‘By challenging the obsolete food-as-commodity understanding of food that comes from silo-style thinking in today’s fragmented departments of agriculture, water, environment and health, good food advocates will play the same central role in creative disruption that was once the norm in automotive and computer industries.’
—Wayne Roberts
| This report from the field comes from sunny Alberta, where the people are not cloudy all day, despite a sharp downturn in the economy resulting from the oil industry’s mass lay-offs. The sun is going to power up what is now Alberta’s Number One industry — food production, processing and preparation — which was the topic of my keynote speech at the Cultivating Connections conference in Edmonton a few weeks ago. My keynote plugged the idea of identifying food as a strategic and enabling sector that can serve as the foundation of a renewed and renewable economy. The reason we need to think about food as a strategic sector is that most of food’s yields come from a broad understanding of food and of the partnerships needed for successful implementation of a whole-of-society food-based economic strategy. THINK BIG AND STICK AROUND! Earl Butz, head of the US Department of Agriculture during the 1970s, was infamous for bluntly telling any farmers slow to embrace the demands of Big Food processors and retailers that they should either “get big or get out.” My advice is the opposite: Think big, and stick around! If food producers think big and wide about food strategy, they won’t need to get out. An example of a narrow (not wrong, but narrow) approach is to support increased food exports as a way of increasing farm income and employment. In Alberta, this idea is often applied to boosting exports of beans and pulses, almost all sold in unprocessed form to Asia. Increased sales of unprocessed pulse exports might encourage some existing growers to expand their operations, might lead successful pulse exporters to buy more goods from local retailers, and might encourage some new farmers to shift into pulse production. But it’s unlikely a boost in unprocessed pulse sales will move any employment or revenue needle very far. It’s a tactic without a strategy. Many ag experts believe Albertan food exporters should also strive to increase local jobs by increasing the value of processing added to raw material exports — up from the Alberta norm of about 40 per cent to the 65 per cent level common in Ontario and Quebec. According to Stats Canada figures, Alberta exported $10.2 billion worth of agri-food in 2015; value-added food exports comprised 47.2 per cent of that, a significant improvement over past years. If value-added had risen to 65 per cent, that would have meant processing jobs working on over a billion dollars worth of raw materials. Why use rich farmland, and then invest in agricultural capacity, without taking the next step of ensuring that crops are processed to keep residues for composting in farm country, and to reap the full benefit of Canada’s hard-earned reputation for food safety, rather than liquidate value by selling anonymous commodities with no connection to place? Such improvement of food’s job-creating potential is long-overdue, but it’s still a tactical, not a strategic, initiative, and is not yet the game-changer needed to use good food as a foundation for major job creation. Yet another limited (not wrong, but limited) view is “import substitution.” Instead of importing apples, grow them near home, import substitution fans argue, and thereby increase the number of people growing, distributing and processing apples. Many Alberta greenhouse operators are already moving in that direction, as are many craft beer producers, who can add value to some of Alberta’s premium barley crop. There’s lots of potential.Such import substitution can be especially generative — that’s the word I’m looking for, generative — when public agencies, schools and hospitals contract with suppliers who order a certain percentage of local and sustainable foods, and thereby scale up the availability of both local and sustainable foods. That’s an example of scaling out, not just up. Public sector purchasing, because of the volume sales provided, has the potential for game-changing job-creation improvements because of this capacity to generate scaling up and out through volume purchasing that supports infant industries. But even with this twist, import substitution of food commodities is not where the big opportunities lie. We still need to think more strategically. The real job creation opportunities come from branching out beyond food as an edible commodity, and working with food as a multifunctional and value-creating service that requires many different kinds of workers to implement. The most obvious example of such opportunities waiting to happen comes from envisioning a food-based economic strategy to promote health and reduce chronic disease. GENERATIVE AND TRANSFORMATIVE OPPORTUNITIES According to the Alberta auditor general’s report of 2014, the annual costs of treating over 700,000 Albertans with at least one chronic disease came to a whopping $4.5 billion — and that’s without counting the costs of lab tests, long-term care, home care and the lost productivity while workers undergo treatment and rehab, all of which could easily double the economic value unnecessarily lost to productive economic use to about $9 billion a year. The auditor general was very critical of the province’s failure to intervene more constructively on such runaway costs. Imagine what could be done with just 10 per cent of $9 billion invested in preventive and curative treatments featuring delivery of healthy diets and exercise programs. Such job-intensive non-medical interventions (9000 jobs, at a cost, including overhead, of $100,000 per job, would cost $900 million) would have the greatest long-term impact if invested in youth, who can in turn influence their parents. Such interventions are obviously sorely needed. Alberta’s food programs for youth got an embarrassing D in the overall 2016 report card prepared by the Alberta Policy Coalition for Chronic Disease Prevention. The government got a F on its record for financial incentives to support youth consumption of healthy food. My recommendation would turn the report card to an A. Such a strategic orientation linking food and health could create 9000 new jobs at no net new cost to taxpayers by investing in nutrition to prevent chronic disease, support local food producers, and protect the well-being and economic productivity of Alberta citizens. Think of what it might mean to Alberta’s emerging potential as a major grower of pulse crops. A campaign to boost increased consumption of such nutrient-packed crops — even a modest increase to one cup per week for each of Alberta’s four million people — would double pulse sales in the province. It would also have positive impacts on the environment, because pulses drawn down nitrogen into the soil, and pulse roots break up soil at risk of being compacted, while helping bring down the rates of heart disease and diabetes. That’s the kind of quadruple-win for jobs, financial savings, health and environmental improvements that a strategic orientation to food can double down on. WASTE NOT, WANT NOT Doubling down with strategic partnerships could work similar wonders in the field of culinary tourism and agro-tourism, as well as in the field of green infrastructure, which can easily incorporate food-bearing plants into what are called “living machines.” But in the short-term, the greatest possibilities come from preventing, reusing, recycling and upcycling food waste. Alberta has been a North American leader in such efforts since the 1980s, and presenters at one major workshop revealed the province’s continuing leadership and entrepreneurial excellence. If recognised as part of a strategic sector, managing the food lifecycle to eliminate waste and strive for increased job creation and environmental benefits, the food un-waste industry can convert some $3 billion in annual costs of dumping food waste in landfill into its opposite — some $3 billion of value-added resources and revenues. One Calgary-based company, BioCan, keeps 2000 tonnes of wasted food a month out of landfill by mixing up wasted food from food retailers with wasted elemental sulphur from the oil industry to produce high-quality and clean fertilizer and soil conditioner, which is sold to farmers. In the waste field, two bads can make a good! Another company, Sustainavil, got its start in 2011 turning wasted vegetable oil into fuel for rides at an Edmonton carnival. It’s still turning heads as a world leader in turning waste into energy for food production — in one case into heat for an aquaponic fishery. Marc Legault manages a unit within Alberta’s ministry for Agriculture and Forestry, where he describes his job to “ferment chicken turd” and create probiotic “chicken manure smoothies” that can be used as a premium fertilizer that substitutes for synthetic fertilizers made from fossil fuels. Legault thinks such soil additives can support a new growth industry of year-round greenhouse-grown cabbage, celery, beets, Swiss chard, kale and fig production, all of which take up his fertilizer well. Mike Dorion, who sometimes goes by the name of The Compost Kid, is based in Calgary and is excited about the city’s forthcoming bylaw banning organics from landfill. He will have his work cut out for him. In the discussion that followed, all panellists agreed there was a huge amount of space for new entrepreneurs in this field. Composting of humanure is not likely on the immediate horizon, one speaker suggested, because the cost of synthetic fertilizer is so low. But urine is the product to watch, one said. Maybe there’s merit in the trickle down theory of wealth-creation.Indoor farms incorporating products from the end-of-life phase of the food cycle are also about to happen, says fuel maker Joey Hundert, considered one of the province’s most visionary entrepreneurs. Moore’s Law — the notion that the prices of computer chips drop in half each year while ability doubles — is coming to greenhouse lighting, and will make local, year-round “indoorification” of high-value crops a viable business, Hundert said. “There’s a real blue ocean out there,” Hundert said — a reference to the idea that upstart entrepreneurs can find room to move by finding out-of-the-way projects that look like too much work to interest bloated corporations. Alberta may be landlocked, but Albertan food system entrepreneurs don’t need pipelines to get to blue oceans, where jobs producing environmental benefits are plentiful. Such opportunities come into view when people have an eye for a strategic sense of food, which leverages food’s ability to create job opportunities across the board, in a variety of services valuable for environmental and human well-being. That strategic sense is lacking across the world. By challenging the obsolete food-as-commodity understanding of food that comes from silo-style thinking in today’s fragmented departments of agriculture, water, environment and health, good food advocates will play the same central role in creative disruption that was once the norm in automotive and computer industries. If you’d like to carry on with other ideas that the Alberta conference inspired me with, especially the importance of using food to create positive and collaborative social relations, please got to my blog rendition of this newsletter. |