I drove my rental car through rural Maine towns best known for their proximity to somewhere else. I was spending part of my trip home in farm country because of a book, Food and the MidLevel Farm. It’s a collection of journal articles on the struggles of farms like ours, and I wanted to talk to the project coordinators. Going down the line of them, I learned that one had died, one was too ill for visitors, and another didn’t return my calls. Toward the end of the list was a Dr. Stewart Smith. He was from my alma mater, the University of Maine, and happened to farm just a couple of hours from my parents’ home. Best of all, his wife said I could come.
After stopping twice for directions to fields, I was pointed to a set of dirt tracks that led into a field off the aptly named Old Stage Coach Road. My teeny energy-efficient rental car, which seemed utterly adorable at the Portland airport, was now absurd. Its miniature tires heaved along this washboard path, long grasses tickling its low-riding frame. I gunned the four cylinders through the wet, low spots, counting on the forgiving attribute of momentum, and arrived at a cultivated field, a hundred or so acres, tightly hemmed in by scrubby trees and thin pines. Farmers never forget that Maine is 90 percent forested.
Pulling in past a running refrigeration truck, which I’d later learn costs a hundred bucks a day to cool freshly picked veggies, I saw people. I could see from the gaggle of ten or so workers, bent at their waists over rows of squash and cabbage, that they did a lot of work by hand.
Soon a rugged, compact man approached wearing a Red Sox cap and striding with the confidence of a crew leader. Adam informed me that Stew wasn’t there but would probably be out in about an hour. I was invited to wait. Just as we were finishing our conversation, a pickup truck pulled up with a couple of workers. The driver, a big guy, engaged us in a friendly conversation about fishing in which Adam let slip he’d recently caught a bass, “a three-poundah.”
I smiled.
Whenever I return home, the New England accent jumps out at me now as surely as my big roundy O’s (as in Minn-Oh-Sota) cause eyebrows to arch, often inviting the less-than-polite query, “You from away?”
After assigning picking tasks to the workers, Adam walked the rows with me looking at the oversized zucchini plants. “We farm conventional in this field, growing a variety of vegetables,” he said, adjusting his hat on his short brown hair. The website lists some twenty-five types of produce, some organic certified, some not—including the cucumbers and summer squash the crew was working on today under the hot sun. The model for this operation is to grow a wide variety, so they can bring lots of different produce to fewer stores, handling the distribution themselves. This differs from the commodity model, which specializes in what a farm’s really good at, like carrots, forcing the farm to work with a number of distributors to get the produce out farther. One store can take just so many carrots.
It wasn’t long before a pickup pulled up. A trim man with white hair and dressed in neat cotton work apparel got out and shook my hand. Stew had grown up in central Maine back when there were some twenty-four farms in the region, including his family’s place. By 1977, there were six. And these were no longer diversified farms with a variety of harvest and livestock, but rather simplified, mono-crop operations, growing potatoes for chips, on an industrial scale.
Stewart went to Yale and later became Dr. Smith at the University of Connecticut, earning a PhD in economics that started a twenty-year career as a professor of sustainable agriculture policy at UMaine.
I didn’t know it then, but he’d also served in a bevy of other positions, including agricultural expert to the state’s governor and even President Jimmy Carter. Stewart was involved in a list of institutions the length of my arm. Being underinformed of these accomplishments was a blessing, as it likely would’ve triggered more nervous prattle. I was already sheepish about bothering any farmer, much less one who moonlights as a presidential advisor.
He invited me to sit in the truck, out of the hot sun. The cab reminded me of my father’s work pickup back when he was a home builder, a big American model covered with a layer of dust thick enough to write one’s name in. When we’d settled a bit, Stew looked at me and smiled with an expression that might be interpreted as the polite inquiry, “So, why are we here?”
I rambled a bit about my admiration for his book and the threads of similarities between our operations and then finally blurted out, “I’m just hoping you can help me understand why agriculture is so … broken?”
He exhaled. “Well, that’s because agriculture is regulated by neoclassical theories of economics and it adheres to the first law of thermodynamics and not the second law of thermodynamics.”
At that moment, Stew might as well have been talking to a house cat.
For the next hour, the doctor talked while my hand careened across my notebook scrawling a collection of scribbles that would puzzle me for months to come. I knew I’d stumbled upon something important to my understanding of agribusiness—a pitchfork-shaped Holy Grail—but could I wield it without poking out an eye?
So began the second phase of my education. This conversation led to more academic journals, and even an economic theory book appeared on my nightstand. As a woman of average intelligence, I’m not going to pretend any of this came easily to me. It pushed my limits, even prompting a piteous decree from my side of the bed, book light clipped to a journal, highlighter in hand: “Jason, if I don’t read a vampire sex novel soon, I might not make it.”
So, to save you such desolation, I’ll just give you the abridged version.
There are two camps of economic theory. And let’s be clear. They are each stalwart in their thinking and not prone to mixers.
First, there’s the First Law of Thermodynamics tent, a crowded and popular place given that its tenants are the underpinning of modern neoclassical theories of economics. These are the cool kids. Camp rules plainly state that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, and since everything is made of energy, this gives us leave to relax about the resources needed to make a product, any product—including food ones. For farming, these resources refer to things like water and topsoil. The idea held by First Law folks is that resources, even natural ones, enjoy exchangeability, and if you can’t swap it out, there’s likely a technofix. Like chemicals.
Nobel Prize–winning economist and father of the neoclassical growth model (and head camper) Robert Solow said it succinctly: “The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources so exhaustion is just an event, not a catastrophe.”
Of course, not everyone sees our glass of planet resources as half-full.
As lauded as Solow and his groundbreaking Presidential Medal of Freedom–winning work is, he does have an academic foil: Professor Herman Daly, former senior economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank.
Daly sits squarely in the Second Law of Thermodynamics encampment, and its rules are predominantly tacked to the sparsely populated pup tent pole. It states that each time energy transforms—like from a seed to a plant—some of that energy is lost. Essentially, there is waste in the system. And while chemical fixes such as fertilizers may get you by, there comes a need for more and more to make up for diminishing returns, as seen before with the post–World War II farmers.
In Daly’s book Steady State, he compared Solow’s circular First Law economic models to thinking of an animal only in terms of its circulatory systems, sans output. Though it took me a couple of read-throughs, I saw what Daly was slyly telling the learned academy of neoclassical economists (a group I like to imagine wearing their velvet graduation tams and puffy-sleeved gowns). He thought their closed economic model was constipated. Full of shit.
Solow and Daly, along with their protégés, volley these erudite insults at one another via academic journals. At times, their essays read like a scholastic pissing match worthy of daytime television. But while academics battle it out from their ivory towers, farmers on the ground know firsthand that it’s tough being in sustainable ag
riculture bound by the environmental concerns of the Second Law of Thermodynamics while functioning within an economic system entirely defined by the concerns of its First Law.
It’s like a soup we all steep in. We’ve been acculturated to shop on price without considering its means, and not until recent history have we begun to penalize (or even arch an eyebrow toward) those who exploit our finite resources for their personal gain.
Fortunately, the message that cheap food is not cheap after all, and that natural resources have real value, is getting out there—slowly. It’s a tough sell, the idea that we should spend more money now for viable growing environments in the future. If I thought a “Second Law First!” campaign would stir the nation, I would wage it, but I’m pretty sure I’d just be stuck with a lot of Tshirts.
Chapter 22
I was relieved when Dr. Stewart shifted our conversation from the theoretical to his concrete (and often-cited) research on real farmers. If our first topic explained why agriculture is broken, this second one illuminated to what extent. His data followed the nation’s shift away from the early-twentieth-century model of many small, multi-crop and multi-livestock farms to the bigger, industrial monoculture model.
And it goes like this:
Say in 1910, you had a dollar to spend on food. This was back when the actual paper bill read, “One dollar in silver payable to the bearer on demand.” Back then, your farmer, likely running a diverse operation, received 41 cents of that food dollar—after expenses. Another 15 cents went to farm expenses like seeds and machinery, called inputs, and then the balance, the remaining 44 cents, went to the marketing sector.
Now when I say marketing, banish thoughts of billboards, radio jingles, and celebrity spokesmodels. Think of it in the broader sense, as in everything that has to happen to get a raw food, say a potato, to market. The farm family might have done their own washing, quality control, and bagging, while the marketing sector was likely in charge of warehousing and getting the sacks off to retailers and ultimately to the serving dish on your dining room table.
Zoom ahead to 1990. This is postindustrialization of the food system when monoculture, specializing in raising one food for market, had partnered up with technological advances such as big machines, chemical fertilizers, and the move toward modified seeds. This was all in the name of market efficiency, as farmers could specialize on the tasks and machinery to raise one or two crops or animals, rather than tending to an entire diversified farm.
These efficiencies, it would seem, should make it easier for famers to make a profit, right?
Revisiting that food dollar in 1990, inputs increased to 24 percent, so just about a quarter now went to fancier seeds, more chemicals, and bell-and-whistle-laden machines. And the growing marketing sector was now swallowing up 67 percent—a good-sized hunk of that buck.
Think again of those potatoes. The marketing sector was interested in the growth market of processed foods and was starting earlier in the process, picking up spuds right at the farm gate. Potatoes would catch a ride to a processing plant and start their transformation into a convenience product, such as instant mashed potatoes. Every action, from washing to peeling to dehydrating to the spraying on of sodium acid pyrophosphate and sodium bisulfite plus an emulsifier such as monoglyceride, was now handled by the marketing sector altogether. The resulting concoction would then be shaken and sealed into a labeled and logoed box with nutrition charts and put onto a series of trucks for distribution from hubs to warehouses all over the country to your store.
And how much of the cut does our 1990s farmer get? That’d be nine cents of that food buck—NINE! Put another way, if you paid the farmer nothing at all, items in the grocery store wouldn’t even be a dime cheaper on the dollar.
This requires a dramatic pause.
Sadly, these numbers haven’t improved for the American farmer in the past twenty-five years.
While Locally Laid hasn’t been able to zoom back to those margins of 105 years ago, our partner farmers do get a bit over 20 percent of the food dollar, and that’s after paying their considerable feed bill and a slim margin to us. At more than double the proportional income of most American farmers, it’s not perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Our nation’s turn toward commodity agriculture and its resultant 78 percent decrease in farmer profits led to something other than just poor farmers in this country. It also shifted land ownership. Researcher Willard Cochrane calls it the Agricultural Treadmill. He explained it like this:
As farmers crank out commodities, be it grain or eggs, there’s no way to get a better price for a better product. A commodity is a commodity, after all, as interchangeable as a wing nut. Where one can game the system for more profit is to produce that wing nut on the cheap. That is, until whatever cunning technique the early adopter is using to cut costs, be it chemical or mechanical, becomes standard industry practice. Then as all the farms appropriate whatever clever idea that first farmer was leveraging for bigger yields, everyone’s crop yield goes up and all are rewarded with a market flooded with the commodity and a lower price for all.
This sets forth the whole jogging process anew with the next innovation, and those farmers who can’t afford to climb back onto the treadmill are, as Cochrane says, “cannibalized,” bought out and folded into other, more profitable operations.
But following the dots of how this American tragedy occurred, the undoing of these midsized farms that are Middle Ag, and the gutting of communities they supported, reveals our road map out of it.
I’d called Stew back at his Maine farm but got Sarah on the phone instead. She spends her days organizing all the orders and dispatching the farm’s trucks out six days a week. “Stew is very clear that the way to capture back more of the farmer’s dollar is by owning more pieces of the chain. That includes distribution to stores,” she said.
She also joked that the reason Stew continues to farm this way, growing a great number of crops to serve one geographic region with all its labor and headaches, “is just to prove himself right.”
I hope he does.
Taking his research and using it to define what it is we’ve been doing with our partner farms became the crux of my presentation to the thirty or so Minnesota Cup judges at the Carlson School of Management.
After weeks of writing and rewriting our competition business plan and working with mentors on everything from public speaking to marketing, I was standing in front of these esteemed businesspeople in an intimidating lecture hall, wearing borrowed dress clothes. There I gave a sweaty twelve-minute memorized speech on how Locally Laid was actually bringing back better margins for producers.
I swept my hand across PowerPoint slides indicating how we and our partner farmers eschew vertical integration by contracting with other midsized producers working in our region. How each farm patronizes nearby feed mills and farm supply stores participating in the hippie-sounding concept of value chains, which strengthens an entire region’s economy.
In truth, though it hadn’t even been a year, we were already seeing material improvements in this community.
As I was giving this talk, the audience stuck with my goose-bumpy salute to the millions of Americans who continue to live rurally despite the disappearance of so many solid ag-related jobs.
Before you get concerned that we’ll get bigheaded or trip over our imaginary cape, you need not worry. We came in second in the competition, solidly preserving our runner-up legacy—though it was hard to feel too bad, as we lost to a company with a nutritional drink for the gravely ill, mostly cancer patients. We also walked away with a five-thousand-dollar check, new connections, and a better way to speak about what it is we’re trying to do out there in the big world.
Chapter 23
A couple of months later, I was back in Maine to dissect a chicken.
This had seemed like a good idea, on my Duluth couch, while reading the agenda for this multi-day, hands-on experience—get to know the bird inside
and out. I wanted to know more. Lots more.
Now a full-time Locally Laid employee, I desired mastery with layers, to be a good steward to our girls in the field, a coach to our partner farmers, and the well-informed community resource people believed me to be. As the biggest poultry game in town, we field a lot of questions. Hobby farmers and backyard keepers call or find me out in public, leaving me to illustrate basic poultry care, like how treat a chick ill with “pasty butt” (holding her rear under a warm running faucet to wash off the fecal matter blocking her vent) all while standing in the produce aisle or parking lot. I was desperate to avoid being that Locally Laid lady who gave bad advice to the 4-H kids.
In this knowledge quest, I found resources thin. Traditionally, farming is an art and science that has been passed down from parents to children. But as industrialization relocated farm kids to new lives in the city, there’s been a widening instructional gap. First-generation farmers like us are left to library books and YouTube tutors.
I was ready for something more formal.
There were twenty or so participants at the Applied Poultry Science Project. It’s a grant-funded effort to instruct New England educators, such as extension agents, agricultural program teachers, and mentors, in all things chicken. Clearly, Duluth, no matter how cleverly one folds the map, isn’t on the East Coast, and I’m no farm agent. However, I’d found this rare three-day intensive workshop after weeks of tickling Google.
There had been few offerings that weren’t either a one-hour lecture for backyard keepers or a multimonth commercial course in another country. When I saw the Maine program, I desperately wanted in. After an e-mail, I followed up with a phone conversation in which mild begging may have occurred. Plus, I promised to earn my keep by teaching a marketing workshop I’d developed specifically for farmers. It’s my “dog and poultry show” that I’d carted to many university classrooms and some farm and food conferences. When I offered a trade, they accepted.
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