‘The physical distance that has to be travelled by food from afar is difficult. But it’s less challenging than the social and entrepreneurial distance that has to be travelled by food from down the road.’
—Wayne Roberts
| Field notes this week:It Takes Two To Tango Boosting the amount of local food that’s eaten is not as simple as persuading more people to buy more local food, or convincing more farmers to grow more food for the local market. Odd as it seems, given how complicated it is to move mountains of food from one end of the Earth to another, it’s more complex to move local food from farm to fork. That’s why shifting more people to more local food is so much harder than straightforward logic leads us to think it should be. People say they want to eat more local food, a lot of frustrated local boosters say. So why isn’t more of it happening? Good question! The answer isn’t complicated either. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t complicated because it’s complex. Complicated describes the seeming miracle of delivering a tomato from China or Florida, where most tomatoes come from, to a supermarket a few miles from where most people in North America live. That journey takes a lot of algorithms and logistics, which is why its complicated. But since all the equipment, facilities and staff are controlled through corporate chains of command, it doesn’t take much in the way of human interaction and social skills — which is why it isn’t as complex as the social arrangements needed to move local food. To explain the difference, some people say that sending a rocket to the moon is complicated, but raising a child is complex. Same difference with long-distance and short supply chain food. The physical distance that has to be travelled by food from afar is difficult. But it’s less challenging than the social and entrepreneurial distance that has to be travelled by food from down the road.The First MileExperts in long-distance logistics always talk about the most difficult part of their trips – the notorious last mile. It may take two hours to drive the last hundred miles into a city. But it takes many more hours to drive along 20 miles of a crowded city main street, and find parking spots while deliveries can be made. That’s the Achilles’ heel of any delivery system. Even food from 30 miles away faces exactly the same last mile problem. The competitive advantage of being physically close almost disappears because of this common problem of the last mile. But even more daunting for the food producer is the first mile, and especially the first few feet of that first mile– figuring what to grow for the local market, finding places to sell, getting the food ready for delivery. We might call it pre-harvest handling. That first mile has to enter a time machine to go the entire distance between todays dominant agri-food and agribusiness system and the once-prevailing system known as agriculture. Todays dominant agrifood and agribusiness systems have no first mile problem because their lean production has stripped away the time and creativity it takes to make human connections and handle human problem-solving. Today’s agrifood system is super-efficient, in short, because it took the culture out of agriculture, and assigns the farmer the task of growing one crop that will be turned into one ingredient in a supply chain assembly line that has automated all the first mile personal human know-how and personal human connections. Agribusiness is called agribusiness precisely because it hands the connection-making once done through a culture over to business. Connections are turned into cogs in the machine. If people in cities want all the health, environmental, cultural, and economic benefits of a local food system, they need to do their bit so a new local food regionalism can co-evolve between eaters and producers — who all are understanding and supportive of what goes into the complexities of both the starting and finishing line of a new food system producing a challenging full product line of local food.Meet The ExpertsTo share info about the challenge, I’d like to present two scholars: Mary Hendrickson, a specialist in food monopolies, and Terry Marsden, a specialist in regional geography. They have devoted a lot of time to understanding the loneliness of the short-distance runner — what I see as all the complexity behind the first mile of todays re-emerging local food system. I got to know Mary’s work about 15 years ago, when both of us were on the board, and she was chair of the board, of the Community Food Security Coalition in the U.S. I got to know Terry thanks to all the ties between where my wife is working on her Ph D in Waterloo, Ontario and Cardiff, Wales, where Terry works with an incredible team of localista scholars. I’m leaving out a third analyst, Lori Stahlbrand. She has spent lots of time on this, and also coined the term “infrastructure of the middle” to pose solutions to the first mile problem, but because she’s my wife, people might think I’m biased.Something About MaryMary Hendrickson gave a charming talk to staff of the Farm Credit Association, and presented the emerging food system they should give credit to and provide bank credit for. The centralized and monopolized “consolidation of production, processing and distribution is not the only story of agriculture and food,” she told them. “New value chains are emerging,” she said, “and likely their biggest challenge is in developing capacity to grow, aggregate, distribute and market the products that engaged consumers desire.” It takes two to tango. An engaged consumer who wants to knows where food comes from, who grew it, how it was grown, and what makes it special, needs a dancing partner – a farmer who wants to know where the food going to, who will eat it, and what makes them special. Hendrickson tracks as best she can (it’s not easy keeping up with this fast-paced and secretive industry) what’s called the CR4 of food – how much of any segment is controlled by the top four firms. In poultry slaughtering, it’s half; in corn milling, it’s 83 per cent, in flour, it’s 55 per cent; in some fertilizers, it’s 70 per cent; in soy processing, it’s 85 per cent; in seeds, it’s 58 per cent. Some US farmers are no slouches when it comes to concentration, she points out – 12 per cent of US farms account for 84 per cent of gross farm sales. The only way out alive for small and medium-sized farms, Hendrickson argues, is to get out of the cost-price squeeze of that mass production system, and orient to the newly engaged, information-seeking, relationship-seeking, authenticity-seeking consumer, who will give farmers a break where the C4 won’t. The CR4 have created their own gravediggers, we might say – a group of farmers who have nothing to lose but their supply chains, and who need to create their own supply chains from scratch. At the consumer end, we’re relearning to cook from scratch. To provide us with food we can cook from scratch, farmers have to relearn to sell food from scratch. If we have each others backs, we could even say “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” A basic need, says Hendrickson, “is the creation of value-chains, basically a set of working partnerships, that move local or regional foods from farmer to consumer in a way that allocates resources and profits in a fair and transparent manner.” Her talk was intended to alert farm lenders to some of the complexities of lending money to scale up a local and regional food system, which will require different skills than the ones required to lend money to a long distance food system which had more buildings and equipment to use for collateral, but less connectivity to people.Terry SaysTerry Marsden (with Everard Smith) describes the new farming as ecological entrepreneurship in the field of quality food production and local branding. The argument of Marsden and his co-thinkers is that farmers turned away from producing food that corporations measured by quantity alone, and turned toward producing food that consumers appreciated because of its quality, because quality relationships offered the only hope of getting a price that made farming viable. The shift from quantity to quality – often called the quality turn – became pivotal for the modern food movement in the Global North. One way of increasing quality is to shift to organic, but there are many other ways that have to do with heritage, taste, freshness, nutrient levels, allergic sensitivities, dietary preferences, customer service, and so on. This is a food movement based on “one no, but many yeses,” or of “ands, not buts” — as two famous food sayings put it. Moving quality food requires problem-solving skills, people skills, and enhanced values around society and the environment, say Marsden and Smith. So capacity building is part and parcel of pre-harvest handling as well as post-harvest handling, neither of which skillsets got a lot of attention before the quality turn. Entrepreneurial skills also hone in on what is called agriculture multi-functionalism, which had also been suppressed in the long-distance food system. Food producers in a local system can be valued not only for the food they grow but the agro-tourism they invite, the local heritage they sustain, the filtering of local water they provide, and the protection from floods provided by rich and well-protected soils. No-one halfway around the world will pay for those local co-products of food, but locals just might. Marsden and Smith refer to this as multi-functional forms of value-capture. That is why they call such farmers ecological entrepreneurs, and point to a whole new arena for adding value and adding income streams to local and regional farms. What Did We Learn?In Marsden and Smith’s view, this process changes the meaning of local from a location to a social space. It’s a space where people make new connections and gain new capacities that broaden their horizon and sense of purpose. The landscape becomes a social-scape. In their view, such capacity issues are every bit as important as policy in creating a new, more quality-based and regional food system. They refer to one set of needed skills as “retro-innovation” –learning how to slaughter, butcher and prepare animals on a small and humane scale, for example. Policy has to be attuned to such new entrepreneurial needs, and the funding they require for skills training, outreach and equipment. Policy also has to be attuned to a new system of value-recognition which, unlike the old system, shows financial appreciation for all the things farmers add to a regional community. Legislators who don’t provide fees to pay farmers for environmental services are just being penny-wise but pound foolish, for they’re missing major contributions farms can make to natural and physical infrastructure. Contributing their share to the benefit-rich entrepreneurial infrastructure of this new regional food system needs to become an important part of the city food equation. |