When I think about what a truly healthy, vibrant food system would look like, I envision more farms: small farms serving specific communities, and diversified, midsized farms geared to supplying their surrounding regions.
Many hands make site work.
Of course, there would still be interstate and global trade -- you can't grow olives or coffee in Iowa, or enough wheat in Florida to supply the state's bakers. But with more farms across the nation, we could all generally eat much closer to home, consuming fewer resources and throwing off less pollution in the process. Traveling would be more interesting as well. Imagine finding region-specific, seasonal specialties -- not standardized burgers -- at train stations across the land. (Oh yeah, in my vision, there'd also be a high-functioning national rail system.)
In some ways, this scenario -- the food part, anyway -- isn't so far-fetched. I've watched people's zeal to "eat local" rise dramatically over the past 10 years. And now, even the business media are taking it seriously. Just last week, BusinessWeek joined the chorus heralding the "Rise of the Locavore," noting that, "Consumers increasingly are seeking out the flavors of fresh, vine-ripened foods grown on local farms rather than those trucked to supermarkets from faraway lands." Nationwide, the number of farmers' markets ballooned by 50 percent between 2001 and 2006, BusinessWeek reports.
But consumer demand alone can only create so much change. Though the locavore movement is heartening and necessary, it remains a tiny organism compared to our great lumbering beast of an industrial food system. By some estimates, local-oriented farms supply something like 2 percent of U.S. food calories. To move beyond the farmers' market box, farms producing for local and regional markets will have to multiply in number far more than that impressive 50 percent figure.
I've already identified one major obstacle between my reverie and reality: infrastructure. As I wrote in a recent column on the need to revive the dismal fortunes of midsized farms, the infrastructure needed for such farms to thrive -- locally owned grocery stores, dairy-processing plants, slaughterhouses, canneries -- has withered away as the food industry consolidated over the decades.
In the weeks since that column, I've hit upon another roadblock: a growing labor shortage that's falling particularly hard on midsized farms.
Belaboring the Point
At first glance, New York would seem a particularly ripe state for a midsized farm renaissance. It boasts a bustling metropolis -- the nation's largest -- with a strong and growing locavore scene. Combined with population centers like Albany and Rochester, the vast organism that is greater New York City might be expected to provide a robust market for the midsized farms that dot the state's landscape.
Yet those very farms are struggling to harvest their produce because of an ongoing labor shortage. And produce unharvested means produce unsold -- and farms in trouble.
According to a recent New York Times piece, upstate farms are suffering because very few U.S.-born citizens will accept agriculture jobs -- and the undocumented workers who have been staffing them for years are being hounded out by anti-immigration zeal.
As a result, farmers are scaling back production of labor-intensive fruit and vegetable crops and investing heavily in labor-replacing machinery. Substituting human labor with machinery not only boosts agriculture's fossil fuel use, it also makes farms more vulnerable by strapping them with debt.
Not surprisingly, their lenders are getting nervous. In testimony last fall before the U.S. House Agriculture Committee, an official from Farm Credit of Western New York estimated that more than 800 farms in the state, representing 750,000 acres in farmland, were "highly vulnerable to going out of business or forced to [become] part-time farms from a severe labor shortage."
These operations, whose average size is less than 100 acres, essentially represent New York's base of midsized farms. The Farm Credit official predicted that if those farms fail, much of that land would likely remain in some form of agriculture, but that "hundreds of thousands of acres would be vulnerable to being discontinued from crop production and converted to non-farm uses."
In other words, what's left of New York's most productive farmland may soon be sprouting second homes and vacation condos where it once produced tomatoes and green beans.
U.S. Farms Migrate to Mexico
The problem is by no means limited to the Northeast. In California, the Associated Press reports, Mexican farmworkers are having trouble heading north over an increasingly well-patrolled border -- but U.S. farm owners are crossing the other way freely. According to AP, "Many [U.S. growers have] moved their fields to Mexico, where they can find qualified people, often with U.S. experience, who can't be deported."
When they jump the border to buy land -- presumably without having to risk their lives in the desert or hire "coyotes" to ease the passage -- U.S. farm owners find an oasis of cheap and compliant labor. AP reports that U.S. farm employers can buy a whole day's worth of labor for a wage ($9.60) equal to an hour's worth of work at the going rate north of the border -- while still doubling Mexico's minimum wage of $4.80 per day.
Now, the AP article is talking mainly about large-scale agriculture here -- the kind that keeps your local Wal-Mart stocked with little bags of baby spinach and asparagus all year. In the logic of industrial farming -- where food is grown in vast, centralized monocrops, and then distributed in thousand mile-plus radii -- the shift from California to Mexico makes a certain sense. "Mexico is closer to eastern U.S. markets than California," Associated Press reports. "Shipping times to Atlanta are a day shorter from Mexico's central Guanajuato state."
But the labor crunch is surely also squeezing California's midsized operations -- the farms that will be needed to broaden local-food access in one of the nation's most economically stratified states. In farm fields larger than even a few acres, diversified vegetable farming is extremely labor intensive -- and in the modern U.S., farm labor generally means immigrant labor.
What, then, is the answer? In the short term, the U.S. should end its ridiculous nativist immigration policies. As I've written before, Mexican farmworkers don't sneak across one of the globe's most militarized borders to freeload off of U.S. taxpayers, despite the fantasies of certain cable-TV commentators. Rather, they're fleeing a near-complete meltdown in small-scale Mexican agriculture -- one that directly implicates the free-trade zeal of U.S. policymakers and corporations.
But even if U.S. policymakers did open the border -- highly unlikely -- we can't build a sustainable food system in the United States on the backs of former Mexican farmers who have been driven off their land by NAFTA and other binational U.S.-Mexico policies. The time has come for the U.S. sustainable-food movement to develop a North American consciousness -- to foster a farmworker movement of its own, and to seek coalitions with Mexican small-farm advocates to rebuild local and regional food networks on both sides of the border.
Simultaneously, it's time to develop an idea floated by Anna Lappé on Grist a couple of months back: farm work as a green-collar job. Heard of Teach for America, the federal program that draws college graduates into critically important, but horribly paid, public-school jobs? The time for Farm for America is ripe -- as ripe as the fruit that will soon be rotting on vines across the country for lack of pickers.
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Comments
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mamajoy Posted 2:57 am
30 May 2008
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PermieWriter Posted 5:47 am
30 May 2008
We're chronically misled by the artificially low prices at grocery stores that do not represent all the externalized costs, including underpaid farm workers. How do we convince Americans to pay more for less, higher quality food? If that happens, that whacks a big part of the medical industry problems as well (obesity, diabetes, etc.).
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Stephanie Ogburn Posted 6:52 am
30 May 2008
Good column. This labor problem was the major topic of my graduate thesis; I interviewed farmers in Western Colo. about labor. Most of them, no matter how socially conscious, would not pay more than $7 or $8/hr for their workers. A lot of these (either certified organic or uncertified but growing organically) farmers relied on interns or family members for free labor, or Mexican farm laborers that they paid very little. And for those Mexican laborers, the work was seasonal, so many of them were either mobile or based in a central town about an hour drive from where they worked. They would drive up to our valley to pick cherries, peaches, nectarines, plums, apples, as the season went on and then back home most every day. Some did live in employer-provided housing, but only seasonally. This population of workers were almost an invisible population in the area where I did my research, and they even seemed invisible to the otherwise progressively-minded farmers who employed them.
What I found was that since farmers can't pay high enough wages, they either discount their own labor or the labor of someone else. And even then they barely make ends meet. I can't see a clear way around this problem, other than farmers being able to charge a lot more for produce or being subsidized in some way.
This summer, I am working part time on a farm, mostly weeding, harvesting, and selling at the market. I'm doing this because I believe in it and like the work. I might be a "green collar" farm worker. However, I can't work full time for any farmer here because I need a better-paying job in order to make ends meet. In the area I live now, the going rate for farmworkers is about $8/hr. It's just impossible to be a full time farm worker if you want to have a place-based life, since the work isn't year round and pays so poorly. You have to be able to cut corners by living in crowded circumstances and move around so you have work almost year round.
And it isn't like my area is a local/organic food desert; we have three thriving farmers' markets where farmers often sell out, but they just can't raise prices for produce high enough to compensate their laborers at a liveable wage.
And when considering the Teach For America model, let's think about a few things:
Is Teach For America is actually changing the system within which it's working?
How many people work for TFA and then leave the system burnt out and wanting to move on to something better?
Does TFA challenge the overarching paradigm of public schools, which, in my opinion, isn't a viable model for this century?
On the positive side, something like TFA for farm workers would be good because even those who only engage for a short period of time are forever aware of the problems within the institutions where they work (be it education or agriculture) and therefore may be more likely to support policy changes in those institutions. But I am unsure if it is really a way to engage with changing the system
(disclosure: I was a TFA corps member; in an interesting twist, most of my fourth-graders were the kids of migrant farm workers)
Well, that's my 99 cents.
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tdmeeh Posted 7:24 am
30 May 2008
On a different note, I have been reading a book by Eliot Coleman called "The New Organic Grower". In this book Coleman argues that an ideal scale for a truck farm is actually more like five acres, as this is a scale that can be maintained by a family with minimal expensive machinery.
Maybe the answer to our industrial farm problem is not mid-sized farms, but rather many more very small farms. Where do all these new farmers come from? Maybe they are idealistic youngsters fresh out of the Farm For America program?
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belloinsella Posted 11:10 pm
31 May 2008
I think it's extremely necessary for those people who want to get into farming to have access to training. Farming cannot just be taught in the classroom setting, but accompanied with hands-on experience. Often this type of training is hard to come by and often unpaid. But, like so many other trades, apprenticeships or internships are the only method to gain the knowledge. It's rather unfortunate though because food production is so important.
One resource to find apprenticeships into sustainable farming is the directory from ATTRA. You can find it HERE. I'm looking at trying to do an apprenticeship soon, but I'm finding that working on organic farms a great resource for education. Although, like said in a previous post, it's difficult to make a decent wage doing this.
Will part-time farm workers need to supplement their work with an "off-farm" income like so many full-time farmers do?
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justinhahn Posted 8:39 am
01 Jun 2008
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justinhahn Posted 10:08 am
01 Jun 2008
to find this work force, how about looking for people who 1) have other things to do durning the time of the year when plants aren't growing or being harvested and 2) don't really need to support themselves or a family. or in short: students, and espcially college students.
the Farm For America idea is good. but instead of tageting post-graduates, why not target pre-graduates -- people who will be working minnimum wage jobs which are far less rewarding than farm work is anyway.
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renegade botanist Posted 2:43 pm
01 Jun 2008
Now days high school students are not interested in physical labor. Their parents won't let them work for anything less than $10/hour. They are not available to work because of all the sports camps, summer practises etc.
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blacksheep Posted 11:42 pm
02 Jun 2008
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wiscidea Posted 2:13 pm
04 Jun 2008
I spent six hours pulling grass, trying to get every last root, from several rows -- about 80 square feet -- of strawberry plants. Fortunately, I'm talkng about a home garden, so it is a labor of love and protects us from contaminated fruit. It is worth the effort.
But if someone paid me a reasonable wage of $20 per hour or $42,000 a year to do this sort of thing, it would cost $1.50 (+ health insurance + retirement benefits + social security) to clear the weeds from just one square foot. Is this cost effective? Is the yield high enough on an organic farm?
I cannot imagine how you folks compete with industrial ag.
(Sorry for the duplicate post... seems to fall under each topic and I couldn't decide where to post it. Peace.)
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belloinsella Posted 10:35 pm
04 Jun 2008
I'm no expert on the subject of weed control or organic farming/gardening. However, I'm currently working on an organic farm that grows strawberry's "commercially" in a small market garden. They're grown on top of grass, but they have a system set up which is based on a no-dig garden bed theory. Essentially they use tall dried grass or straw as mulch and to build a garden bed about 10-12 inches in height. They make a hole in the straw then fill it with compost and plant the seedlings straight in. The mulch suppresses all weeds and competing grass. They have very few, if any, weeds and no grass problem. This is only one method and takes more planning, but seems to be working very well.
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MAD MAC Posted 2:03 pm
05 Jun 2008
100 years ago, standards of living were much lower. Many youth lived on farms and ranches, or worked to harvest with small communities as part of the work cycle. This is still true where I live, in Thailand. This is model is no longer possible for the US. Therefore, factory farms are clearly the model for the future, even though most Greens have a fundamental opposition to them. We are NOT going to become a more aggragrian society unless there is a total glopbal economic collapse, with the resulting wars and mass population decreases that would be associated with same.
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belloinsella Posted 10:31 pm
05 Jun 2008
I agree that we will not become more of an agrarian society without global economic collapse. But we are heading in that direction mainly with the realities that the US has hit peak oil. We're beginning to realize that we have to grow food on a smaller scale and closer to our homes due to the rise in transportation, input, and processing costs. This all stems from our society being built around oil, which was incredibly cheap when we "industrialized".
Manual labor is backbreaking, but it may be more economically feasible than running machinery as oil becomes more expensive.
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Storm Dragon Posted 8:43 am
09 Jun 2008
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