by Bob Comis.
It is time to make local passe. It is time to make regional the new local. Enough of farmers
markets, CSAs, and direct on-farm sales. Yes, they are exciting—they feel like they are getting us somewhere. And, to be honest and give them their due, they have gotten us somewhere. The reality, however, is that they will never get us there, whither goest we must if we want to make a change—real change. I will say it as straight as I can: I want to see my pork in Price
Chopper (a supermarket).
Can this be done with integrity? Yes, yes it
can. But, you’ll need to have faith and let me, the friendly face you like to see at the farmer’s market, recede into the
background again, let me fall out of the limelight into the limeless
light of the sun shining brightly on me and the critters living lovely
on the fields.
Wither goest? To work: to build infrastructure enabling us to regionalize our farm and food systems.
What infrastructure? Here’s a list:
• Regional distribution:
Trucking and rail, and yes, where appropriate, even barge
Distribution hubs (logistics and storage) to gather produce into regionalizable quantities
Regional distribution outlets
A plethora of mom and pop butchers
A plethora of mom and pop groceries
Supermarkets
• Regional wholesale markets and wholesale distributors without which regional distribution infrastructure is fruitless
• Regional processing:
Slaughterhouses with smallish to mid-sized kill floors
Mid-sized packing plants to break carcasses into primals and/or all the way down to retail cuts
• Regional-scale production infrastructures:
Scaled-up farms producing enough that when gathered by the regional
distribution infrastructures can consistently and reliably supply
regional distribution outlets
Creating a regionally directed, ecologically sound food system that’s accessible to a broad swath can be done with integrity and with no loss of animal, farmer, or consumer welfare; and it must be done.
How much food consumed in the United States is produced under
ethical, ecologically sound conditions —1 percent? Two percent or
even three? Is that enough for you? It’s not for me. I want 30 percent.
But, to get there,
we need to get my pork in front of the consumer, not the consumer in
front of my pork. It’s as simple as that.
When I started farming, just a few years ago, I had one goal, to know
every single person that I sold every single piece of meat or whole or
half animal to, to see them in person, to look into their eyes as meat
and money changed hands. I believed, very strongly, that this
face-to-face farming was the proper response to the ills of a century
and a half
of agricultural industrialization, the last quarter century of which
had accelerated to an absolutely dizzying pace.
At first, I loved it. Every person I met was so excited about local
agriculture. Most of them could barely contain themselves; they were
bubbling over with genuine enthusiasm and sheer delight in the visceral
emotionality of making food choices and cultural choices that really
mattered. Some would gush about all things local farmish. Some would be
thoughtful, pensive even. Some would excitedly jabber about farms, food,
flavors, tastes, textures, smells, sounds. Some were shy. Some were
absolutely matter of fact, acting as if they had been buying meat
directly from a farmer for their entire lives. All seemed sure that we
were doing the right thing: We were doing it like grandma did, and that
was good.
And I believed it too. I believed that we were returning to a
pre-World War II model of farm and food systems. I believed that before
WWII all beef was grassfed (not true). I believed that before
WWII, food distribution was local (not true). I believed that
before WWII farmers farmed sustainably (not true). I believed,
therefore, that in order to create a viable local farm and food system
all we had to do was return to how grandma did it before WWII
(not true).
So how could I have strayed so far from the
path of localism?
Because I started to read books, old books, primarily on raising pigs
on pasture. I was reading old books not because I thought the old books
had more wisdom to share necessarily, but simply because after about
the mid-1950s to early-1960s the subject of the farm manuals shifted from
pasture-based pig farming to confinement pig farming. I learned—
continue to learn—a lot from these old books, some of them going back
as far as 1805. Other than using contemporary technology like electric
fences, I have modeled my farm on what I see as the heyday of
pasture-based pig farming, the half century from 1900 to the 1950s.
There was more, however, in these books than information on the day-to-day practice of farming. There was just as much information on
marketing, and it was through the information on marketing that my
fervent belief that we were doing things as grandma did was shaken, not
merely shaken, but toppled, upheaved, pounded to dust.
I discovered that the history we were telling ourselves in the local
farm and food systems movement was a myth. It was, in fact, a complete
fabrication with no historical basis at all. We had simply wiped G. W.
Swift clean from history. We had written away Sinclair’s Jungle (and his
socialism!). In our tale, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia were fed by
local, or maybe even regional, farms. In our tale, grandma, bought local meat from her neighborhood butcher.
My old books say different. My old books say that we’ve forgotten the
perfection of Swift’s refrigerated rail car—which by 1880, made it possible
to slaughter hundreds of thousands of cows, millions of pigs, and
millions of lambs in Chicago and ship them to the major population
centers of the East. In other words, we wrote out of existence the
great stockyards of Chicago where millions upon millions upon millions
of animals from the Western range lands were slaughtered after being
fattened on mountains and mountains of corn, which has also been wiped
clean from our history.
My old books talk about selling not directly to local butchers, local
grocers, or to grandma. They talk about selling at central livestock
markets, almost universally, there being here and there an occasional
reference to what we would consider local sales. The prices farmers
received ebbed and flowed with the supply dropped off for sale at these
central markets, because before WWII, before 1900 even, farmers
were already selling commodities. We can go back even further than that.
One of the major exports of the early American colonies to Britain was
barrel upon barrel of brined pork.
So, I can say that I want to see my pork in Price Chopper, because behind the veil of the many myths of the local farm
and food systems movement is a reality that we need to deal with. The
energy and counter-cultural impulse to buy local, to buy directly from
the farmer, is more than the vast majority of our population can or ever
will be able to muster—heck, it is more than I can muster half the
time! Historically, it has never been done this way. We tell ourselves
we are going back to the future, but there is no there back there. We are
attempting something brand new wrapped in a false veil of familiarity.
If we insist on such a marketing model, local food will never account
for more than a pittance of total sales, 1 percent, maybe 2 percent, possibly 3 percent
(which is about where organic is right now).
To get beyond niche level, we need to radically change our marketing model. We do not need
to sacrifice the integrity of our cultural model. We can and will
continue to farm ethically. We can and will continue to be remunerated
well enough to make a decent living. We can and will be able to afford
to pay our employees living wages. What we cannot do is insist that we
farmers look into the eyes of every consumer of local produce.
Newsflash: Grandma bought faceless commodity meat from a
nameless farmer. That is not a past I want to return to. I want us to
build a new, different, and I do think better, future.
I think we should take the considerable momentum of our farmers
market, CSA, on-farm sales culture and direct it toward the broader
population. Let’s convince supermarkets to buy local-regional meat, and
sell it under our farm names and tell our farm stories. Let’s at the
same time find a way to re-proliferate mom and pop butchers and mom and
pop grocers who could do the same. These outlets can be a farmer’s
proxy. They will know the farmer. They will tell her story. She can even
occasionally visit the store and mingle with customers.
I do not think we should get rid of farmers markets, CSAs, and
on-farm sales—I think they are lovely. But I do believe now that this
more distant, but not quite faceless, way is the way to the future.
It can’t be stressed enough: this way requires a lot of
work. We can’t just snap our fingers and go back to doing it how grandma
did, because we now know that we don’t want to do it how grandma did
it. Instead, we are setting out to do something absolutely new, and in
order to get there, we have tremendous infrastructures to build.
Let’s get to work!
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