Opportunities to Scale-up Local, Regional Food Systems

Conversations about fairness and sustainability of our food systems have entered into a mainstream context for the many sectors that touch our everyday lives and interactions. Change is indeed upon us creating vacuums, opportunities and perhaps some unintended consequences. The giant food system has begun to react to decades of dedicated advocacy and strategic action for positive change in our food and farming systems.

Great efforts to rapidly and effectively communicate throughout networks and organizational capacity have highlighted high leverage opportunities and spurred effective action. Two years ago, it was aggregation of supply to get access to existing markets. Now, I feel the opportunity is aggregation of resources and knowledge to empower the willing. This aggregation must be both horizontal and vertical simultaneously. The food system is a very mature industry where knowledge and resources are held close by a few. Knowledge and resource dispersal will require new conversations, partnerships, shared visions and shared values.

Two of the knowledge assets in our food system are dispersed knowledge and tacit knowledge. Disperse knowledge is often decomposed into non-significant pieces so they pass through the supply chain without much notice. The other, tacit knowledge, is only mentored and shared with great trust.  Value creation is often dependent on tacit knowledge. Our entire food system operates in anonymity exploiting culture, economic plight, and tradition-everything that makes a community a community- to earn a profit. A very simple example is selling a one pound box of chicken stock for $3.50 while you can purchase the whole chicken for $3.50, feed four and have the bones and other waste remaining to make chicken stock. There are a plethora of similar “know-how” strategies to profit in every wrinkle of the entire food system from the seed to the dinner plate. We human do not behave rational when purchasing or even consuming food in modern day society. To change the way we act, we must change the way we think. We have to think about food systems differently.

Thunder Snow- Harbinger of Rough Times?

The prognosticators were all calling for a winter storm this week that will impact 100M people in the US. With the days getting longer, we have been busy with seed orders and anticipating the smell of newly awakened soil. The old-timers say that thunder snow is a harbinger of drought. With Mother Nature as our partner, we never know what we will get, except that over time, it will mostly average out.

Our free-range chickens have been laying more eggs and enjoy the movable chicken tractor that we cover with plastic in the winter and call it the Florida room. What if our whole country could become aware of the changes needed in our food and farming systems to become healthy and sustainable- just like this mass awareness of this inconvenient winter storm? The snow will melt quickly, but the bad food we eat will hang around a long time- literally.

Our Midwest topsoil washes to the Gulf of Mexico to join the remnant oil from BP as our kids are dealt a shorter life expectancy than us because of food and life-style; but yet we don’t hear the alarms being sounded like we hear when a not-so-unusual winter storm approaches! How about Jim Cantore giving a “be-on-the-alert and stay vigilant” report from the cafeteria of a school at lunch time or at the fast-food drive-thru?

We get so focused on the wrong thing that we go to the supermarket and pay $3.50 for a pound of chicken broth when we can buy the whole chicken in the meat department for $3.50; feed a family of four, boil the remains and make a gallon of broth, or $28.50 worth- retail in the box. Our food and farming systems are changing, but I think we should have the same urgency as the approaching thunder snow. Fall in love with food and have a relationship with it! Then, share that passion with those you love.

EPA Brownfield Conference 2009

It was so appropriate for the EPA to hold their Brownfield Conference in New Orleans this year.  Urban agriculture was on the agenda.  I was invited by Ann Carroll out of D.C. as she heads up a new program called “How Does Your Garden Grow?”  The aim is to get cities to clean-up brownfields and turn them into productive gardens.  The Department of Labor has classified urban agriculture as “green jobs” that qualify for job training funds.

Federal agencies are making great efforts to work together and maximize impact with their funding.  For so long, the built environment and transportation have been the focal point of reducing environmental degradation without addressing food systems.  Now, there is the epiphany among planners, city, state and federal officials that we have to fix the food system as we build appropriate houses and offices with appropriate transportation.

Could we now have the awakening that fixing our food system is the same way to fix health care?

Agriculture at the Crossroads, Mother Nature Votes

Sustainability and productivity of agriculture  have been at odds in many conversations around the world.  Biotech makes the argument that only Genetic Modified Organisms (GMOS) can be productive and resist pretty much everything,  including drought, and produce consistent high yields.  These plant populations get narrower every year alarming some breeders that a single event could wipe out the entire corn crop that is the basis for our current food systems.

Oh, the other problem is that the balance of the essential amino acids and protein quality have gone away in corn.  So, we get a bin-busting harvest that the pigs starve to death eating.  Well, it seems that mother nature might be weighing-in with her vote.    Reports are coming in all around the Midwest about light test weight in low-yielding GMO corns and non-GMO corns as well.  A big part of the promise of GMO was to reduce mycotoxins caused by the many fungi that love corn. 2009 Grain Quality Armored against the entire lepidoptera class of insects,  tolerant of the herbicide Round-Up,  much of the corn crop has died premature from anthracnose and friends,  fungi that lives in corn residue.  Yields are cut in half and the grain quality is the worst in 30 years of affected fields.

At the World Food Prize meeting in Des Moines last week Bill Gates proclaimed  “The world food crisis has forced hunger high on the agenda, this global effort to help small farmers is endangered by an ideological wedge that threatens to split the movement in two.” Bill Gates GMO

Reports of the failures of GMO corns get buried by all the hype to call for world-wide acceptance of changing the dietary make-up of our basic foods. GM Corn Fails As our well-intentioned, hard working American farmers  toil to bring in a low-yielding poor quality corn that is not suitable for consumption, maybe they will opt for more diverse genetics that gives up a bit of yield potential for reliability and sustainability.   My wife and I have 22 heritage laying hens and we have noticed they steer away from my brother’s quad-stacked GMO trait corn for almost anything else.   Maybe our chickens are smarter than we are.  Smart Chickens

Have We Got Organics On Backwards?

The USDA ERS has released research findings on organic food production and consumption.   The US imports about $1.5B of organic products while exporting a mere $.25B.   The current trend is a widening gap.  Does that mean organics are eroding the buy local food movement?  Why doesn’t American agriculture rise up to produce food the consumer is wishing to buy?

The answers to those question are not in the USDA findings.   It is evident that consumption of organic food is growing faster than new acres are converted to organic.   I believe this is a social issue not a market imbalance.  To grow an acre of conventional corn  in 2009, inputs total $560 per acre before land cost.  200 bushel corn at $3.00 brings in a whopping $600.  $40 to pay land cost and return on labor and management.  An acre of organic corn cost less than $200 per acre.  Only 100 bushel corn brings in $600 per acre or $400 to pay land cost and return to labor and management.

When hypesters say we cannot feed the world with organics, they forget about the value we have to create to pay for all the chemicals and GMO fees.  Organic farmers do not brag of the money they save not purchasing chemicals because they do want people to know how much money they are making!  Organic crops yield nearly the same most years, but in bad years they yield far less because we have fewer tools to be in command and control of mother nature.   So, let’s accept that we can produce 80% of applying a factory mentality to an ever changing ecosystem.

We waste 40% of our food in this nation.  Most food waste goes to a landfill while we are short on soil nutrients.   If we only wasted 20% of our food and composted 20% we would be way ahead of the yield game.  The conventional farmers are not going to switch to organics or low input sustainable agriculture.   That is not a club they choose to be members of.  However, their replacements will because it is a good marketing decison and is right for the environment and humanity.   Sustainable agriculture will become conventional agriculture.  Maybe Obama will come out with a “Cash for Chemicals” stimmulus.

System Thinking the Driftless Area

We are part of a rather large consortium coming together to think through economic and social development in the Driftless Area, about 24K square miles missed by the last glaciers crossing four state lines.  For the past two days we have had meeting with different stakeholders.  To help us stay on the right path, we brought in two “world-class” system thinkers, Richard Karash and David Stroh from Boston.

In the course of the conversations they brought in sound bites that were new to me.  Glocal is understanding the global food system to make better decisions about local.  Fail, Forward, Faster- means not everything is going to work but keep going- faster.

What a beautiful, diverse region the Driftless area is and so adapted to perennial crops-apple trees, hazelnuts, aronia, etc.  With the demand for “local” soaring,  it seems that agriculture needs to “gear-up” to the opportunity.  But as we stripped away, we realized that when these products go out of the area “wholesale”, none of the value-added stays in the communities and there is only minor economic benefit.  But when locals and tourist come to the farms and buy direct, the full economic benefit stays in the community.   One farmer suggested instead of a “Farm to School’ programs, we should have “School to Farm” programs and maybe we would get new farmers.

The trout fisherman bring in more that a billion dollars a year purchasing rooms, meals , gifts and supplies.   The Driftless Area Initiative has done a wonderful job of creating maps and materials to brand this region as a destination.  http://www.driftlessareainitiative.org/  Organic Valley sits nearly centered in the Driftless.   I think both opportunities- retail and wholesale- will increase together as the Driftless is “discovered” and there is a lot of organizational capacity working in unison to help make that happen.

Food Systems from Different Perspectives

Today I had the pleasure of taking a prominent Milwaukee endocrinologist sailing on Lake Michigan.  After trimming the sails in light winds and flat water, we were clipping along at 6.5 knots so we settle into the cockpit to solve the problems of the world.

We quickly got to the subject of food as he commented on how busy his practice has become, trying to convince people their diabetes and obesity are because of what and how much they eat.  Recently, one patient claimed he had consumed only coffee, juice and a sweet roll at McDonald’s for 80 calories by his estimate.  They got online and looked up the actual calories.  His “small” breakfast contained a total of 900 calories, nearly 1/2 of the daily calories needed.

This doctor’s frustration was not with farming practices, federal policy or even the composition of our food, but rather the state of denial of people about what they control- food choices and quantity.   Like illegal drugs, there would be not sellers of bad food if there were no buyers.  From the many disiplines of our culture, we are all getting to our food system from different places.   A new movie “Food, INC” will open this Friday, June 19  http://www.foodincmovie.com/ Sail on.

Agriculture and Wildlife

This past Saturday, we hosted the Kettle Moraine Land Trust’s annual meeting.  The Keynote speaker was George Archibald, Co-founder of the International Crane Foundation.  His presentation of the massive efforts to save cranes from extinction around the world highlighted the negative role that agriculture plays in preserving diverse wildlife.

In the case of cranes, agriculture in the Midwest has removed vital habitat for migration stop-over and nesting.  However, a hopeful turn around in whooping crane population is occurring right here in Wisconsin.  “With the recent Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership Reintroduction Project, whooping cranes nested naturally for the first time in 100 years in the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Central Wisconsin, USA.” according to Wikipedia.

In other parts of the world, when agriculture fails to provide enough food, cranes and other wildlife disappear from hunting.  With our accumulated agricultural knowledge in our country, we (the US) have the opportunity to take a leadership role in responsible agriculture that provides habitat for wildlife and preserves water quality while reliably providing human food without soil depletion.  Thanks George

Sustainable Food and Farming Systems

There is currently a ground swell of discussion and activities from the major food industry around sustainability.  We all need to be at the table for this growing discussion of sustainable food and farming systems.  Our choice is to reinvent our food system or fix the one that currently rules.

I recently attended the Growing a 21st Century Agricultural Revolution conference in D.C.  http://www.agrevolution.org/   Food corporation dominated the attendees with some representation from government, universities and NGO’s.  If there were any farmers, they were not admitting their occupation.  The first evening, we had a “progressive”, “local” dinner from all over the world.   We each met 36 new people in four courses of a delicious meal.

Alas, all of us involved in food systems broke bread, drank wine and enthusiastically embraced our new working partnerships.  The next morning, the honeymoon had passed and I felt we all realized we did not know much about our new partners’ worlds and we spoke languages quite foreign to each other.   The Sustainable Food Lab with Peter Senge had managed to get food system players and the conversation in the room, but there was clearly a lack of shared understanding.

Obviously, there is a lot of work to be done in creating a sustainable food system.  The industry is mature and has advanced processing, distribution and information technology to a level that is very efficient translating to food access and affordability.  Now, if we can just plug in “healthy, nutritional balance” food.