Provenance

Technology's Place in Transforming Agriculture

2011-09-28T10:27:00.000-07:00

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.

New Agriculture Needs Out From Under the Corporate Thumb

2011-09-12T14:02:00.000-07:00

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.

Agility in Agriculture: Why Farms Will Succeed and Food Corporations May Not

2011-07-08T17:14:00.000-07:00

Extreme weather has thrown off fruit and vegetable production schedules by a couple of weeks around the country this year. Anyone who’s a CSA member or an avid farmers’ market-goer knows it – farmshares are starting delivery a couple of weeks late in some regions and markets are still displaying spring greens in others. In the Pacific Northwest, there is much talk of compromised fruit crops. Cherries, which usually hit the stands well before the 4th of July, will make their way to Portland markets one of these days, but for now the strawberries will do just fine. Most people seem okay with that.

American consumers are increasingly choosing to be part of a dynamic agricultural experience. The value of agricultural products marketed directly from the farm to individuals through CSAs and farmers’ markets grew 104.7% from 1997-2007, representing over $1.2 billion in revenue in 2007 alone. Alternative channels have taken hold in part because consumers have demonstrated great capacity to adjust their expectations to the realities of agricultural production. Late cherries are not a nuisance, the thinking goes, but part of a story that connects people with the larger system that feeds them. Direct communication between farmers and people has also given producers insight into what their customers want, allowing diversified farms to adjust their crop plans to people’s tastes.

Meanwhile, the food industry is on a hunt for a “sustainable” production and marketing model. A recent Fast Company piece describes how companies like Unilever and PepsiCo know that they need to prepare their supply chains for a volatile climate and assuage their customers through social responsibility. However, food companies need more than a revision in their procurement strategies and waste policies; they need to completely rethink their design, development, and manufacturing processes. If they are to source from farms, they ought to meet dynamic production systems with an equally dynamic processing and marketing strategy instead of the unwavering product needs they present the market with today.

A farmer and a corporate procurement manager probably agree that it will be harder and harder to force a static basket of consistent, timely products out of the land for years to come. But the two have wildly different capacity to deal with this reality. While the farmer can reasonably adjust her production methods and planting choices to the ecological and market conditions her farm faces, the procurement team will have an awfully hard time figuring out how to redesign a nutrition bar in light of a cold spell in the Pacific Northwest in order to use extra strawberries as an ingredient in lieu of those missing cherries.

The future of farming does not lie in producing the same thing over and over again – the soil can’t take it and neither can farmers’ bank accounts. The future lies in an agile production system and in building producers' capacity to respond to changing markets, environmental conditions, and tastes. Farmers are good at managing for diversity and unpredictability. Individuals are getting better at it. Companies with keystone products, hefty manufacturing infrastructure, and entrenched organizational wisdom will have a hard time adjusting, I predict.

Agility means a push of what the land gives up into the markets and eventually the hands of people who eat, not a pull of ingredients through a supply chain, and it may require thinking beyond traditional measures of productivity and efficiency. As Fred Kirschenmann has remarked, economies of scale and specialization are not appropriate gauges for agriculture. Yet those are measures that food companies have typically been keenly focused on. There is a profound disconnect in food supply chains if scale is not the solution at the farm level but is the only measure of success at the corporate level.

One way forward is for farmers and people to get together and sort it out themselves (that’s where Plovgh comes in). Another is for companies to begin investing immediately not just in new procurement strategies but in a responsive product development and marketing mentality. Companies will have to do more than get closer to the farms that supply them; they need to rethink how they design and manufacture products that involve agricultural risk.

I see great potential in farmers, who demonstrate agility out of necessity, driving the future of agriculture (what a funny thing to have to say). I also see great potential in the ability of human beings, who are integrating agriculture – the culture of the land, as a reality in their daily lives, to adapt to changing conditions. I have much less faith that global, publicly held, quarterly measured corporations will figure out how to upend entrenched organizational processes, branded products, and global manufacturing in order to lead our agricultural future.

This piece is also posted at www.plovgh.com.

How Plovgh Makes FarmVille Real

2011-01-24T13:18:00.000-08:00

It’s refreshing to hear Dave Thier talk about the struggles he had as a farmer on FarmVille. I hesitate to say it, but I think his experience – the attraction, the addiction, the desertion, actually bodes well for farms and farmers. Apparently more than 80 million people want to get involved with the farm (albeit only at arm’s length), but, man, it’s a hard life even on FarmVille. Most of us aren’t cut out for the real thing, which makes it all the more important for us to give due respect and dollars to those who are.

When I first heard about FarmVille, I found a teeny-tiny bit of hope in millions of people pretending to farm. Maybe it would mean a resurgent interest in the realities, challenges, and glories of farming. For long I’ve thought that farming was just about the swellest thing you could do. Were others, perhaps, beginning to agree?

To some extent, they were. Just as those millions on FarmVille were playing the virtual farmer, millions of people were entering into a real-life version of that game. They called it Community Supported Agriculture and spent $1.2 billion buying their food directly from farmers in 2007 (up 50% from just five years earlier). I’m relieved to say that, even in 2010, virtual gamers didn’t spend that much on all social gaming platforms combined.

But I think there are some significant lessons to be learned from FarmVille’s popularity. The way people have responded to the game suggests they want to be part of something bigger, an on-going process that yields something colorful, flavorful, valuable. CSA subscriptions and farmers’ market purchases deliver a real-world version of that experience but in a wholly lo-fi way, and as a result, miss out on the addictive potential that the gaming industry has tapped into. What’s more, the real-world farm game doesn’t forego the burnout and desertion that Thier describes of his FarmVille experience: CSA farms have an average member retention rate of just 65% nationally.

FarmVille’s user numbers and the increase in the popularity of CSAs and farmers’ markets lead me to believe that people want to be involved in food and farms, but only up to a point and only if it gives them a subtle power trip. The thought of turning everyone loose on their own six acres and betting on who can subsist is terrifying; that would be way too much adrenaline. However, I do think there’s a way to get the eating person involved in making decisions about what is produced for them, but for real, not for fake. And not in the way that makes you the annoying food evangelist who’s always praising the virtues of bok choy.

Plovgh puts farms and people together at a virtual farmstand. We hope that they buy and sell together, plant some crops together, follow the ups and downs of their harvest together. Plovgh is about the thrill of being part of the farm but without the kookiness of FarmVille because, um, Plovgh lets you spend real money on real crops and real farms. Don’t worry, you don’t have to leave your console or forsake your iPhone. We’re in there.

Wal-Mart's New Policy Could Starve Us of Fresh Food

2011-01-20T10:25:00.000-08:00

You probably caught the headlines a few months back about Wal-Mart entering the market for local food (defining it as food produced and sold within the same state, an arbitrary definition at best). Today’s New York Times features an article about the store’s plan to make food healthier. One of the plans is to drop the price for fresh fruits and vegetables.

Using fresh food as a loss leader is ludicrous as a solution to getting more fruits and vegetables into the mouths of Americans. In fact, it misses the mark entirely and potentially has harmful repercussions on the quality and amount of fresh food available to us. It might be a little counter-intuitive, but lets’ think this through.

The relationships and incentives involved in the production, sale, and consumption of fresh food look something like this.

As the perceived value of fruits and vegetables increases, your willingness to pay for them increases. If you’re willing to pay more, the price the farmer gets increases. As the price to the farmer goes up, his incentive to grow that food for you also goes up. When he grows more, supply of fresh food in the market increases and, all else being equal, lowers the market price of that food. Basic needs, flavors, and headlines all influence demand for fresh food, and as you see more value, you probably eat more fresh food and push the market price upward (again, all else being equal).

Wal-Mart is trying to artificially diminish the perceived value of fruits and vegetables. By lowering consumers’ expectations about what they should have to pay to eat fresh food, Wal-Mart fools the market and gives farmers no reason to continue growing fruit and vegetable crops. By dropping prices on fruits and vegetables, Wal-Mart isn’t making more fruits and vegetables accessible to people who think they can’t afford to eat well; it’s making it less appealing for farmers to grow specialty crops. If Wal-Mart’s approach takes hold, we will see fewer farmers choosing to grow non-commodity crops, and instead of more people being able to eat fresh foods, fewer of us will (even those of us who can afford to pay full price for it). Wal-Mart has chosen the wrong point to press on to serve demand for fresh food and get people to eat better.

Leslie Dach, of Wal-Mart’s corporate affairs group, is quoted as saying, “This is not about asking the farmers to accept less for their crops.” But how can it not be? It is not in the farmers’ interest to have their crops devalued, even if the wholesale price they’re getting from Wal-Mart is a fair one. Farmers who sell to Wal-Mart are forced to “accept less” because Wal-Mart is sending a message to the world that no one should have to pay much to eat their food. You’ll notice there are no quotations in the article from farmers who supply Wal-Mart.

I contend that there’s a better way for farmers and for eaters, and that way does not include a behemoth controlling the interaction between the two. In a post I wrote a few months ago, I mentioned that when you buy fresh food, you’re now paying intermediaries far more than you pay the farmer. Do you really value the trucking and storing and advertising and grocery store cashier more than you do the soil, the water, the sweat that went into producing your food? You don’t buy food because you think the wholesaler that got the food to you did a really great job; you buy it because you think it’s going to meet your taste, nutritional, maybe even emotional needs. The farmer imbues your food with those qualities, not the grocer or anyone else. So, why not start paying the farmer an amount that reflects the value they provide you?

Plovgh is developing a way for you to do that. We get that it’s not always easy to pay the farmer because to do so, you have to find her. We want to pull down the barrier between people and farmers so that you have more control over who feeds you. It doesn’t solve everything to put the farmer and the eating people into direct relationships, but it certainly upholds balance and eliminates the forces that keep the makers of fresh food separate from the people who need it.

This article is also posted at Plovgh.

Eating In Trumps Eating Out

2010-11-18T19:57:00.001-08:00

In an article last week, I discussed data that shows that a farmer receives a dwindling portion of the consumer food dollar in the US. The data does not explain the ratio of whole foods to processed or prepared foods purchased, but one person who commented on that post attempted to reason, “The farmers' share has fallen because consumers are choosing to eat out more and buying food in more highly processed forms. If we all want to return to buying raw food at markets and spending hours preparing it then the farmers' share can go up.” This is an understandable, if uninformed, take on why farmers aren’t winning in the current food economy, but it misses what’s really going on: Americans spend significantly more money on food they eat at home than they do on food they eat out.

Since 1929, when the USDA dataset begins, disposable income spent on food-away-from-home has increased more than five times faster than has disposable income spent on food-at-home. There is no question that the market for restaurants, prepared food, and food service blew up in the second half of the twentieth century. But the food-at-home market is still 42% bigger than the market for food that is consumed away from home, and it has been that way since the early 2000s. Furthermore, the ratio of dollars spent on food-at-home to dollars spent on food-away-from-home has been especially stable in recent years. Cathy Erway and her ilk, who are trying to shift even more consumption back into the home, might take comfort in that statistic, even if they have a lot of territory to cover to get us back to our early-1900s habits. Even in this era of idolizing chefs, restaurants, and food experiences, we still spend more money on food that we eat at home than we do on food outside of the home.

That means that the data to which I referred last week is not just a reflection of people paying someone else to prepare their food. I posit that what is really going on is that stale supply chains make it nearly impossible for farmers to reach consumers, and that because of the lack of choice in market channels, consolidators, wholesalers, and distributors can earn a huge amount of money, even though most on-lookers would say they don’t add a whole lot of value. Those intermediaries skew the portion of the consumer dollar that goes to the farmer for producing the food, tending the land that gave up that food, and managing the risk and decisions involved with sustaining a crop.

In response to intermediaries eating into food dollars, farmers have attempted to reach consumers directly through farmers’ markets and CSAs, and consumers show a growing interest in forging that connection with the farm and their food. That the number of farmers’ markets in the US has increased 114% in the last decade, to 6,132 markets around the country, suggests that consumers have an interest in getting their whole dollar to the farmer, rather than paying a store to keep its lights on.

Consumers, take comfort. You have a direct hand in farmers getting more of the credit for the food you eat. But you have to start with knowing whom you empower to feed you.

This piece also appears at www.zocalofood.com/blog.

The Balance of Food Profits: Whom Do You Really Pay For Your Food?

2010-11-10T13:36:00.000-08:00

The USDA tracks the value of domestic food expenditures, and also reports what portion of the consumer dollar goes toward labor, packaging, intercity transportation, fuel, pre-tax corporate profits, and farmers. The difference between what the consumer pays and what the farmer gets is called the marketing bill (look at the pink line in the graph). The marketing bill, which “covers processing, wholesaling, transportation, retailing costs, and profits”, or any function beyond the farm but before the household, has been climbing upward since the start of the dataset, in 1967, which means the farmers’ share has been on the decline.

The components of the marketing bill show that, from 1970 to 2006, labor, packaging, fuel, corporate profit, and miscellaneous items (like advertising and promotion, local for-hire transportation, and rent) increased relative to consumer spending, while fuel costs fell slightly relative to spending. The portion of a consumer dollar that a farmer receives fell the most dramatically in relation to consumer spending on food: in 1970, a farmer captured 32.10% of the consumer dollar; in 2006, she got just 18.53%.

These trends suggest that over the last 40 years, it has become more expensive to get food to market. It is worthwhile to note that the farmers’ share of the dollar begins to decrease significantly in the 1980s, right around the time that alternative market channels like farmers’ markets and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) started gaining popularity. Is it any surprise that farmers would seek the closer connection to consumers that these other economic models afford in a world in which almost all of the functions involved in connecting consumers with their food got a raise while farmers who actually produced the food got, in essence, wage cuts?

Some would say that the functions involved in the food supply chain beyond food production add significant value – the aggregation of supply, the processing, the wholesaling, the marketing, the advertising, the research and development, the store shelves and employees. But perhaps we’re moving beyond the need for those functions as a costly component of our food. The internet levels, liberates, and democratizes industries and supply chains. We should unleash it for the benefit of our farmers and our eaters, instead of continuing to pay for “value” that I, frankly, have a hard time valuing.

This post also appears at www.zocalofood.com/blog.

Finding the Sacred and the Satirical in our Food

2010-09-28T21:51:00.000-07:00

Were you as stunned as I was to hear that Stephen Colbert was going to appear at a House Subcommittee Hearing to discuss his views on farm labor? I’m used to Willie speaking out on behalf of farmers, but that seems to fit his image rather well. Colbert, on the other hand, seems like a guy whose free market politics would steer him clear of any sort of stumping for US agriculture. To listen to his commentary was to understand that he was there to draw attention to the need for basic rights and fair treatment of farm workers, and not to contemplate what kind of capitalist he is (here’s his explanation of why he showed up). And what better testament to the urgency, gravity, and complexity of our food challenges than to hear a white entertainer in a suit ask us to consider the people responsible for getting food to our tables.

The testimony from both Colbert and Arturo Rodriguez of the United Farm Workers remind us that, really, we have no idea what we’re eating, whose bottom line we’re supporting, or what agenda we are inadvertently furthering with our food dollars. Just as I dispute the FDA’s claim that genetically modified salmon is not materially different from non-GMO salmon, I contend that not every tomato (or apple, carrot, or bean) is equal. Quite the contrary, we try to simplify our markets by commoditizing food, but we have reached a time and place where the slightest differentiating factor, from what kind of fertilizer was used on the field, to the origin of the seed, can affect the price, market destination, and end use of a crop.

Let’s think about this. Say that two peaches were placed before you – same variety, same harvest date. You were assured that one had been sprayed with an insecticide that had run off into an underground stream that would ultimately affect water quality in the Gulf of Mexico, all the while using as close to forced labor as the US comes. The other peach had come from a neighboring field, where the farmer used integrated pest management that required a quarter of the insecticide and thus added only a fraction of the groundwater pollution as her neighbor, and farm laborers were paid a decent wage. How much more would you pay to eat the second peach instead of the first?

As this over-simplified example demonstrates, by not knowing, we can unwittingly participate in something we’d rather not. I’d like to think that farmers’ markets could solve the information problem, but unfortunately they are not only inaccessible to a large portion of the population, but they are also mired in their own struggles for transparency. And so, without easy access to information, we make decisions that are less than optimal for ourselves and for others.

The question comes down to what you know about your food. To know is to acknowledge the sacred in food, what theologian Ellen Davis describes as a way of thinking about food that honors the people, animals, and elements that cultivated and harvested the food. It’s what we mean to do when we pray at meal time.

However, the fact that so few of us know the story of our food is due in large part to how the food system is set up. From cotton traders in India to spinach packers in California, the dominant view is that markets are more efficient if the consumer doesn’t know.

Herein lies the contradiction, and thus the satire. The stuff we depend on day in and day out, for energy and wellness, to sustain our physical, and often our emotional and spiritual, being is the stuff we know so little about we’re making choices that actually defeat the purpose of food: to nourish. No wonder Colbert found an angle on all of this – we are acting the fool. And so, I leave you with one question. Whom are you empowering to feed you?

This piece also appears on Zocalo.

Chaos at the Farmers’ Market

2010-09-20T12:53:00.000-07:00

This story in the Wall Street Journal about a farmers’ market debate that is raging (can anything really rage at a farmers’ market?) in Wisconsin and across the country reminds me how much is wrong with how we choose our food. It reports that even our best alternative to supermarkets, our closest approximation to traceability in our food supply, can’t provide us the assurances we ask of it. Meanwhile, some half-cocked ideas are floating around about how to make farmers’ markets stricter, less accessible, and heavier on bureaucracy and process.

Who needs more of that, especially farmers? Cross checking seed receipts to verify that a farmer grew what he is peddling, inspecting farms to make sure they’re growing what they said they were, lots of pencil and paper work overseen by resource-constrained market managers? How in the world can this be the extent of our food alternatives? There must be a better way to get the comfort we receive from believing that a real farmer grew real food that we browse while a country music cover band takes us back to another time, when people had no choice but to farm.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I must say that I shop at my neighborhood’s Saturday market when I can. But I don’t enjoy it for anything but the outcome: a great selection of fresh foods in which I have a higher degree of confidence than I do in food I get from the grocery store. I think the farmers’ market is just about the least efficient way to get our food (and research from Cornell Cooperative Extension suggests that it is just about the least efficient way to sell food too), much less gain transparency into how that food was produced. If you’re lucky, you’ll actually get to talk to the farmer when you show up at the farm stand. But if the farmer is successful, she will be selling at multiple markets on the same Saturday morning, reducing your chances of meeting the woman with the dirt under her fingers. If she’s really successful, her sunny day will be better spent on the farm.

At the heart of this debate are questions about what a farmers’ market should be, what it turns out to be, and who gets to decide. For some, the farmers’ market is about community, an opportunity to socialize with neighbors and farmers, a pastime. For others, both buyers and sellers, it is business. Still, direct sales of food from farmer to consumer represented just 1.1% of food purchases in the US in 2009.

Two recent articles published in Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems discuss research that shows that even though consumers pay significant premiums on farmers’ market produce, if labor costs are taken into account farmers are only slightly better off selling at farmers’ markets, if they are better off at all. An article on Grist suggests that New York State farmer Morse Pitts has no long-term incentive to continue selling at the Union Square Farmers’ Market. By Pitts’ calculations, he makes just $7 an hour selling at the market, even though his customers pay a pretty penny to buy greens directly from him.

Furthermore, markets suffer from both consumer and farmer upward mobility. As Salon reports, farmers in Lancaster County that could gain access to higher-paying Philadelphia markets chose to go there instead of continuing with a community food access project in their own county. Isn’t that the rational thing to do? The problem is that consumers in small towns and communities with lower ability and willingness to pay are not just economically but also geographically excluded from the market for direct-from-farm food. If we could resolve the geographic boundaries of transacting in fresh food, as we've done with markets for commodities, perhaps we could achieve better equality of access.

Some farmers that sell at market do gain a lot from interacting with customers. They hear about what people like, what they don’t, how they’re using the produce. They get some satisfaction from meeting their loyal customers, from educating people new to the market, and from spending time with peer farmers. Is there a way to retain the good in farmers’ markets – the community, the interaction, the access to an array of (what we think is) farms’ fresh produce – but gain insight into the authenticity and quality of farms and food, the mystery of which has caused this Wisconsin tiff?

The farmers’ market fills a true need that is underscored by data from the USDA that shows the number of markets in the US has nearly doubled in the last eight years. So, the market brings us something that nothing else does yet: an array of fresh, whole food the source of which we generally trust; a choice in what quantities and assortment of that food we want; direct contact between farms and consumers. I spend my days thinking about a better way to accomplish this, but for now, I’ll take what I can get.

This piece also appears at Zocalo.

What the Farm Gives: A Morning at the Wholesale Farmers’ Market

2010-07-28T12:57:00.000-07:00

By 6:30 yesterday morning, I was chatting with Jack Hoeffner, one of the farmers who sells at the Wholesale Farmers’ Market at Hunt’s Point in the Bronx. New York City’s Greenmarket had organized a two-hour buyers’ tour to introduce farmers and customers, and to attract attention to the market, which came under Greenmarket’s purview just last year. The drive up from Brooklyn, a mecca of sorts for good foodies in this city, was seamless at that hour, but my first smile of the day was when one of the entrance guards explained that, you know, he didn’t see too many ladies up here. When you’re about to spend a few hours with some old school vegetable growers, you may as well start off old school.

This market is a place where farmers can sell directly to wholesale buyers like restaurants, corner grocery stores, and small-scale food processors. Today there were nine sellers, their white trucks scattered across the parking lot, with bags of corn and onions, and boxes of potatoes, peppers, and cucumbers stacked on the concrete. The farmers are here because selling at this market allows them to sell in bulk but at an agreeable price and without much distribution responsibility.

Hoeffner, who farms in Montgomery, New York, and whose family has been in the business for five generations, attributes the challenges of the small farmer to reckless markets. In a traditional wholesale market, he might make an agreement to sell a box of cabbage for $10, but by the end of the day the market clearing price is $8 per box, and he is forced to give up those $2 in order to keep buyers coming back to the market. That price unpredictability would be okay if he benefited from the up-side as often as he suffered from the down-side, but the reality is that if he makes an agreement to sell at $10 and the price goes up to $12 over the course of the day, he is stuck with his original deal. Hoeffner sells at the Wholesale Farmers’ Market because here, at least, the spot market for his products exists and he takes what he can get, without the risk of his buyers renegotiating a price.

The Greenmarket gives these farmers, many of whom are beyond middle age, access to marketing and sales opportunities that they would otherwise lack. These are not guys who are going to serve the unique needs of dozens of different buyers or contract their production with big companies, but they do want to sell in a fair and efficient way to customers that value their products. The market succeeds at pulling farmers and buyers together, but as Shayna Cohen, who organized the event, pointed out, growing the market is “a chicken and egg thing.” You don’t get farmers to come to the market unless there are buyers, and buyers won’t be there unless the farmers are.

Talking with Hoeffner exposes how much dissonance there is between farmers’ ability to sell fresh, whole foods and apparent demand for it. Restaurant buyers may claim to want seasonal, local produce on their menus, but the reality is that buying from nearby farmers a few months of the year can jeopardize relationships with national distributors that deliver peaches and tomatoes all year round. “When you farm, you sell what the farm gives up,” Hoeffner says. This mentality of taking what the land, and hence the market, offers does not extend to most restaurant buyers and consumers. We have been conditioned to expect that we can get what we want, when we want it.

Back home in Brooklyn, it’s easy to think that the future of healthy, whole food and efficient markets for that food are in our immediate future, and it’s easy to forget that the farmers we rely on for that food face an uncertain future. From day to day, they don’t know who will be at the markets and how much those customers will need. From week to week, they don’t know what crop prices will do, so they guess at the most advantageous times to harvest and sell their products. From year to year, they try to compete with huge makers and movers of food.

If we are going to strengthen and promote a network of regional foodsheds, not to the absolute exclusion of broader trade but with a core value of ensuring stable farm communities in proximity to our cities, we need to rethink how we define a dependable food supply. Does dependability mean getting the same assortment of products day in and day out, or does it mean having the agility to respond to the market, the season, and the farmer to incorporate a changing array of foods into our lives and menus?

Instead of trying to control and correct for diversity in our food supply, we should embrace it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we should never, ever eat pineapple in January. I’m saying that to revitalize small- and medium-sized farms in this country, we first have to shift our mental models, accept some degree of variation in our food supply, and adjust accordingly our expectations of what farmers like Hoeffner and his cohorts deliver.

Open Data in Agriculture and Why It Matters

2010-07-16T11:31:00.000-07:00

The farmer usually knows best – for his or her land, crop, livestock, and profitability, among other things. As a girl on a Minnesota farm in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I was in awe of my grandfather’s ability to know just what his beef cattle needed – more water, richer pasture, better nutrients – and to have a crop rotation schedule seemingly in his head. It was as though my Granddad could feel his way through the unpredictability of weather, supply and demand, and price fluctuations to make the optimal decisions for his operation.

A couple of years ago I was with him on his farm when the cows were getting checked for pregnancy. He sat in the middle of the cattle yard while cow after cow ran through the chute. After each check, the cowboy gave a signal to indicate the cow’s status, and Granddad jotted down on a spreadsheet the results that would later that evening get saved to someone’s hard drive. What could I build, I thought to myself, that would make this process easier, and link the data that emerged from this days-long affair with other information from the farm itself, the region, and the markets to help my family make even smarter operating choices?

It’s a question that participants from across the food sector have pondered for years, and to which new information technology is beginning to provide answers. With capabilities like social media that offers instantaneous mini-reports, remote sensing that announces field-level conditions, and user-generated mapping that offers an on-the-ground view of production, merchandising, and consumption activity, we are beginning to get the tools at our fingertips to optimize decision-making with connected, real-time information, not just intuition. Farm management software, mobile applications, and web-based tools are increasingly available to farmers around the world and present an opportunity for us to understand and act on the global interconnections among food, agriculture, water, energy, soil, farm profitability, and human nutrition as never before.

I do not want farmers’ wisdom to evaporate in the face of technology. Quite the contrary, I want that specialized knowledge of acre, crop, and herd to be augmented and preserved. Agricultural and food system data is important because it lets us see what we couldn’t see before, and in a world in which the expertise to sustain our food supply lives in the minds and senses of aging farmers, I would like to see a 21st century agricultural revolution that builds on farmers’ talent and perception to capture and interpret newly available signals from the ecosystem.

Imagine, for example, that a farmer needs to decide how much to irrigate during a drought. It's a decision that affects just his farm in the short run, but has systemic costs and benefits. If the farmer could connect historical commodity prices, weather charts, financial and environmental costs, and soil conditions to assess the trade-offs in the choice he makes, he could complement his highly refined intuition with the long-term effects that his decision has on his farm and beyond. The more widely information and tools like this are available, the more optimal decisions participants can make throughout the food system.

Opening up food and agricultural data requires an information architecture and infrastructure that does not currently exist. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization is a leader in providing easily accessible, highly usable, and surprisingly current data, but right now it is far ahead of the pack in terms of transparency in reporting. The USDA released its Open Government Plan in April and the possibilities the agency’s data presents for developers and entrepreneurs are many. However, there exists no single platform for coordinating the numerous strands of measurements, probabilities, risks, and fluctuations in real-time. We need to build toward a high level of integration and openness in data in order to truly be stewards of the land and sustainable producers and consumers of agricultural products.

At a time when food is becoming a political issue instead of being discussed as the fundamental need that it is, we must access competing data and analysis to inform the investment, innovation, and policy behind food production and consumption. To transform data into metrics that empower decision-making across the food system, we need to get a broad spectrum of actors in the sector to communicate and collaborate. Let this essay serve as a call for a networked food system that harnesses and applies robust information through data generation, database architecture, open research and collaboration, and agile, relevant metrics, in pursuit of more efficient, more sustainable, more productive food and farming.

What's in a Name? The Power to Shift the Food System

2010-06-28T11:16:00.000-07:00

I can’t help it. Food comes up in my conversations all the time. Whether I am at a conference for sustainable agriculture or at my neighborhood watering hole, the people I meet are paying attention to their food in a way that should perk the ears of anyone who produces, markets, distributes, sells, prepares, or buys food. These conversations should get your attention because they reflect a desire to reject a mainstay of the food industry – traditional food labeling, in favor of radical transparency.

Recently, two articles have brought to light the risks and challenges of transparency in food systems. David Karp’s article in the L.A. Times, “Fruit Varietals: Identity Crisis in the Produce Aisle”, describes how fruit varieties get mixed together for the simplicity of the supply chain and in order to prevent customer confusion. As Karp writes, for the produce industry, the value of veiling details about fresh produce is in efficient operations and subdued consumers.

The produce industry is not alone in favoring streamlined over customized operations. When I was working with a big commodity merchant last summer, there was significant concern that if textile customers knew the origin of a particular kind of cotton, they would begin to have sharpened tastes and, if they liked a specific region’s cotton one season, might demand it to the exclusion of other varieties or geographies next season. This picky customer would create chaos in global trading relationships and pricing because, if next year cotton from a different region is superior but the customer wants what he got last year, demand favors an inferior product.

Karp suggests that grocers are worried about the “educated customer” problem too. What a risk it would be if I got Pink Lady apples last month, loved them, and demanded my grocer get them again this month, even though they are expensive and out of season! I daresay, with the right information provided to them in the right format, people are smart enough to figure out that the best produce today might not be the best next week or next year. We’re already trained to think this way with some foods. Who buys pomegranates in the summer months, or corn on the cob in January? We get it. Tell us what is good now, and let us figure out what we want for ourselves. Karp rightly states that doing so would allow “good products [to] be rewarded with increased demand and higher prices, and inferior ones [to] fall by the wayside.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times article “Genetically Altered Salmon Set to Move Closer to Your Table” describes how a genetically modified fish could get approved by the FDA and show up unidentified in grocery store freezers next to, shall we say, authentic salmon. My first reaction is, “Label it!” (To clarify, in general, I think static labeling is insufficient, but here we are talking about whether or not to even distinguish “real” from “altered”).

If consumers are given enough information to determine what’s what, who cares whether the FDA decides to let this fish go to market? They will do their best to conclude whether these highly efficient protein producers are safe, but they cannot possibly be expected to anticipate the long-term effects of a genetically modified fish. If consumers have at their fingertips sufficient information to understand the choices they make with their food dollars, then collective intelligence and preference will decide whether to keep AquaBounty’s product on store shelves.

If a stable food system is one in which farmers produce what consumers want, consumers know what they’re getting, and consumers’ decisions influence farmers’ production plans, then full disclosure seems necessary. What would it take to get there? It will take more than the “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” campaign, the USDA’s well-intentioned effort to connect Americans to the farm, because we need to rely on real-time data. But data takes time, and time is money. As Karp reports, farmers do not have the incentive or are too fatigued to sort fruit by varietal, much less track field-level statistics.

It’s understandable that farmers are tired – if they sell their products directly, they are not only farmers but also marketers, distributors, and, increasingly, social media strategists. Technology is evolving that can help. Products like Stickybits connect digital content with a physical product, allowing food manufacturers, marketers, and farmers to tell a more complex story than nutritional values and ingredient lists can. Similarly, Leitha Matz of FreshDirect sees online food retail as a way to provide greater depth of information than is available on a sign inside a grocery store. She sees personalized, transparent information through the website as a key factor in FreshDirect’s commitment to supporting both farmers and customers.

The question of how we identify our agricultural products comes down to whether we believe that such products are differentiated. For decades, even specialty crops have been lumped together in name, price, and path to market. However, as food sustainability and transparency efforts make headway, we’re starting to realize that nothing that the earth produces is undifferentiated. Each peach has its own flavor. Each tree has particular nutrient needs. Each acre gets its own sunlight and irrigation. Each farmer has her own practices and philosophy of farming. And each hungry person has a unique combination of flavor palette, health profile, and willingness to pay. How can we possibly consider agricultural production to be a commodity?

Traceability and transparency are essential to healthy food systems because without them, consumers have little say in the food they choose to buy, except through niche certifications like organic (which I find more and more of my peers distrust). If we could see, at the moment of our purchase decisions, the system that we empower to feed us, then our dollars could begin to align with our nutritional, environmental, social, and cultural desires. Until then, I grudgingly trust food supply chains that are not merely veiled but curtained.

Right now, the only people with the drawstring on this picture are big food retailers that can demand their suppliers give them rigorous information so that they, in turn, can provide it to customers, and farms that see the economic value and vast marketing potential of offering deeper transparency through technology. In an era when consumers increasingly want information about pesticide use, fertilizer type, irrigation level, soil pH, nutritional value, long-term economic costs, and social tradeoffs in their food, I’m putting my money on the farmers.

Some see radical transparency as a costly burden (which, if done with paper and pen, physical labels, and manual sorting, it is), but I firmly believe that with the information infrastructure that exists today radical transparency is not only possible but necessary. Yes, I think that the companies that refuse to throw the curtain back on food products are in for a big surprise, as the companies that embrace the data, consumer insight, and brand evolution that comes with full disclosure thrive. Why? Because those companies will be in constant communication with everyone they touch, from their farmers to their customers. To my way of thinking, that describes an engaged, responsive, and agile company that will survive the 21st century.

This piece is cross-posted at Zocalo and The Huffington Post.

Food and Technology: Learning from our past and defining our future

2010-06-21T09:31:00.000-07:00

On a recent Tuesday night, the back room at Jimmy’s No. 43 in the East Village is packed with foodies and techies, researchers and entrepreneurs, filmmakers and activists. The group has converged for “Five on Food #2”, the monthly event from Meetup.com’s food+tech group. We are there because we believe that technology can disrupt habitual behavior, points of reference, and mindsets, and that just such a disruption is needed if we are going to achieve sustainability in food and agriculture.

When Will Turnage takes the stage to talk about what the combination of food and technology means to him, and how he weaves the two fields together in his daily life, the group nods when he talks about being a developer, and cheers when he announces that he keeps bees. Turnage’s combination of technical expertise, passion for food, and commitment to combining the two in ways that are good for people and the environment, is a common theme among members. However, Turnage, who helped to develop the Ratio application that accompanies Michael Ruhlman’s book by the same name, suggests that the point of technology is to reacquaint us with the instinct and intuition we have lost. He wants to give people the tools they need to get comfortable in the kitchen again.

Daniel Bowman Simon, of the People's Garden NYC, also reminds us that we are not new here. On stage, he produces a photocopy of a 1917 city pamphlet promoting school gardens. Ironic, he says, given how he has had to hit the street to get people to sign his petition to ask Mayor Bloomberg to put a garden in front of City Hall. Simon says he likes making the face-to-face connection with potential supporters first, having them sign, and then following up with an e-mail (in other words, technology enhances the connection but does not establish it). So far, 5,000 people have signed; he wants 8 million signatures. “That’s how many it would take for it to be unanimous,” he says. Simon reminds us that where we are trying to go might not be so far from where we, or at least our ancestors, have been before.

Because of technology, we now have the potential to see the systems around us in new ways. Wendy Brawer of Greenmap.org arrives with symbols printed on bright orange paper. These symbols, she says, are the iconography that helps connect communities around the world to sustainability resources. The open mapping project, which she has led since the early ‘90s (it started on paper, she reminds me), allows cities, organizations, and individuals to create their own maps, which Brawer believes are the missing link in delineating and communicating the issues around food sustainability. She has gotten us a long way toward visualizing the activities, concepts, and needs that shape our local, regional, and global perspective on food systems.

Leitha Matz, who is Senior Content Manager at Fresh Direct, is another presenter this evening who is keen to offer a new level of transparency into food. She reminds the group that food and technology can sometimes be used to describe mega food corporations. However, this group interprets the combination much differently. For us, “food+tech” describes the potential that innovative technology, from iPhone applications and social networks, to GPS and e-commerce, has to restore a healthful, regenerative food system.

At Fresh Direct, Matz has been part of the effort to double the amount of local produce that the online grocer offers. In her view, online grocery has an opportunity for transparency that traditional retail lacks: it’s hard to put on the shelf the integrated pest management and other sustainable farming practices of farms like Red Jacket Orchards, but it is possible to tell a more complex story with digital content. Matz reminds us that this is a “wonderful moment” for consumer information. Though this is nowhere near a sales pitch, Matz’s talk suggests that radical transparency in food is possible.

Stephanie Beack is a farmer’s daughter. With a business degree and a professional background in tech, she says, “I firmly believe in the way technology can change lives.” For Beack, the transformation of food happens in the kitchen. Her site, Scrumptious Street, started two years ago because for her, getting healthy, sustainable food into the home is a way to change mindsets about how we eat. Beack suggests, as she closes her talk, that technology enables food.

But doesn’t food enable technology as well? If not for a stable and healthful food supply, we would not have the wherewithal to pursue the technological innovation that improves connectivity among people and throughout ecosystems. The essential nature of food makes it our most urgent challenge to resolve. As I step into the crowd after the presentations, I have great confidence that the creativity, enthusiasm, and commitment of the people in this room will, through unique applications of technology, change how we understand the future of food.

The Hustle for Good Food: Dispatches From the Bronx Food Summit

2010-05-05T07:21:00.000-07:00

New York City is one of many cities around the country that is placing a renewed emphasis on food access. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has launched the FoodWorks initiative to address production and distribution, while Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has announced FoodNYC to reform food policies in the City. Both of them showed up on Saturday for the Bronx Food Summit, an event organized by Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., who of all the political leaders there probably has the most at stake in bringing healthy food into this city: his constituents live in a neighborhood that is both the nexus of New York City’s produce markets and home to a population suffering the consequences of limited access to that very produce.

The beautifully diverse group – kids from the neighborhood coming in with their skateboards, urban farmer and activist Karen Washington, Chris Grace of New York State Department of Ag & Markets, among a few hundred others – gathered for the Summit at Hostos Community College. The event gave voice to the anger and hope, frustration and deliberation, need and intention that surrounds the question of food in the City’s poorest borough. In her opening remarks, Majora Carter described her hope for high-yield urban agriculture, which she intends to support through her newly launched American City Farms program. Her vision is to make starting urban farm models as simple as opening a fast food franchise, but with wildly different health outcomes. She calls such efforts “monuments to hope and possibility” for this neighborhood.

What’s gone wrong in the Bronx to make a conference about food access necessary? The easiest answer is decades of disinvestment in a low-income neighborhood by traditional investors that has made the neighborhood unappealing to large grocers, but that misses the point. There are two more significant things happening: availability of financing and poverty itself.

When there is a need but no one to fill it, entrepreneurs tend to step up to the opportunity. However, because in the South Bronx access to capital is limited (as Judi Kende of the Low Income Investment Fund pointed out, even a non-profit lender has trouble approving a loan to a first-time business owner with little in the way of a borrowing track record) it’s difficult to fund even a fruit cart or small food retail space. Furthermore, the structure of poverty reinforces demand for the least expensive, highest calorie foods. What you do with the last three dollars you have today when you are hungry now contributes to perceived demand for cheap, easy food. The response to this demand is, of course, more fast food than fresh.

There are alternatives like the South Bronx Food Coop and some grocery stores (though residents claim the chains in their neighborhood have far inferior produce to their neighboring stores in Westchester and Riverdale). New York City has initiated the FRESH program, which provides grocery stores incentives to establish and expand their presence in underserved areas. Yet residents are stunned that even a company like FreshDirect would deliver to zip codes that require their trucks to drive through the South Bronx, but do not bother to take orders for delivery there.

As one woman, who lives in the neighborhood and shops at the Coop, exclaimed, “We have to hustle to make sure we have access to good food… We have to depend on us.” For some in the neighborhood, the hustle involves shopping once a month at a grocery store in Manhattan, paying for a taxi or schlepping a heavy load all the way home, and supplementing their stock with intermittent stops at the corner store. For others, it means making due with low-quality fresh food. And for others, it means foregoing healthy options almost entirely. Perhaps what motivates the Bronx to hold this Summit is knowing no one is going to fix this for them.

The question of what to do about food access in the South Bronx comes down to how you move a market. Is it demand-driven, policy-driven, or supply-driven, or does it require some combination of all three? From the energy and commitment I witnessed on Saturday, I expect demand isn’t enough or we wouldn’t have had anything to talk about – these people want better food badly. I also don’t believe policy is enough; we’re talking about changing entrenched processes, decision-making mechanisms, and incentives both among human beings that want food and within companies that could supply it, and unless there is an accompanying emotional, physical, or economic under-pinning, food choices are unlikely to change.

I believe we need to rethink the paradigm of how we get food into dense urban areas. Perhaps instead of relying on thousands of square feet, millions of investment dollars, and countless hours to make the change happen, we should start thinking about using the organizing capacity, information systems, and distribution tools we have today to get creative with how we move healthy, affordable food into the areas of our cities that need it most.

Correction: The original version of this post inaccurately suggested that Majora Carter is still an active leader of Sustainable South Bronx, an organization she founded in 2001.

An Ode to Farming Isn't Enough: We Need a Reality Check

2010-04-27T15:05:00.000-07:00

Foreign Policy has compiled stunning photographs in its An Ode to Farming, and what a beautiful tribute to farms and farmers around the world it is. I wish I could say that what you see is what you get. Much though I would like to ponder the lovely landscapes, these photos tell an incomplete story. They capture the rich diversity of human beings, ecosystems, climates, and crops that contribute to our agricultural reality, but in conveying the bounty that is one part of that reality, they fail to acknowledge the environmental effects of the decisions those farmers are making, the nutritional impact their crops have, the poverty in which many of them live.

The publication fills in the picture a bit with this article about the absurdity of taking a die-hard stance on organic and local food. In the article, Robert Paarlberg argues that without new technology (biological and otherwise), Africa and South Asia will continue to suffer from low yields and a hungry population. Furthermore, he criticizes the critics of the Green Revolution, suggesting that their well-intentioned, conscientious decisions about food (sustainable, local, organic, what have you) may have unintended consequences (surprise!). Most compelling is his description of how technology is allowing farmers in developed countries to pursue precision agriculture, thereby reducing inputs like fertilizer and pesticide.

I appreciate the conversation about the Green Revolution because Paarlberg offers a nice explanation of where it went right without diminishing the importance of rectifying where it went wrong. As the granddaughter of Pete McVay, a former President of Cargill, I have long held an appreciation for the innovation and commitment that a generation of people who grew up during the Depression brought to the world's food, and do not believe that anyone who was part of pushing large-scale production in the mid-20th century had a malicious motive. Quite the contrary: they meant for everyone to be well nourished, much as my peers and I do. So, why haven't we been able to achieve nutrition for all?

We possess the technology, the sensitivity of implementation, and the capacity to see nuance that we need to solve global food challenges. We are at an inflection point in how we think about and consume food, and dwelling on either extreme - all-out industrial or exclusively organic production - is probably a mistake. The more compelling approach, and one that is gaining ground on both sides of the spectrum, integrates practices and philosophies from a range of farming styles.

Let me offer a personal example. Last Monday, I had the privilege of visiting what some would call industrial spinach fields in King City, California, while on an agriculture trek with classmates at MIT Sloan. As we stood in the fields, I was surprised to hear that the farmer does not use herbicide; instead of using chemicals, he has workers weed the fields (don't worry, the labor is legal and unionized, and I have proof that a taco truck shows up to serve them lunch and they have ready access to biffies). He also uses integrated pest management to control disease in his fields, which both lowers his costs of production (fewer tractor passes through the field saves on fuel costs and emissions) and reduces the need for synthetic chemical use on the crop. In the next field, the farmer uses drip irrigation to save on water use and fertigation to target nutrients where they're needed in the soil, and avoid runoff of excess nutrients. This farmer is growing conscientiously and cost-effectively while also getting a superior yield to the organic fields across the road.

Across the country on a Brooklyn rooftop, Ben Flanner works a different landscape but takes an approach recently dubbed "beyond organic". Growers are using this term to convey their commitment to the environmental stewardship traditionally associated with organic production, but to demonstrate that they do not need a bureaucratic sign-off on their practices in order to find an eager market or grow a good crop. Furthermore, their practices, which tend to incorporate the best of the organic mindset with the best of low-impact non-organic production, tend to achieve strong yields, quality food, cost effectiveness, and a modest environmental footprint.

Could it be that the urban farm down the street from me and the spinach fields in the salad bowl of the US could be migrating toward a shared vision for the future of agriculture? I'm not saying these farmers agree on everything, nor would I want them to. Diversity in how, where, and what we produce is critical to a healthy food system. I'm just saying that there may be some common ground after all. Innovations in fertilizer production, irrigation systems, and precision machinery will help move us toward a sustainable food future, but our true transformation will come from farmers like these taking risks to find new and better ways of producing food.