Locality and Ecology: A Reflection on Local Food, Ecological Stewardship, and the Logic of the Market

To sell at the farmers market or not to sell at the farmers market? As spring descends in full force and I contemplate the imminent gardening season, this is the question that has me staring at the ceiling each night. But why?

My family of three moved onto our little country property at the end of April last year, just in time to plan and plant a garden. And as we did so we also made a spontaneous decision: with only a few years of gardening experience between us, including two years as a market garden intern under my own belt, we were going to purchased a vendor’s license and sell our produce at the local farmers market. We were small scale to be sure, but we happily tended our few rows of lettuce, spinach, and potatoes, and each Saturday even more happily sold them. It was a smashing success: we made friends, we established relationships with clients who came back to our stand week after week, we came home with cash in our pockets, and we felt like we were part of a small but vibrant local foods movement in our little corner of northeastern Ohio. Most importantly of all, we loved the actual experience. Every Saturday the four hours of the market flew by as we chatted with new and old friends and hawked our wares, and at market’s end we were tired but already looking forward to the next week. So why, half a year later, would I be wavering over whether or not to repeat the whole experience? There’s a simple answer to this question, and then there’s a more complex answer that has as much to do with the state of small-scale sustainable farming today as it does our particular circumstances.

The quick answer is that we simply have a lot on our plate. We just had our second child in December, my wife has a small but budding crafts business, and I myself am knee-deep in a doctoral dissertation. At times it’s a challenge just to get the dishes and the diapers washed – how are we possibly going to find the time to do the planning, seed starting, planting, watering, weeding, harvesting, processing, and selling that a market garden requires? For all its benefits, the whole process would take away precious time and add additional stress to our lives. Why not simplify by taking a year or two off, at least until the children are older and don’t need constant supervision? It would sting a little to remove the proud label of Local Food Vendor, but at least we wouldn’t have to choose between farm time and family time.

But as I lay in bed the other night, staring up at the ceiling, it struck me that the dilemma was more complex than that. It ran deeper than a simple question of work and free time. After all, plenty of other farmers and market gardeners find themselves even more time constrained than us and still manage to carry on farming. Certainly the majority of vendors at our market farm on the side while holding down full- or part-time jobs. And furthermore, whether we sold at the market or not, we would still be planting a garden, and even a poorly tended backyard veggie patch requires some amount of planning, planting, watering, weeding, etc. The only difference would be the destination of the produce – our clients’ tables or our own. And there, I realized, was the crux of the problem.

It goes back to a more fundamental question: What are our ultimate goals in living this country life, in managing this little piece of land, in growing food? For us, moving to a small rural acreage was so thrilling because it would allow us to realize a singular dream long in the making: to be the stewards of a property, to manage a tiny piece of the earth respectfully and intelligently and productively. Not just to enjoy a woods but to care for a woodlot. Not just to have a lawn but a living meadow. Not just to landscape the driveway but to plant a living hedgerow with fruit and nut trees. And not just to grow food but to produce vegetables and fruits of the highest quality while increasing the fertility of the soil. In short, the garden itself was just one piece of a larger puzzle, a larger project which I will call ecological stewardship – to manage the land, the flora, the fauna, and even the property’s physical infrastructure so that it provides a satisfying lifestyle while paying respect to the forces of nature. What I realized while lying in bed is that our primary goal in living and working on our property is not producing “local food” or selling at the farmers market, it is ecological stewardship in a much larger sense. And producing food for sale at the market is simply a happy outcome – a positive externality, if you like – of that larger goal.

So time is still the limiting factor. Like all people, my wife and I have a finite set of hours available to us each day. A large portion of those are already acounted for – by eating, by sleeping, by caring for our kids, by my wife’s business in her case and my schoolwork in mine. Whatever’s left over will be allocated to the farm. But the question is no longer whether there is enough time left over to run a market garden without adding too much stress to our lives, it is whether there is enough time to have a market garden and still fulfill the vision of ecological stewardship. The dilemma is not one of having to choose between farming and family, it’s having to choose between different visions of farming.

If we allocate our spare time to producing for the market, then the market takes center stage. We invest more in capital costs in order to produce with greater precision and efficiency and on a larger scale, and return on investment becomes the paramount concern. The logic of ecology and sustainability loses ground to the logic of productivity. In a backyard garden a few heads of lettuce can be sacrificed to the slugs or can go to seed with little feeling of loss, but in a market garden every head represents a certain potential for income. That lettuce no longer stands just for food, it stands for money, so the slugs aren’t just eating into a leaf of Red Sails, they’re eating into our profits. If time is the limiting factor and profit the immediate goal, we will maximize the efficiency of our labor output. Instead of gardening for maximum diversity we will choose a handful of the most profitable varieties and grow them in larger quantities. And varieties would not be selected according to our personal preferences, but to those of the market. Long rows of the same crop would replace shorter mixed beds. Landscape cloth instead of organic mulches. Purchased fertilizers instead of an on-farm composting system. And I am not just speaking hypothetically here – these are some of the real dilemmas we are mulling over at this very moment as this year’s growing season beckons. And they are precisely the sort of outcomes I have witnessed on multiple market garden operations, where even the most well-intentioned farmer must at some point bend her ideals to fit the ethos of production.

And all of that is just the garden. The real tragedy – the one that keeps me up at night – is what would happen, or more properly what would not happen, on the remainder of the property. If our free time is devoted to the exacting task of growing food for other people, will we find the time to develop a meadow or manage a pasture for a small flock of livestock? Producing our own eggs with a small flock of hens, as we do now, is very gratifying but it also imposes a time demand and some capital outlay. In full production mode perhaps we would simply scrap the flock and revert to buying our eggs again. The lofty goal of managing fencelines for supplemental production of fruits, nuts, and firewood would likely be abandoned altogether. Or, getting back to the garden again, let me take this a step further: will we even have time to grow food for ourselves in a proper manner? If we’re growing carrots for the market and peppers for our own fridge and it’s Friday evening and both rows need to be weeded, which do you think will get our attention? Local food production is often spoken of as a natural vehicle towards a more sustainable farming system, but, shocking as it sounds, growing for local markets and managing a farm holistically may at times be incompatible.

What all of this comes down to is a fairly simple question: Is local food production an end in itself, an inherent good? Or is it merely a means – and one possible means of many – towards the larger goal of maintaining a sustainable, agrarian landscape? In the popular press’s account of local food, the locality alone is usually treated as the goal in and of itself. To take just one example, practitioners of the well-known “100 mile diet” do not rank order the farms they patronize according to any kind of ecological logic, they simply try to source as much of their food as possible from farms as close to them as possible. I, however, would argue something different. To my eyes, local food production is not an end in itself, and it is not even the means towards an end. It is rather a secondary benefit, a happy byproduct of the more fundamental vision of ecological stewardship.

The temptation to sell at the farmers market remains for us simply because it is both a gratifying and an enjoyable experience. But if producing for the local market actually interferes with the ecological stewardship of our land, then something has to give. If “get big” has more recently given way to “get local,” we might still choose to just get out.

Obama Optimism

DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE: Clinton supporters will vote for Obama in November

I just read a two weeks old but still uplifting post over at Ink, in which the author makes the case that Obama is on the upswing again after flirting with 'pastor disaster.' It's surely an opinion shared by many, but I still found it uplifting because, for all his positive attributes, for a pessimistic political progressive like myself Obama's campaign has that air of fragility about it that one comes to expect from all things hopeful. It is not that he or his message are fragile per se, but that the world is a mean place and messages of hope tend to get chewed up and spit out by an unforgiving political machine, especially when they have to hold their own for months on end before being validated, as in the case of a long election year. But Ink's post got me thinking about another reason for Obama optimism, and it is the precise opposite message that we are presently hearing from the media corps. At first I believed their gloomy prediction too, particularly the first rumblings of it that came to my ears: a convincing commentary by NPR's Ted Koppel right after Clinton's still-hanging-on-by-the-fingernails_a.k.a._"comeback" victories in OH and TX on March 4. And the message only got more convincing the more that others repeated it: the Democrats are being riven by infighting and bitterness, we are creating long-lasting internal animosities, the party needs to choose a candidate now so they can begin duking it out with McCain instead of with one another. Particularly troublesome are the poll results we repeatedly hear that x% of Clinton supporters say they would vote for McCain over Obama, and y% of Obama voters say the same about Clinton. But . . . I am no longer buying it.

I have been mulling this over and I've come to the conclusion that it is nonsense. A staunch supporter of a liberal democrat would vote for a white, male, pro-war Republican over a different liberal democrat, just because their liberal democrat of choice did not get the nomination? Nonsense. This is a classic case of one of the flaws of polls -- people answer a question about the future ("Who would you vote for in November?") based on their feelings in the present ("If Hillary loses the nomination my world will end"). [See the similarity here to one of Daniel Gilbert's theses, about our inability to predict how we will actually feel when a future event comes to pass, in his for the most part excellent book Stumbling on Happiness. The truth is that, whoever gets the nomination, their rival's supporters will be pissed off for a few days, maybe a few weeks, but then that will fade and they will come to their senses and continue to vote Democrat in the general election. If you want proof, just look across the aisle: I recall listening to conservative radio talk shows a few months ago when the Republican nomination was still an open question and being just amazed at how vicious was their hate for McCain. We all heard Ann Coulter's silly comments about campaigning for Hillary if it came to McCain versus her. And now where do all those talk show hosts stand? They may not like McCain, but they sure as hell aren't talking trash about him anymore. And they will all vote for him in November, because who else are they going to vote for? Ralph Nader?

I like the way one friend of mine put it -- if you are a Hillary supporter and you truly would vote for McCain over Obama, the reason could only be either (a) racism or (b) a complete misunderstanding of your own stated political philosophy. There may be a small segment of either camp that would actually remain bitter enough after their candidate loses to vote for McCain, but they will be a tiny percentage. And I believe this is particularly the case for Clinton supporters. Many Obama supporters genuinely dislike Clinton and the Clinton Machine, for various reasons whether justified or not, and perhaps they would vote for McCain -- or simply not vote at all -- out of this genuine dislike. But most Clinton supporters can say nothing worse about Obama than that he's not as "experienced" or "qualified" as their gal. Sorry, despite the vigor of their support for Clinton, that is not a feeling strong enough to make them switch parties in November.

Here's how I call it -- Obama gets the eventual nod; Clinton supporters bitch, moan, and seethe for a little while; then the dust settles and people come to their senses. Obama takes McCain handily. I remain at heart a political pessimist (how could you not be after the last 8 years?), but at present I am riding a tide of optimism: Obama Optimism.