Food to the forefront
By Steve Fairchild

A cultural movement gives new meaning to what we eat. For better and worse, all of agriculture is involved. And that may not be so bad.

Consumers have a growing interest in food. It’s more than a new-found concern about nutrition or wholesomeness; it is about what food means—food philosophy. Walk into a popular bookstore and head to the food and cooking section. The walls are replete with books about food, cookbooks and magazines. But the titles aren’t sparse and simple as they used to be when Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking sat along side Betty Crocker and Julia Child to take most of the shelf space. In fact, many of the books skip telling us how to cook. Instead, they tell us what to think about food. On television, we get the same. The Food Network reaches some 85 million households these days. There is no doubt that the network’s hosts tell us how to cook, but they also ponder the quality of ingredients and the story behind the food they cook. Glossy magazines fall in line. Bon Appetit has more than a million subscribers. Food and Wine and Gourmet have about a million each. That is not to mention scores of titles with smaller subscription bases, food inserts in major and local papers and more and more stories about food trends making the news section. Whole Foods Market, which opened as a single antiestablishment grocery store in 1978, now has almost 200 “natural-food” supermarkets. According to the New Yorker magazine, last year Whole Foods had revenue of more than $5 billion with profit exceeding $1.6 billion. Something about food preferences is changing in America and it behooves those of us who make our living in agriculture to understand it.

How did we get here? The narrative of present time is a multithreaded account and difficult to trace with accuracy. From a true macro perspective, you would need to look back to the industrialization and mechanization of our society. It is safe to say that prior to that there was not much clamoring for locally grown, organic or “sustainable” products.

To narrow the view, consider the beginnings of today’s food trends as rooted in the 1940s. They are a culmination of the response to synthetic fertilizer, which, in its time, disrupted traditional notions of the agrarian mindset. Regardless of the fact a plant processes nitrogen the same whether it has become available from manure or man-made fertilizer, the introduction of synthetic fertilizer brought forth the perception that food can be “real” or “artificial.” That was the wellspring for the organic movement, the birth of the idea that local is better and that food can have some sort of transcendent authenticity. From there, adherents to mechanization and increased production through modern chemistry went one way and those who fought it went another. Other factors have amplified this split. Consolidation in agriculture, highly processed food, obesity, animal welfare and about any food-based controversy you can name push believers from both sides to take hard-line positions. The result is sometimes perception over reality. And it is certainly behind the fact that food has become a tool of politics.

Conversations in the middle
This year Wal-Mart announced it would bring organic food to the masses. And the company promises to do it at affordable prices, not to exceed a 10 percent premium on current offerings—this from a retailer of gargantuan proportions with sights set for a grocery market share that rivals its consumer-goods position.

Reaction from the organic industry was mixed. Some accepted the move as validation for their efforts and a grand opportunity for upward mobility in food markets. But that sentiment was drowned out by a howl and screech from more fundamentalist organic producers. To them, Wal-Mart’s entry into organics means that some of the movement’s basic tenets will be destroyed.

As organized and integrated retailers and producers salivate at the profit margins that can be captured in a lucrative specialty market, demand will spike. To meet it, organic producers will scale up. Organic production then becomes commoditized. For many organic producers, this is anathema; it is the appropriation of the organic market by a food system they have consciously stayed out of and even fought against over the years. If you are a conflict junkie, tune into this scene. The next few years will be fun to watch.

Other segments of the change in food trends aren’t so combustible. There is a powerful movement toward products grown and produced close to the market in which they’re sold.

This grow-local trend is more accommodating to farmers who would prefer to leave the politics out of food. It has its philosophies, to be sure, but whereas organic versus conventional is black and white, there is plenty of gray to be found in growing locally.

“I don’t think it should be a battle,” said Mary Hendrickson, a University of Missouri sociologist. “There are a lot of opportunities for all sorts of farmers if they want to respond to identified consumer need.”

And consumer need is being identified. Grocery retailers like Hen House in Kansas City and Schnucks in St. Louis increasingly feature food that is produced locally. Some of this is traditional marketing, but much of it is a reaction to feedback they get from consumers. That feedback tells retailers there is demand for some sort of association between producer and consumer. There is a desire to “connect” with what goes on the table. Call it blowback from globalization or frustration that tomatoes picked green in California and delivered to the Midwest, while very consistent in shape and color, tend to consistently taste like styrofoam—or worse.

Yet retailers find out that there is a problem with heeding consumer feedback. Until recently, there hasn’t been much of a way to respond to it. Infrastructure on both sides of the equation isn’t built to match local production with local demand.

“Hen House is a good example,” said Hendrickson. “They have been working with family farms on a buy-fresh, buy-local campaign. And it’s been going gangbusters. They’re grocery store owners—they know food and they want certain things, but they’ve gotten a real education by talking with local farmers who respond to requests by saying, ‘Now, here’s what we can do.’” In other words, there are climate, soil and growing-season realities to account for when offering locally grown products.

That’s one thing that Rusty Lee counts on. Lee started growing tomatoes for the St. Louis market about 5 years ago. At peak production, he and a partner grew 45 acres of tomatoes and delivered to Schnucks and other distributors. When his partner dropped out of the operation to take a job in town, Lee diversified into eggplant, squash and melons. Lee said that a good litmus test for what can be grown and sold locally is to identify what is most perishable.

“That’s when growing them locally most improves the quality and taste. Potatoes might not work. They’re storable and don’t suffer from a 700-mile trip. They still look good when they get to market. The way I see it is if little old Rusty Lee wants to take business from a conglomerate in California, there’s got to be something in it for the buyer. It all takes you back to quality. This year our eggplant sold phenomenally because you just can’t ship good ones.”

But Lee, who farms near Truxton, Mo., is pragmatic about what he does. He considers himself just another farmer and refuses to take sides on organic and conventional production.

“There’s room for all of us,” he said. “Some people will buy nothing but organic. And some people equate locally grown with organic. But I’m not organic. I grow local produce conventionally. We use IPM [Integrated Pest Management] and those kinds of philosophies, but we’re not organic. We’re not teetotalers.”

Hendrickson said that one thing producers must face is the fact that in the production of food of any kind there are many claims made.

“Some are true and some are not true,” she said. “We don’t have much scientific evidence to back up claims that organic products are healthier. You might be able to talk about having less [pesticide residue], but they still are claims. But then, there are claims from the other side, too. That’s what makes this a difficult time for farmers.”
Yet without claims, there is no differentiation among products. Can one segment of agriculture build itself without tearing the other down?

“People have to make claims about their products,” said Hendrickson. “That’s just a standard marketing technique. I would prefer it if these claims were backed with good evidence.”

A way to start
For Lee, exploration of producing vegetables for the local market was one way to answer a calling.

“I wanted to farm. But I knew the challenges of buying land and the rest of what you need to run a bigger operation. This was my wife’s grandmother’s place. The rest of her family farms, and when I looked at it, I figured that by buying it I could at least be able to use some of their equipment.

“As beginning farmers, it made sense. We didn’t need a lot of land. We watched land around St. Louis that had been truck farms get developed. And nobody was replacing those farms. We had a chance to meet demand in a situation where supply had dwindled and not been replaced.”

Lee said that scale is an issue that can’t be ignored. In the first year of production, he figured that it would take 10 acres of tomatoes just to get the attention of buyers. But by the time he and his partner had reached the 140,000 tomato plants it takes to plant 45 acres, he recognized other factors that affect the operation.

“Now, 45 acres of tomatoes can be absorbed by the St. Louis market,” he said. “But at that point, you get into competing for buyers. You get into high labor needs at just one time of the year, and you become limited in capacity because you have to cool everything when it comes out of the field. It is taxing on resources to have just one kind of crop, and you’re trying to increase general revenue when cooler space is limiting your production,” he said.

The scale up
“One of the big issues for local food movements is that there needs to be a way to scale up,” said Hendrickson. “We’re at the place where we can’t meet the demand that is out there. Hen House is publishing ads that show the locally grown product along with the people that produce it, and it’s working for them. And when you see a mainstream grocer like Hen House or Schnucks doing this, it isn’t a niche anymore. But we’re not set up to supply that demand. And that’s why we need more farmers.”

Problem is, there isn’t much to explain what to expect in these markets. Universities and private consultants can guide commodity grain producers through the expected costs of production and the expected average return. And we know the break-even numbers for beef and swine production. But there’s not much to tell a tomato grower what to expect.

That may change soon. An effort led by University of Missouri extension is searching for answers. Lee, who has participated in the project said that a consultant has been studying the St. Louis market to identify demand and production volume so that rudimentary profit and loss scenarios can be developed. That’s the foundation needed by local growers who might be interested in projects like building a cooperative cooling shed, which spread capital investment while affording individual growers to increase production.

“Right now there are a lot of infrastructure issues to resolve if we want to scale to the quantity of production these markets are starting to demand,” said Hendrickson.

The thing about infrastructure is that it won’t develop overnight. Nor will it vanish. Food trends may seem a threat to today’s commodity agriculture, but the countryside is built for the way we do things today. Yet don’t be surprised to see things like vegetable packing and sorting sheds being built among the grain bins and silos of the Midwest.