In a 1984 retirement speech delivered to his colleagues at Cargill, my grandfather called for a renewed focus on the people that agriculture serves. “What is good for producers and consumers,” he said, “is good for us.” His intention was to inspire a more efficient commodity business, but his message – that working in the interests of farmers and consumers will benefit the agricultural whole – resonates a quarter century later. As we search for a way to transition on a large scale to a more diverse and vibrant farming and food culture, we must focus on transforming the relationship between farmers and the people they feed.
The distended relationship between farms and individuals is the fundamental problem in the food system we’ve inherited. Supply chains and the corporate cultures that house them keep information isolated. Choices about what to produce and buy are limited to what merchants will trade and processors will sell. The realities of agricultural production bewilder the quarterly projections of Wall Street.
Yet efforts to circumvent the prevailing order abound. As Joanne Wilson rightly points out in this series, farms that traditionally depended on wholesale buyers increasingly turn now to direct markets. Farms do better when they plan crops, set prices, and choose markets based on intelligence from the people who actually eat their harvest. They also claim more of the dollar spent on their food when they sell directly to individuals (though because of inefficiencies in farmers’ markets and CSAs the profit margin on that dollar is not much higher than it is when a farmer sells wholesale). Despite their proliferation in recent years, these alternative models present substantial barriers – namely the cost to farms of finding and reaching a large customer base – that limit their widespread availability and benefits. Technology has the ability to level the barriers and move alternative models beyond the niche.
That technology has not yet turned the food industry on its head indicates how much complexity the food system presents. Reforming how we grow, seek, and consume food has meaning for our culture and our humanity that de-institutionalizing the rental car and hotel industries does not. Agriculture touches seven billion people with as many different palates, preferences, and nutritional needs. While technology has carved into the markets, products, and identities of almost every other sector, farming and food defy easy solutions. Environmental health, human health, economic relationships, market structures, personal histories, and food cultures are colorful and sometimes conflicting strands of the agricultural dilemmas we face.
To make lasting change in the agriculture and food sector, we need to prioritize two things: farms’ profitability and the affordability of food for households. We need to shift the balance of the consumer dollar to the farmer – the participant in the food system that serves the most critical function, takes on the most risk, and makes the choices that have the largest influence on the environmental, nutritional, flavor, and quality profile of the food we eat. The best way to do that is to give farms a way to sell their harvest directly to individuals.
The dual objectives of farms and their customers doing better go hand in hand, and to accomplish both we need to restructure markets. Companies that play in the middle of the agricultural supply chain do best when producers and consumers are separated by time, place, and information. In contrast, by giving producers and consumers a platform that coordinates transactions and the movement of goods from farm to household, Plovgh provides one example of how technology can make widely available the benefits of alternative markets that CSAs and farmers’ markets already provide on a small scale. Applying technology to models that restore the connection between farmers and the people they feed has the potential to make an already disruptive trend a new standard for agriculture.
This piece also appears on Plovgh and Food+Tech Connect.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Monday, September 12, 2011
New Agriculture Needs Out From Under the Corporate Thumb
Last week, Walmart announced a $1 million grant for Growing Power, a Milwaukee- and Chicago-based organization started by Will Allen that focuses on equal access to healthy food for all communities. The Good Food Revolution was aflutter with reactions. Should Growing Power accept Walmart’s support? Can big corporations really be part of the transformation in farming and food or are they merely participating to rack up do-gooder points?
In a reaction to Will Allen’s Facebook message explaining the decision to take the funding, Zac Henson declared, “The revolution will not be grant-funded.” Henson’s perspective raises a crucial and unresolved question: Can New Agriculture succeed without the financial and operational support of the corporate network it aims to subvert?
The problem with Growing Power accepting Walmart funding or pursuing the PepsiCo grant they’re after is not whether powerful corporate interests and dollars ought to be part of shifting the food system. They should. The agriculture movement is not exclusive – it has emerged from concerns shared by citizens, nonprofits, governments, and multinationals alike.
The deeper problem the funding decision exposes is that if New Agriculture relies on money and support from Industrial Agriculture (and I call it that very intentionally – I am talking here, as I have before, about those corporations that apply traditional notions of efficiency, economies of scale, and operational rigidity to an agricultural system that performs anything but linearly and predictably), then the paradigm of agricultural production and food consumption does not change. Instead, the predominant market system prevails and organizations like Growing Power that fuel the new model in fact exist within the dominant system as a subject of corporate efforts to participate in the cutting edge.
We need a more profound shift than that to sustain the agricultural resurgence we’re witnessing. In New Agriculture, decisions and information do not need to be centralized in the hands of a few powerful companies. Rather, a diverse base of producers and consumers is beginning to coordinate the production, marketing, purchase, and consumption of wholesome food with alternative markets, new tools, and inclusive approaches. It looks like Windowfarms providing farming kits to citizen growers. It looks like Plovgh giving farms a way to earn more for their crops by reaching their customers en masse. It looks like hundreds of thousands of farms in this country reclaiming their economic fate by putting their land into food crops instead of commodities and selling that food directly to the people who eat it.
Growing Power is part of the reason New Agriculture finally feels accessible, but their decision to take support from a corporate giant places them squarely within the corporate framework. Negative reactions to the organization’s decisions express the disappointment that a leader on the alternative path just nestled itself into the hierarchy it aims to change. Its values and mission just became a line item within Walmart’s annual report (or, worse, its Corporate Social Responsibility report) instead of a call for an entirely different way. It reminds us that we’re stuck.
To have the lasting impact that the world needs, New Agriculture needs to stand on its own. To do so it has to be profitable. New Agriculture does not need a re-funneling of corporate money, money that because of the dominant structure it perpetuates won’t give us the market changes that will keep farmers on the land, improve the quality of our soil, and yield healthful food crops and relationships across our agri-culture.
We need new business models that are built for New Agriculture, that reward the producer and the consumer, that value decisions that are optimal economically as well as environmentally and ethically, that give influence back to the people who grow the food and the people who eat it. Only when the companies that are clearing a truly alternative agricultural path are prepared to upend and eventually replace the old paradigm of the agricultural sector with connectivity, community, and environmental stewardship will we have a chance of sustaining the revitalization of our farms and food.
This piece also appears on Plovgh.
In a reaction to Will Allen’s Facebook message explaining the decision to take the funding, Zac Henson declared, “The revolution will not be grant-funded.” Henson’s perspective raises a crucial and unresolved question: Can New Agriculture succeed without the financial and operational support of the corporate network it aims to subvert?
The problem with Growing Power accepting Walmart funding or pursuing the PepsiCo grant they’re after is not whether powerful corporate interests and dollars ought to be part of shifting the food system. They should. The agriculture movement is not exclusive – it has emerged from concerns shared by citizens, nonprofits, governments, and multinationals alike.
The deeper problem the funding decision exposes is that if New Agriculture relies on money and support from Industrial Agriculture (and I call it that very intentionally – I am talking here, as I have before, about those corporations that apply traditional notions of efficiency, economies of scale, and operational rigidity to an agricultural system that performs anything but linearly and predictably), then the paradigm of agricultural production and food consumption does not change. Instead, the predominant market system prevails and organizations like Growing Power that fuel the new model in fact exist within the dominant system as a subject of corporate efforts to participate in the cutting edge.
We need a more profound shift than that to sustain the agricultural resurgence we’re witnessing. In New Agriculture, decisions and information do not need to be centralized in the hands of a few powerful companies. Rather, a diverse base of producers and consumers is beginning to coordinate the production, marketing, purchase, and consumption of wholesome food with alternative markets, new tools, and inclusive approaches. It looks like Windowfarms providing farming kits to citizen growers. It looks like Plovgh giving farms a way to earn more for their crops by reaching their customers en masse. It looks like hundreds of thousands of farms in this country reclaiming their economic fate by putting their land into food crops instead of commodities and selling that food directly to the people who eat it.
Growing Power is part of the reason New Agriculture finally feels accessible, but their decision to take support from a corporate giant places them squarely within the corporate framework. Negative reactions to the organization’s decisions express the disappointment that a leader on the alternative path just nestled itself into the hierarchy it aims to change. Its values and mission just became a line item within Walmart’s annual report (or, worse, its Corporate Social Responsibility report) instead of a call for an entirely different way. It reminds us that we’re stuck.
To have the lasting impact that the world needs, New Agriculture needs to stand on its own. To do so it has to be profitable. New Agriculture does not need a re-funneling of corporate money, money that because of the dominant structure it perpetuates won’t give us the market changes that will keep farmers on the land, improve the quality of our soil, and yield healthful food crops and relationships across our agri-culture.
We need new business models that are built for New Agriculture, that reward the producer and the consumer, that value decisions that are optimal economically as well as environmentally and ethically, that give influence back to the people who grow the food and the people who eat it. Only when the companies that are clearing a truly alternative agricultural path are prepared to upend and eventually replace the old paradigm of the agricultural sector with connectivity, community, and environmental stewardship will we have a chance of sustaining the revitalization of our farms and food.
This piece also appears on Plovgh.
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