Local food for local people. Looks like Maui is a little ahead of the curve with Maui Cattle Company and the fact that they provide beef to a lot of locations, meaning there are a lot of opportunity to get to it and eat it. However so much stuff is still shipped in. I want to eat food the local farmers are growing and their goods are not necessarily in the farmers markets, instead it will also compete against veggies shipped in from Philippines. I know this will keep prices low but I am certainly torn.
Farmer's Markets open times are also a challenge for people who work long hours during the day. I'm available for shopping on Sunday, but apparently farmer's are not. I don't blame them. Does anyone have a good solution to this dilemma? Start work later in the morning on a designated farmers market shop day is all I come up with. The system is backwards! it would be nice to have some forward thinking in this arena from the government.
Maye Webb
A recent Times article highlighted a growing problem for small farmers across the nation: too few slaughterhouses. Many farmers who have answered the demand for locally raised meat have been forced to scale back expansion plans because local processors can’t handle any more animals and the cost of driving their livestock hundreds of miles for slaughter is too expensive.
According to the Department of Agriculture, the number of slaughterhouses nationwide declined to 809 in 2008 from 1,211 in 1992, while the number of small farmers has increased by 108,000 in the past five years. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has acknowledged the imbalance. “It’s pretty clear there needs to be attention paid to this,” he said.
The lack of slaughterhouses is one example of how the rapidly growing local-food movement has taxed the existing food production and distribution networks. Some advocates of the small farmers have called for help from Washington. What role, if any, should the federal government play in creating better food processing and delivery systems?
Be Careful What You Wish For
Zachary Adam Cohen, a local-food advocate, is a consultant to hospitality businesses in New York City. He founded the Farm to Table online community and blogs daily at his Web site and on Twitter.
The local-food movement has been gaining strength in recent years, despite decades-old federal regulation that favors agribusiness. Many in the local-food movement desire a more activist federal government. Yet that posture fails to recognize that it is precisely the involvement of Washington that has restrained the growth of the movement.
Stricter federal standards forced many local and regional slaughterhouses to shut down in the first place, and aided giant corporations.
Take for example the steadily declining number of U.S.D.A.-approved slaughterhouses, particularly in the Northeast, a gap that has created a bottleneck for small-scale farmers trying to get their animals to market.
Stricter federal standards that went into effect in 1999 forced many local and regional slaughterhouses to shut down in the first place.
Slaughterhouses in Every Village
Blake Hurst farms in northwestern Missouri with his family, raising corn, soybeans and greenhouse crops.
On first blush, its not clear to me why taxpayers who shop at supermarket chains should subsidize patrons of the local-food movement. Surely local farmers can band together and build processing systems for their nascent industry, whether through a cooperative or the efforts of individual entrepreneurs.
Matthew Cavanaugh for The New York Times A slaughterhouse in Athol, Mass.
Of course, my position is highly hypocritical, as taxpayers subsidize my farm, and I can’t think of a single reason why I’m more deserving than small farmers growing local food. It is important that agriculture remain close to the consumer, if for no other reason than to remind people that farming, even small scale local farming, is not the bucolic utopia that critics of the modern food system like to imagine.
A further problem is that people in some areas — like New England — object to the siting of slaughter plants, worrying about smells, waste water and the like. All the more reason for the federal government to locate slaughter plants in every village. The perfect collision between varying versions of political correctness.
We Need Government Action
Tom Philpott is the food editor of Grist.org and co-founder of Maverick Farms in Valle Crucis, N.C.
The response from conventional economists to the local-food processing crisis is: Let the market fix itself. If people want local, pasture-raised meat and dairy, they’ll flock to the farmers’ market to buy it, and farmers will take their extra profits and invest in their own facilities. But people are flocking to farmers’ markets; the problem is that profit margins on small-scale farming remain so tight that few farms have cash to spare on such investments.
Perhaps we could start a federal grant program for small farmers financed by fines against offending corporate giants.
What we have is a market failure — and the proper response to a market failure is government action. Libertarians and food-industry advocates will scoff; but they have to reckon with the stark fact that federal action is largely responsible for the current state of affairs.
The government looked the other way while the food industry consolidated beyond any reasonable level — and as fewer and fewer companies gained more and more control of meat and dairy production, they shuttered thousands of small- and mid-scale processing facilities.
Small Grants Can Help Us
Benjamin Shute is the co-owner and manager of Hearty Roots Community Farm, where he grows vegetables on 23 acres in New York’s Hudson River Valley. He is a co-founder of the National Young Farmers’ Coalition.
To help farmers meet their needs for local distribution systems, the federal government should start by building on its own good idea: the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education farmer grants program.
Grants could help finance the establishment of a slaughterhouse or cold storage site.
This program offers farmers small grants to carry out on-farm, practical research, and then to make the results available to their peers. These small expenditures of federal dollars can have a big impact, since they enhance the knowledge and resources that farmers already have, while providing incentive for sharing these with the wider farm community.
My farm has participated in this program as a grantee, but more important has benefited from the results of other farmers’ projects; we even converted one of our tractors to run on electric power thanks to the do-it-yourself guide produced by a fellow vegetable-grower.
Level the Playing Field
Wenonah Hauter is the executive director of Food and Water Watch, a nonprofit research and advocacy group.
There is a role for government in this issue, both to prevent further consolidation of meatpacking and to facilitate new firms getting into meat processing so that livestock producers have more options to get their animals to market.
Matthew Cavanaugh for The New York Times A sheep and pig farmer in East Montpelier, Vt., who has trouble finding slaughterhouses.
A critical place to start is the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The U.S.D.A. should make specific changes to its meat inspection program that would level the playing field for small meat plants.
One of the most important — and immediate — changes that could rebuild meat processing systems would be to increase the number of inspectors so that inspector shortages no longer act as a barrier for new plants or mobile slaughter facilities.
Buy Me an Abandoned Retail Store
Miriam Latzer grows uncertified organic vegetables in Dutchess County, New York.
Consider how many abandoned big box retail stores stretch from sea to sea in this country and now try to imagine if they were purchased by the federal government and used by small-scale farmers like myself to produce, process or even distribute food locally.
How to create dry, ventilated storage space.
I have been growing garlic for my community supported agriculture shares for the last five years, buying seed garlic from Canada. This season I am starting my own independent garlic operation to supply growers in New York State, as well as offering garlic for consumption at local farmers’ markets.
One of my biggest challenges is finding dry and well-ventilated storage space. Yet, everyday on my way to the farm I pass the hollow, but structurally sound remains of a supermarket made obsolete by the larger one next door. Our town can’t afford to buy it. Maybe the federal government can.
Food Safety Will Always Be the Issue
George Saperstein is the Amelia Peabody Professor of Agricultural Sciences at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University. He is also the director of Azuluna Brands, a company that promotes the production and marketing of livestock and poultry products from New England farms for local consumers.
With the paucity of Department of Agriculture-inspected slaughterhouses in the Northeast, a locally born and raised pig often has to travel hundreds of miles to and from the processing facility to become pork on your plate. The solution is not with the federal government, but rather with the state and local regulators, the processors, retailers, distributors and the consumer.
Consumers must learn to accept retail meats that are flash frozen and vacuum packed at the source.
However, it’s not as simple as changing a few regulations and getting state and local health departments to talk to agriculture departments. The concern of the local regulators is the same as that of the U.S.D.A. – food safety. Just as organic is not intrinsically safer than traditionally produced meats, local is not necessarily safer than imported.
The biggest risk to human health from meats is not from chemical or drug residues; it is from disease causing bacteria that can hitch a ride on the meat during the slaughter process and that is just as likely to happen at a mom and pop plant or on a farm, if not more so.
Fix School Lunches
William Alexander is the author of “The $64 Tomato” and, most recently, “52 Loaves: One Man’s Relentless Pursuit of Truth, Meaning and a Perfect Crust.”
Why shouldn’t the federal government play a role in the distribution of locally produced food? By definition, the food’s not going very far, so the job should be easy and I’ve got a suggestion about where to start: the local schools.
Change U.S.D.A. regulations to encourage (and support with federal financing) farm-to-school programs.
Jamie Oliver’s been getting all the attention, but my wife, Anne, a physician and mother of two, anticipated his school lunch revolution by half a decade when she attempted to reform our school district’s fatty, salty, white-carbohydrate-loaded lunches. No cameras recorded her conversations, but the resistance she encountered was similar. “Our hands are tied by federal regulations,” Anne heard at every turn.
There are several proposals afloat on how to fix school lunches, and the topic is said to be high on Michelle Obama’s agenda, but a change in Department of Agriculture regulations to actively encourage (and support with federal financing) farm-to-school programs — not just for carrots and lettuce, but for local fruit, meat, eggs and milk as well — could in one swoop: Tackle our nation’s serious childhood obesity problem; provide a guaranteed income and stability for our teetering local farms; reduce carbon emissions; and instill in our children the habit of eating locally and seasonally, a habit that would likely be carried into adulthood.
