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.