“I’m thinking if we get rid of those inefficient feed troughs, we could cut our corn bills by maybe as much as a third,” Jason babbled on. “And the chickens wouldn’t have to compete for food …”
I took the notebook out of his hands.
“Oh,” he said, returning to the present. “You look … wow.”
I engaged him in a kiss, and just as I was guiding him toward the bed, he broke off and said, “Oh, Lu, I’m sorry. I … I’ve just got too many chicken-y things on my mind, you know?“
I closed my eyes and threw myself backward onto the king-sized mattress with a sigh.
Mistress LoLa had gotten to him first.
ACT 4
Pecked
VERB: struck with a beak; to be beak slapped
Chapter 16
That early spring, I was walking the halls of yet another convention, the natural-fiber yin to Atlanta’s meat-pun yang—the Midwest organic conference named MOSES. While we’d been the eco-hippie radicals in Georgia, this Wisconsin gathering was a celebration of sustainable agriculture. And we were clearly the moderates in the room.
The morning started with affirming yoga followed by a big breakfast buffet of steel-cut oatmeal, real maple syrup, and organic fruit. And unlike any industry gathering I’d ever attended, it was kid-friendly. Thanks to a grant from the Farmer Veteran Coalition (an organization that would later help us buy a used tractor), we piled the whole family into the Accord and headed to La Crosse.
While walking Abbie and Milo to the kid zone for a day of shirt dyeing and bird feeder building, we took it all in. The exhibition hall was in a cement-bleacher stadium, circa 1980. Booths were set up along the basketball floor, visually engaging with snapshots of crops and livestock, but without the jaw-dropping one-upmanship of the Big Chicken conference. No rotating electric signs the size of a swimming pool above our heads, no tight-skirted women eager to shine our work boots.
The conference standouts were the young fervent types, a faction of counterculture eco-growers who give me hope for the world. Certainly, MOSES accounts for a higher concentration of cotton garments, dreadlocks, and warm personas than I’d ever experienced in one location. Here my red Dickies coat went completely unnoticed in this plaid and beard-heavy constituency, likely the original assembly of the modern lumbersexual.
At a coffee kiosk, a pale and tired-looking knot of twenty-somethings huddled around its fair-trade beverages. I pegged them as likely participants in the conference’s unofficial nightlife. These lively gatherings, usually involving live music and always at a bar, could be found by listening in on the right conversation or its modern equivalent, following Twitter hashtags. It was rumored to be an energetic singles scene, with farmers of both genders on the hunt. Of course, this all went down as we snored openmouthed in the hotel room, unable to break out of our early-morning wake-up habit.
Clutching hands, the kids and I walked single file through the smiling crowds, nodding and excusing ourselves as we swam through the cement corridors on a current of affable people. Attendance numbers followed the national trends, citing a surge in small producers. It’s a bit counterintuitive when the attention and tax breaks come to monstrous agribusinesses, but small operations are actually a huge growth sector in food production. They make up more than half of the numbers of farms in the United States, grossing anywhere from a thousand dollars a year to a few tens of thousands. Often they sell their produce using a direct-to-consumer model: think farmers’ market or a food share from community-supported agriculture, better known as a CSA. According to the 2012 USDA census, there are nearly 24 percent more farms following this model since 2002. And sales from these operations spiked from $812 million to a dizzying $1.3 billion in a decade. That’s an increase of 60 percent in income. Small, it seems, is exploding.
That’s some needed good news among data that also tells us that the big farms aren’t just large, they’re massive. The top 10 percent of megafarms suck up some 70 percent of the cropland. The Washington Post found that the mightiest 2.2 percent of these vast operations control a full third of the nation’s available acreage. That’s like taking a mud pie representing the farmable earth in this country. Cut it into thirds and take out one honking slab of it for under 3 percent of farmers. It’s a crazy visual.
Certainly Locally Laid doesn’t fall into this “mass class” category. In fact, back at Atlanta’s International Poultry Conference, our having added to our flock to now have just over a couple thousand chickens made us idealistic bumpkins. But at MOSES, people were blown away by our farm’s enormity, to the point that I avoided talking numbers at all. A few also eyed us with suspicion when we talked about semimechanizing our next farm to mitigate the brutality of the daily labor, as though we were cheating.
After kissing Abbie and Milo good-bye, I slipped in late to a breakout session, finding a place to lean along the back wall. The speaker, a confident woman with an impressive list of academic credentials, was querying the sixty or so attendees about health insurance. “Who in the room carries a policy?” she wanted to know as she paced. About half of the attendees, maybe a few more, raised their hands. When she asked those covered by a spouse’s off-farm job to lower hands, only a couple remained high.
“Off-farm income” was once seen as a financial Band-Aid during the Great Depression and other economic downturns. But now it’s the norm. According to USDA research, outside work accounted for 87 percent of American farmers’ median income. But even the big operations with gross sales over a quarter of a million dollars were relying on off-farm money for 25 percent of their agricultural household income. Having this regular outside money—not to mention fringe bennies and retirement packages—isn’t just nice, it’s foundational.
While the speaker clicked through emotive photographs of farmers with their verdant produce, she narrated the stories of illness or injury that drove them from their fields. Sometimes charities supported them through tough times, but often there was nothing. And that’s the rub. Despite the good news that more farmers are serving their localities, mostly selling direct to consumer, with superbly grown and tasty real food, it’s not clear if they themselves are sustainable. It’s like feeding people well has now become a pleasant avocation and seemingly as lucrative as a yard sale. And with about as much security.
Meeting up with Jason for coffee between sessions, we chatted about which ones we’d hit next.
“I’m signing up for the free twenty minutes with an attorney,” he said, running his finger down the program. He was eager to learn more about trademarking and licensing, a concept he hadn’t forgotten since our last conference. “What about you, Bird?”
I was distracted. “You know, I’m loving it here. It’s absolutely wonderful and hopeful and …”
Jason waited, wide-eyed and attentive, a hand grazing my shoulder.
“But these conferences make me feel like we don’t fit in anywhere. It’s like, because we’re a little bigger and not interested in selling at farmers’ markets, we’re the odd farm out.”
Just a few weeks after MOSES, I fell into some off-farm income myself as marketing director of the Glensheen mansion, a grand historic home and tourist attraction on Lake Superior. Sadly, the thirty-nine-room museum is better known for its tragic murders and reported hauntings than its impressive early twentieth-century household collection.
But there was an unexpected benefit to working there. Because the mansion is part of the state’s university system, I found myself crossing paths with many academics. This included Randy Hanson, a soft-spoken and well-liked professor in his fifties who runs the university’s sustainable agriculture farm in Duluth. One afternoon, helping his students unload pumpkins for Glensheen’s autumn event, I relayed to him my out-of-place conference experiences.
“Lucie, Locally Laid is between small and big ag,” Randy said, handing me a gnarly, misshapen gourd. “You’re a midlevel producer and that’s a whole topic of academia—agriculture of the middle.” This m
agical new term encompasses farms grossing between $100,000 and $250,000. Not big, not small.
I could have dropped my gourd.
It makes sense that the term middle agriculture hadn’t caught on. There’s nothing dramatic about the midpoint, not when there’s the pocket-sized vigor of farmer David to root for or the sweeping might of big-machine Goliath. Honestly, there’s little that’s sexy about either middle age or Middle Ag. And lucky me, I’m both.
While walking over the bridge that led to a twisty path to my carriage house office, Randy gave me some book titles. Over the next few weeks I read long scholarly articles, which led to a domino effect of new reading material. I attacked them, pencil in hand. I’d like to tell you I was writing keen observations in the margins, but mostly I was underlining the many words I needed to look up and rewriting sentences from academia to lay English.
And so began what I call the Education of Lucie B.
I quickly learned that Locally Laid had settled into that not-so-sweet spot, the linty navel of agriculture’s center. Midsized farms, like awkward teens, don’t fit in nicely anywhere. They tend to be too large to sell all they produce directly to the public but lack the scale to acquire the big-boy toys needed for large-scale commodity production in the global marketplace. Farms like us, middlers, have to sell to other businesses, be that directly to grocery stores, restaurants, or a distributor.
It’s not easy.
And there are fewer of us every day. Between 1997 and 2012 the number of these not-too-big, not-too-small types of operations declined by 18 percent. That’s over 130,000 farms that have shuttered the barn doors, cued the tumbleweeds.
Economy of scale comes into play as big agribusiness wields its buying power to make purchases in great bulk. It’s like they get to shop at the Sam’s Club of farm needs while places like Locally Laid run to the corner bodega, lucky if anything is in stock much less at a good price. Certainly huge corporations buying a hundred thousand pullet birds get a better cost per chicken than our order of hundreds. Large enterprises, counterintuitively, also have lower labor expenses made possible by investments in large machinery. These costs are spread out over their enormous production, meaning that a half-million-dollar contraption doesn’t seem so expensive when the farm complex has a million laying hens, cranking out just under three hundred eggs per bird a year.
Locally Laid experiences its scale disadvantages every other afternoon, when we pay four workers to wash a few thousand eggs—a feat accomplished by industry’s big players in minutes with minimal human involvement, other than the flipping of a switch.
So why does this consolidation in farming matter?
It matters for a lot of reasons, but especially to the ten million Americans living in rural poverty. That’s nearly one-quarter of the nation’s impoverished. And I mean right now, not in some sepia-toned, yesteryear memory.
When midsized operations go away, it doesn’t just affect one family, it dings all parts of the regional ag industry, like grain mills, feed stores, processing plants, and farm jobs. So there’s just a lot less money floating around a community. This erodes tax bases, affecting schools, roads, and livability issues. As the Agriculture of the Middle project puts it, the loss of midsized farms “threatens to hollow out many regions of rural America.”
There’s another important consideration. When land is farmed by a family that intends to pass it along for generations, you’d like to think it’s treated like a prized possession and not some agricultural sweatshop, churning out maximum production, season after season. Think of how people treat a rental car versus one they own forever.
As I read in bed one night, with a snoring Jason beside me, a major hurdle became clear. Midsized farms struggle to establish important business-to-business relationships with restaurants and stores. It’s not that these growers can’t supply fantastic product; it’s about getting that fantastic product in front of consumers, be it cafe diners or grocery cart pushers. To get there, they have to go through kitchen and dairy managers who are generally used to filling one order form with one big food distribution company, then writing one check.
Convenience is the enemy.
Tom Hanson, owner of the Duluth Grill and an early adopter of sourcing regional ingredients, explained that for all the feel-good, taste-good upsides of buying direct from local farmers, there’s a trade-off. It’s plumb cumbersome. It means giving up the well-practiced elegance of uniform boxes rolled out of a big semi and neatly stacked in the cooler on a tight weekly schedule. Instead, one gets a series of loosely planned drops of baskets and hampers and recycled crates filled with harvest-fresh produce—sometimes washed and processed, sometimes not.
If you’ve ever worked in food service, you’ll understand that a restaurant can, at times, fall into a magical rhythm. Each worker serves as a symbiotic member of a meal-generating organism. It pulses with life, there’s a flow, it’s a dance. And when the pace hits that exquisite pitch where one can almost see the tendrils of energy making their way through a well-run kitchen, to be pulled out to deal with the farmer at the back door is as welcomed as interrupting good sex.
Setting down the book in my lap, I felt a motivational shift, an inkling of what my role in farming actually could be. Beyond egg washer and getting LoLa to show a little media chicken leg, I felt a swing from wanting to sell these eggs to keep my family afloat to a desire to kick open an entire market—not just for our product but for the whole middle-agriculture sector. It was a Peter Parker moment, like I’d just learned that I was some kind of agricultural Avenger, minus the superpowers or Lycra.
Switching off the light, I spooned against Jason and smiled into his back. We weren’t going to change this industry with our fledging agricultural abilities. No, this was where those seemingly useless liberal arts skills, along with Jason’s hockey chutzpah, would come into play. And though I wasn’t sure yet exactly what I was going to do or how I was going to do it, it was all percolating in the dark.
“I just want to jam the term middle agriculture into the lexicon—can you imagine it?” I told Jason, now awake. “We could use our farm to start a bigger conversation about midlevel producers and their econo—”
“You said it!” he shouted, now abruptly upright. “That’s the first time.”
“Well, I just learned the term,” I said.
“No, not that.” He smiled. “You said, our farm. You always refer it as ‘the farm’ or ‘Jason’s farm’ or ‘that damn farm’—you’ve never called it our farm before.”
I smiled sheepishly. Although I wanted to deny it, he was likely right.
Chapter 17
It was during that long, warm fall that Jason called me from the road. Through an acquaintance of an acquaintance, he’d been asked to visit a group of farmers looking to morph their in-barn operation into one resembling LoLa. We’d hoped they’d be interested in licensing our brand—agreeing to raise eggs to our standards while renting our well-publicized name and professional look to break into markets. This would provide us with some much-needed income, while saving them thousands of dollars and lots of years building a brand of their own.
I envisioned Jason meeting with these skilled folks, coaching them on pasture rotation and best practices against predators. I could show them how to score news stories and optimize photos for use in social media. And later, we could tutor them in how to work with dairy buyers to create room on their local store shelves.
“Bird,” Jason said, sounding high-pitched on his cell, “their farm is exactly what I want ours to be, with modern feeding and watering systems and the ability to get the girls out on pasture.”
While I couldn’t exactly picture the setup, it sure sounded better than Brian and Jason hauling heavy buckets around the farm. Locally Laid wasn’t just low tech; it was Schlep Tech.
But while the farmers wanted to work with us, they had something other than licensing in mind—contract egg production.
“Contract production?” I said,
shouldering the phone to my ear while simultaneously grating cheese and monitoring Milo’s homework progress.
“They’d produce the way we do; we pay them right away with cash for their eggs and we get them out into the world, in front of customers. We already know how to work with retailers and distributors around their region,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, worry in my tone. I circled a problem on Milo’s worksheet and gently tapped it with my finger. Milo shrugged lethargic shoulders, prompting me to push over a math-motivating M&M.
“They should really just rent our name. It would be so much better for them.”
“Lu, they want nothing to do with selling or marketing. Contract production was their idea.”
It hadn’t occurred to me until right then that farmers, real salt-of-the-earth humble producers of food, aren’t likely as forward-leaning into the world as we were. That they might not be interested in shilling out a press release with humbling follow-up phone calls, word-raking through a social media post for twenty minutes until it’s crisp as shaken linen, or simply ghostwriting for a chicken at all. It’s not easy navigating that sweet spot between witty engagement and out-and-out edification. This kind of work isn’t for everyone.
“But isn’t contract production like modern-day serfdom?”
I’d run into this term in conjunction with broiler production, the meat bird industry exposed in food documentaries, and later through reading research from the Pew Trusts. This mass production of meat chickens has been hailed as the most complete example of vertical integration in agriculture. A parent company, acting as an “integrator,” say a Tyson or a Perdue, will have a stake in or outright own the hatcheries that brood the chicks, the industrial farms that raise the grains, the mills that blend their feed, and the processing plants that later take mature chickens from birds to meat to nuggets. Then they’re all packaged and loaded on their big rigs to be trucked across the nation.
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