Connecting Farms to Eaters

I've discovered local food and connecting producers to consumers came up at the WhereCamp earlier this year. I thought with the growing interest in theorizing about local food and connecting eaters to the people who grow their food, I'd gather up some links here.

You can download a PDF filled with some of my early theorizing (I'm revising my "manifesto" but have not finished, for release at next year's season). It is available as a PDF Farm Foody: A Social Network Connecting Independent Farms to People presenting my rationale for how the social network benefits the family farm and society. My vision of "leveraging the network" as a way of helping small farms compete in a big agriculture economy falls not far from the idea of "How do we create an incentive system stronger than the federal incentive system?" asked by the WhereCampers. You can read about their ideas in a wiki summarizing the discussion.

Food Talk at Wherecamp 2008

When we started brainstorming and developing farmfoody.org two years ago, we understood it had to be easy for farmers to use, not take up a lot of their time, and had to offer utility. I am currently in the middle of a development cycle ready to release what I call a "social feed" and other sites refer variously to as a "wall" (Tom likes to think of it as a "barn wall") enabling and encouraging members of our social network to interact with each other in small, ad hoc social groups.

There are some other sites out there beginning to combine mapping, farms and food. We wish them good luck in their endeavor.

Revenge of the Round, Red Tomatoes

I believe the contaminated tomato debacle unfolding over the last week has something to tell us about the factory food system, which supplies much of what we eat. It is fascinating how this came to be embodied in the shape of our tomatoes. A lot of people are asking the question, just what kind of tomatoes are safe to eat? One answer, we are told by news and government, is to suspect our round tomato friends of harboring salmonella. I had to stop and ask why is this? Why round tomatoes?

Although the description has caused confusion, my first thought was that by “round red tomato” they were talking about the class of nondescript tomato one finds commonly in the supermarket produce section, piled high in a bin. Typically, these are large, as nearly perfectly spherical as the tomato board can blandish producers into making them, bland looking orbs sold in the supermarkets and funneled by the ton into the fast food system to be slapped onto burgers. They are the perfect food to fit the machine.

A second later, it occurred to me that if I were to go to my local farmer's market or farm stand looking for tomatoes and I found some decidedly out-of-round, oddly shaped heirloom tomatoes, that I could very likely be assured they were uncontaminated. They are too imperfect, too delicate for the factory food system, and very likely grown on a local farm or garden. Their shape was a key to identifying their probable origin in a distributed, local food system. By the shape of the tomato I could judge its origin and quality, since I knew that no sane commodity grower would grow such a tomato, unfit for the fast food joint, unfit for the average consumer (who has lost contact with farm and garden, with whole food) frightened by a few blemishes, odd colors or funky shapes.

I can't promise you won't get sick from locally grown tomatoes. The independent farm system creates something big agriculture lacks: firebreaks. The decentralized nature of independent farms and their localized customer base create firewalls capable of containing an outbreak. The factory food system grows enormous numbers of a single crop and distributes the harvest through a sprawling food processing system, which spreads and amplifies even a small outbreak in one field across the nation, into all sorts of processed foods, just as happened with contaminated lettuce. It is the nature of the system, which has only dominated for a handful of decades, that has changed our relation to food and presented this problem of “wildfires.”

Although an individual tomato patch might become contaminated, the effects would be isolated to the one farm or local area. There is far less chance of cross contamination on the way to market. The farm down, in the other state, the road is unlikely to suffer the same contamination. A farm depends on its reputation. Any taint or question about its food and the farm will be devastated. Independent farms rely on their reputation to bring return business, unlike big agriculture.

Perhaps it is fitting the warning comes in the form of these alien orbs, signaling with their perfect roundness and flashing reds, the revenge of the round red tomatoes. Although at first glance, the oddly shaped heirloom at the farm stand might seem more alien, those are the fruits that piqued my curiosity when as a child my parents took me to visit farm stands. They were outstanding in the multi-lobed beauty, looking ready to burst. They were bursting with flavor, at least when we got them home and started the barbecue.

The Wiki and the Farm

There has been a flurry recently inspired by Michael Pollan writing about a vision of people becoming producers and consumers in society. He argues that industrialization created a division in society between producer and consumer, with the consumer essentially at the mercy of producers.

I've thought about how once there were many producers of food, but as agriculture industrialized, we began to call the things we did "industries," a hog farm became the hog industry, wheat farming became the grain industry, raising beef became the cattle industry. All the little myriad farms producing our food were replaced by large commodity farms based on economy of scale through centralization and industrialization (the use of petrochemical fertilizer, mechanized harvesting).

Some of the changes introduced by industry have been useful, for example frozen peas are by and large much better quality than fresh or canned peas. Peas must be picked at the very peak of sweetness, which only lasts for a day or two. This requires a massive and quick harvesting effort. The peas must be quickly frozen to preserve their sweetness and quality. If the peas were sent to a market, if they were picked over a number of weeks, the quality would suffer. The frozen pea is picked at the peak of sweetness and frozen in one quick, mechanized operation.

On the other hand, we by creating industries out of the various aspects of farming, we have lost something in the translation. We lost the intertwined way plants, animals and the soil interact with each other on the farm. This interaction was replaced by massive inputs of petrochemical fertilizer and pesticides to feed and protect the weak, sickly hybrids raised in huge monoculture beds required by economies of scale. But we lost another thing, which Pollan touches upon, the intermingling of producer and consumer that existed before industrialization. It is easy to see the small farmer as a producer, but it takes a little more digging to see the web of producers and consumers. The farmer produced food that the blacksmith ate, but the blacksmith shod the horses the farmer pulled his plows and harvesters with. At every level, people were producers and consumers.

The blacksmith is a recurring figure in my thoughts. Without a blacksmith the community would grind to a halt. The blacksmith also represents the complex web of production and consumption in the community before everything became an "industry," demonstrates the interdependencies in the community. The blacksmith must eat. The farmer must shoe his horses. No one can escape the individual and direct relationships that sustain them by shifting responsibility to some distant industry. The blacksmith also represents the connection between culture and nature, through the implements he fabricates for the farmer to work the fields and reinforces the true meaning of cultivation, which means to cultivate the land and to cultivate the person through culture.

After industrialization there were only classes of producers and consumers. There is always an imbalance, whether in farming or the music industry between producer and consumer, with a small number of producers creating things and a large number of consumers consuming things. The producers dictate what is produced, how it is produced and the consumers are passive or only through large numbers do they influence what is produced.

What does this have to do with wiki? The moment the first wiki was born, it made everyone and anyone who came along into an author or a reader, a producer or consumer. The wiki by definition commingles production and consumption, producers and consumers. The wiki was way ahead of its time. The contribution of this idea may be more important and lasting than the wiki as a way to manage content. The wiki's greatest contribution was to awaken people to a new reality, that in a networked world of digital information, post-industrialization is possible, that people can become producers and consumers again.

Pollan argues we should start gardens to lessen the division in our society between producers and consumers. By gardening, we can become producers as well as consumers of food. It is worth noting that maintaining a wiki can be likened to gardening, so perhaps a wiki is a garden, where like the real garden, is a place of reconciliation.

Reading In Defense of Food

I am reading Michael Pollan’s latest book, In Defense of Food. I had just reached the end of his forward when I was struck by one of the closing paragraphs, which says that eaters have real choices now thanks to the revival of local farms and farmer’s markets, which make practical the availability of whole foods. I had to stop, the words echoing in my mind, because they were incredibly resonant with what myself and Tom Davenport are doing at farmfoody.org, reminding us that our health, the health of the land, the health of our food culture are inextricably linked.

I continued my reading and came to the point where Pollan relates the story of dentist and amateur scientist Weston Price, who abandoned his practice to study the food culture and nutrition of various aboriginal peoples around the world, untouched by the Western diet. Price concluded the common denominator of health among these peoples was, as Pollan says “to eat a traditional diet consisting of fresh foods from animals and plants grown on soils that were themselves rich in nutrients.”

Tom and me believe that the survival of small, independent farms is dependent on leveraging their local characteristics, just as wine makers leverage terroir as as an argument for the uniqueness of their wines. It is not a stretch to believe, as Pollan does, that the richness of the soil has an influence on the nutritional richness of food. Price’s description mirrors that of the small, independent farm supplying the local area with food, which was common before the second world war.

Moreover, Pollan writes that Price believed that “by breaking the links among local soils, local foods, and local peoples, the industrial food system disrupted the circular flow of nutrients through the food chain.” I am not sure about the disruption of nutrients, but it is those broken links we wish to restore by making some new links of our own, linking local soils, local foods and local peoples together again through social networking.

As I turned the pages, I discovered another passage that resonated with our intuitions about linking together the land, food and people though locality, food and culture using the technology of the 21st century. In the latter half of In Defense of Food the author lays out rules of thumb for escaping the Western Diet, but before doing so, he observes that food does not consist of nutrients alone, but “comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people.” Our hope this is exactly what our website will do, create a web of social relationships reaching back to the land and to other people, through the farms and foodies, sharing their pictures and their recipes, a little bit of who they are with each other.

That is as far as I’ve got, but with farmfoody.org, Tom and me want to enable people to create, sustain and nurture change in our food culture, because we believe that a healthy society and a healthy people is a product of nurturing a set of relationships with food, the natural world and people.

The Tomato and the Grape: Whole Foods, Terroir and the Independent Farm

"It's very hard to make money selling whole food." says Michael Pollan in a talk given at the Free Library in Philadelphia on the 10th of January 2008 about his new book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto and available as video through C-SPAN BookTv. He explains whole foods are not as profitable as processed foods because the whole food cannot distinguish itself from other foods in the marketplace. There is nothing special about plain oats to make them cost more. By processing the oats and packaging them in a way that distinguishes them from ordinary oats, the profit is higher because people are willing to pay more for a unique product. Independent farmers face this problem every day, but there is a solution.

An idea developed through centuries of French winemaking based on observations of the special characteristics bestowed on individual wines by geography. The term denoting this special characteristic, which no other wine could claim even if made from the same grapes, is termed terroir, which loosely means "sense of place." If the concept of terroir could be extended to all whole foods, it would then be possible to distinguish one whole food from another creating competition among producers of whole foods. This is what happened to French wines, with wine of one terroir becoming more highly prized than another, thus producing a higher profit than a generic wine. Applied to farming, it becomes possible to distinguish a heirloom tomato from the regulation, perfectly spherical, artificially red, tomato in name only served up at fast food joints and found in supermarkets.

This has already begun to take shape in an ad hoc and unvoiced way as the remaining independent farms become boutique farms, selling high end produce to sophisticated farm stand buyers and knowledgeable chefs at gourmet restaurants. Survivors of the agricultural contraction seen during the last century have implicitly adopted the idea of terroir. This idea of adapting terroir to farming came up frequently in my discussions with Tom Davenport over the last two years during the planning of farmfoody.org, our social networking site for farmers and foodies. He was insistent that the idea of terroir be incorporated in some way into our site, tirelessly pushing for the development of features involving geographical location.

Farm Foody: A Social Network Connecting Independent Farms to People

Over the last year, I have been working with Tom Davenport, and Matthew Davenport, of Hollin Farms, a small, independent but very internet-savvy family farm to start a social networking service Farm Foody (farmfoody.org), which uses the Internet to connect local farmers like you to their customers. I would like to summarize why we believe social networking is so important to the survival of the independent family farm, by posting a revised version of our flyer.

A social network is a group of people who become connected to each other through their activities and interests within an online community.

We believe a social network increases the economic leverage for the independent farm. A catalog of farms or an individual farm homepage does not change the economic leverage of a farm. A social network gives the small farm leverage in a big agriculture economy in two principle ways: by helping farmers manage their relationships with customers more efficiently and generating a more effective marketing presence through the social networking experience.

The independent farmer must create a close relationship with the customer, similar to the relationship an artisan baker or butcher has with their customers. This involves effort, which our website seeks to reduce to a manageable level and leverage for marketing effect. We hope by providing a means to relate directly with consumers as a “personal farmer” your farm can compete in a small farm economy becoming dominated by high end, specialty products.

We like to think of the social network as restoring the balance that once existed in small town America between the farmer and the customer.

A social network provides benefits to both farmer and consumer. When people are members of a social network, they automatically generate a marketing presence for you through normal activities they find beneficial. This presence is much larger than any standalone website, catalog or advertisement could provide, since it includes all of the people who are friends of your farm and their friends, and so on. These indirect effects are difficult to enumerate, just as the fertility of the soil is hard to explain, but the effects are there for all to see. We all recognize fertile soil when we see it by the vibrancy of the plants growing in it. The social network is like the soil a plant grows in.

People are encouraged by the social network to discover new farms by exploring the relationships between network members.

When people visit a social networking site, they will ordinarily explore the site through following relationships with “friends.” In a social network, anyone can be a friend of another member. In this manner, they often find other members to become friends with who they might never have found through searching. This process is similar to “word of mouth” in the real world, where people ask their friends where they bought their produce. This phenomena drives new customers to your farm without the farmer being required to do anything.

Think of how musical groups create elaborate websites to market their music, yet nearly all successful music groups today maintain a presence on a social networking website. They receive much more activity and feedback, much greater awareness among young people who buy their music, through the social network than the traditional website.

Unlike a catalog of farms, even with a locality search, the social network draws people in and keeps them there with an activity, it gives them a stake in the farm and in their own presence on the site, which benefits them and the farms they affiliate with. Your “profile” (presence) on the site becomes a place for customers to return to for the latest information on your farm. A customer's profile becomes a way to share their own interests (along with your farm) with others. When you post a bulletin (like a classified ad), it automatically flows out to friends of your farm. Non-farm members can even use the network to promote themselves.

Think of a chef joining the network, becoming a friend of several farms they purchase produce from promoting his own abilities through his network of friends and bulletins, leading new customers to your farm.

The social network involves people with the life of the farm. Interest in agriculture has never been greater. The farm is an exotic location for agricultural tourism. Organic food is an established product. Eating local has never been more attractive to the consumer. With books like Omnivore's Dilemma, and the recent anxiety and uncertainly about imported foods, people are more likely than ever to wonder where their food comes from. Farm Foody leverages this social change for you.

A site designed by farmers for farmers.

Our experience at Hollin Farms helped us to design an online service mindful of the needs of farmers. We understand the farmer does not have time to sit at the computer figuring out how to update their information. Our goal was to make using our site as simple and immediate as possible in order to reduce the time and effort you spend answering customer's questions, keeping your customers up to date on availability of produce, and the like. We believe the Internet can play a vital role in helping the independent farmer survive and prosper in the 21st century.

farmfoody.org

A website by Tom Davenport, Hollin Farms (hollinfarms.com) and Steve Knoblock (brandymorecastle.org)

An Easter Egg in Winter

I had my first experience today with the emerging new technology of labeling individual food items in order to make them traceable. I opened a carton of eggs from Giant supermarket, picked up an egg to make my breakfast (my favorite fried egg and leftover dressing concoction). I noticed some writing in gold ink on my egg. An Easter Egg! WooHoo! And then I thought, perhaps it is one of those crazy internet projects where people put writing on things directing you to a website to track it. Like a garden gnome, a book or paper money. No, it said "Best by" and a date. Aha, I recognized it was an example of the individual food item labeling I'd heard about and seen demonstrated on television.

I checked the egg carton hoping there would be some information about the code on the egg. Yes, the carton directed me to a a website where I could find out more information about my egg: giantfreshegg.com (or you can go to http://www.myfreshegg.com/ for other brands), which redirects to a site where I can enter the code and sell by date into a web form to identify and trace my egg. I entered the code. A page displaying information about my egg appeared: "Key Egg Dates;" the date my egg was processed, the sell by date; "Your Egg Information;" told me my egg came from Hillandale Farms, which I know to be a large industrial egg producer.

The numbers and letters printed on my egg are called a "Freshness and Traceability Code." This is an attempt by industrial agriculture to satisfy consumer demand for knowing where their food comes from, which is gaining popularity with greater concern for food quality, ethics and safety. It is one more way that large scale agriculture hopes to compete with small, independent and organic farms. The company behind this (laudable) technology is http://www.eggfusion.com/

I welcome measures increasing the traceability of food, especially in the industrial agriculture and processed foods realm, where for example, one bad leaf in a field of spinach gets mixed up in tens of thousands of bags, inoculating them with bad bugs and the industrial system spreading them out over the country. When people bought lettuce by the head, only one person might be sickened by a bad head, but chop the lettuce head up, bag it and distribute it to tens of thousands of people and you have a new problem created by the efficiency of industrial agriculture. Yes, it's convenient, but is it sustainable? We need to know where our food comes from whether from big factory farms or small organic ones, in order to make choices about the advantages and disadvantages of factory farms and factory foods.