports the Economic Research Service.
If farmers today receive only 19 cents of the food dollar on average, what becomes of the remaining 81 cents? It goes to pay what USDA calls the “marketing bill” - cost of labor, packaging, transportation, energy, profits, advertising and other expenses involved in getting food from farm to table.
Our job is to fix our food system. That starts with a thing called policy - the rules and regulations that make it possible, or sometimes impossible, to do what we need to do.
Farmers' markets may be the biggest part of the solution to problems of our food system and the threat of agroterrorism. The greatest single threat to our food system is the huge distance our food travels - an average of 1,500 miles is the number I see most often. The more we shorten our supply lines, decentralize our food production and processing, the more secure our homeland is going to become.
The Farmers Diner in Vermont got it exactly right with its slogan: “Food From Here.” That's what farmers' markets are all about.

George DeVault is a contributing editor to In Business.

A DIFFERENT SORT OF MEATPACKER
Iowa back-to-the-landers launch an alternative marketing system for over
40 farmers in four states who raise organic livestock.

Brian Halweil

IN 2001, Wende Elliot and her husband Joseph Rude - “back-to-the-landers” who dropped out of the New York business world to raise their own food - founded Wholesome Harvest, a coalition of Iowa farmers who raise, slaughter and market certified organic animals. In launching the firm, they thought: “Wouldn't it be cool if there could be a legacy more than our successful booths at the farmers' market!”
On the morning I visited Wende Elliot, she had already fed the chickens, let the cows out to pasture, while Joseph Rude tended to the hogs, and they got their children ready for school. It was only 9 in the morning. The bulk of her work that day would be spent inside Wende's home in Colo, Iowa - running an enterprise that could provide part of the answer for struggling livestock and dairy farmers around the world.
With the sales staff camped in the dining room, and the packing and shipping handled in one of the Elliot's barns, Wholesome Harvest now sells its steaks, chickens, sausages, and pork chops to an extensive list of restaurants, small grocers, and even supermarket chains across Iowa. The coalition included six farmers the first year and 20 the next. In 2003, 41 farmers in four states participated. At a time when American hog and cattle farmers are going belly-up by the thousands, Wholesome Harvest has a waiting list of 70 farmers. “Our business has grown 156 percent in sales for 2004,” notes Elliott, adding that organic meats have an annual growth rate of 78 percent, according to the Organic Trade Association.
“It's really a different business model,” Elliot explains, which tries to overcome the two major bottlenecks in American meat production. First, Americans buy 99 percent of their meat at supermarkets, and the Elliots saw farmers' markets as a sort of “farmers ghetto.” They decided to market themselves as a legitimate wholesale meat seller. And because the big meat packers effectively control the price and market for meat in America, Wholesome Harvest found some nearby slaughterhouses and invited them to join the coalition.
By sharing a sales staff and trucks, Wholesome Harvest tries to compensate for where individual farmers generally fall short. “Some farmers are great marketers, but they either die of exhaustion or break their backs,” Elliot notes. “You can't farm all day and then pack up your orders and drive them to the city.” An economist from the University of Wisconsin found that Wholesome Harvest got its members a better return on investment than if they were selling their meat through the standard channels. “When people say no to us at the corporate level, we go to the store level and try to get in the backdoor,” Elliot explains. “Studies have shown that if 14 people go to a store manager and ask for something, the store will change.” After the recent discovery of mad cow disease in American cattle, supermarkets that previously weren't biting began to call.
The coalition is held together by stubborn principles. “We're really socially minded farmers who want to make a difference. So we farm organically and raise our families on organic farms.” It is the only national meat brand that voluntarily exceeds national organic standards. All animals are raised on pasture (the national organic standards allow some confinement), which means no manure spills or worrisome lagoons, and the farmers keep the density of their herds low enough to ensure a healthy pasture and animals. Wholesome Harvest tests all its meat for mad cow disease (again voluntarily) and sells certain products frozen to avoid preservatives and to stay in synch with the seasons. Elliot raves about the old-fashioned European recipes for the sausages and the heirloom breeds raised by the members.
On top of that, Wholesome Harvest donates five percent of profits to like-minded charities, including the local Sierra Club and Iowa State's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. “If you saw us, you might say, 'we're all poor,'” Elliot says. “But we all donate what we can in terms of time, labor and money. We're not a religious organization, but we feel like it's good karma.

Brian Halweil is a senior researcher with Worldwatch Institute, based in Washington, D.C. Readers can buy online from Wholesome Harvest at www.wholesomeharvest.com.

RECLAIMING HOMEGROWN PLEASURES IN A GLOBAL SUPERMARKET
IN HIS NEW BOOK, Eat Here, Worldwatch Institute researcher Brian Halweil explains how a simple shift in eating habits can result in a great many significant changes. First, there's superior taste plus personal health benefits. Then there's the improved economic returns for small farmers and the quality of the global environment.
“Eating local is the next frontier in the American diet,” says Halweil. “People everywhere are taking control of their food supply to protect themselves from heavy pesticide use, agroterrorism and urban sprawl. They want to know who grows their food and where it comes from.”
There are many signs that this practice has gone mainstream. The number of farmers markets in the United States has doubled to more than 3,100 in the last decade. Approximately three million people visit these markets regularly and spend over $1 billion each year. At the global level, the largest organized movement to preserve the world's distinctive food cultures, Slow Food (www.slowfood.com), is growing explosively and now counts over 80,000 members in 104 nations.
In Eat Here, Halweil argues that while this push for “food democracy” is surging, its long term success will depend on moving local food beyond farmers markets. “Farmers markets aren't enough to secure 'local' a viable space in the food market,”' says Halweil. “Local ingredients need to show up in school cafeterias, on restaurant menus, and on supermarket shelves.”
Copies of Eat Here can be purchased at $13.95 by contacting Worldwatch,www.worldwatch.org/pubs/books/17/.

Copyright 2007, The JG Press, Inc.