Why 'the market' alone can't save local agriculture

Through one lens, things are looking better than ever. According to a USDA report (PDF), the number of farmers' markets leapt 79 percent to 3,100 between 1994 and 2002. Community-supported agriculture programs -- wherein consumers buy a share of a farm's output before the season starts, sharing the risks and rewards of the harvest -- have followed a similar trajectory. According to one source, North America boasts 1,200 CSAs. Just 25 years ago, the concept didn't exist in these parts.

All that growth aside, though, the overall market for local produce remains tiny. The USDA reckons that farmers' markets account for less than 2 percent of the more than $70 billion Americans spend on produce. And, as I've pointed out before, the overall income picture for small commercial farms is dismal. Key USDA stat: Farms with annual revenues between $10,000 and $99,000 -- which describes the vast majority of farmers' market vendors -- have an average operating profit margin of negative 24.5 percent.

Simply put, small farms lose money, and their losses are financed by the off-farm incomes of the families that run them. From this angle, so-called sustainable farming looks like a precarious enterprise.

Why, then, do farmers' markets and CSAs continue to grow and multiply? Why do people still farm? The local-food revival, it seems to me, runs on passion: people's desire for connection to the seasons, to the soil that feeds them, to powerful flavors that can't be manufactured with chemicals or preserved over 1,300-mile delivery hauls. Aside from the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, I can think of no great boom in American history built more on enthusiasm, and less on profit.

Yet passion has practical limits (as investors in, say, Pets.com learned in 2000). For local farms to supply significantly more than 2 percent of the nation's produce (or meat, dairy, and eggs, for that matter), small-scale farming will have to become an economically viable activity.

Some optimists argue that market forces are already quietly working to achieve that goal. The argument goes like this: surging consumer demand for local food -- coupled with rising energy costs -- has convinced the large supermarket companies to rethink their far-flung supply chains and seek out small-scale producers near individual retail outlets. These corporate buyers will pump cash into local farm economies across the nation, reviving the fortunes of small-scale farmers.

Certainly, evidence for this scenario abounds. The phrase "local is the new organic" has become commonplace. Having turned organic food into another consumer fetish drained of much of its original meaning, the big corporate retailers are setting their sights on "local" cache. Shoppers entering Whole Foods outlets can hardly grab a basket without reading "buy local" propaganda. One pamphlet that confronted me on a recent visit poses the question, "What is local?" The answer seems a bit lenient to me: produce labeled "local" must "travel no more than ... seven hours from the farm to our facility."

Still, Whole Foods has committed resources to local foodsheds. After a scrape with industrial-agriculture critic Michael Pollan, CEO John Mackey pledged $10 million per year in loans to small-scale farmers, among other initiatives.

  Iowa Farmer's Union Needs Help On Water and Grassfed Meat

By The Iowa Union

The EPA has extended the comment period on the proposed revision of Clean Water Act regulations two weeks, with a new deadline of August 29.  The proposed regulations are the agency’s response to the court ruling in the case Waterkeeper Alliance v. EPA, in which both environmental plaintiffs and feedlot industry plaintiffs challenged the regulations issued in 2003. 
 
Martha Noble is working with member organizations of the Clean Water Network which were involved in the litigation on an Action Alert with talking points for organizations to prepare their on comment letters.  This Action Alert will be issued early next week and will go up on our website at www.msawg.org.

In addition, at the end of next week a sample comment letter will be posted on the Clean Water Network’s website at www.cwn.org.  SAC (the Sunstainable Agriculture Coalition) encourages people to draft their own letters with specific information about feedlot problems in their state.  The full text of the feedlot regulation and additional information is posted on the web at http://www.epa.gov/guide/cafo/.

Grassfed Meat

SAC submitted detailed comments to USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service on the proposed meat label claim and standard for grassfed meat.  The comments support the 99 percent grass and forage standard being proposed by AMS, but asks for clarifications in definitions to close potential loopholes that could allow significant grain feeding.  The comments also urge AMS to control the costs to farmers for participating in the Process-Verified Program and to proceed immediately to issuing for public comment the complementary free-range or pasture-raised label claim and standard so that farmers and ranchers can use them in combination.  The comment letter will be on the website at www.msawg.org later today.  If you have any questions, please call Tazuer Smith at the SAC DC office.
 Also, your grassfed comments are due by August 14.  There have been very few submitted to date.  Don’t Delay!  The action alert and our comment letter are both online at www.msawg.org.  Though USDA is a week behind in posting comments to the web ( http://www.ams.usda.gov/lsg/stand/claim.htm), we are concerned that very few comment letters as of last week had come through with our message.  This has been a 3-year undertaking – let’s not drop the ball at the last moment!