Most people probably don’t think of Carrboro, North Carolina — a
bustling town just outside of Chapel Hill — as a food lover’s
paradise. But walk into the town’s beloved farmers market on a spring Saturday morning, and you see an impressive bounty on display.

Right now, it’s still greens season. Table after table bursts with
bright stacks of collards, kale, and all manner of mustards, plus
arugula, spinach, and many kinds of lettuce. Ahead of the summer
harvest, farmers are offering green garlic — the immature stalk of the
garlic plant that adds an incomparable zip to whatever it touches. It
won’t be long before radishes and peas come along; and soon after,
strawberries, tomatoes, eggplant, and other glories of the hot months.
Already, there’s plenty of raw-milk cheese, and a host of farms offer
delicious pastured pork and poultry — as well as grass-fed lamb and
beef — along with their veggies. Several farmers cook up samples of
their sausage, perfuming the air with savory scents.

While taking in this scene recently, I got to thinking of the minor stir I created in my last column,
when I argued that higher prices for industrial food won’t necessarily
inspire more people to choose sustainably grown, healthier fare.
Instead, I claimed, the price squeeze will likely push people deeper
than ever into the clutches of large-scale food marketers, companies
that know how to economize on ingredients and labor costs while
producing stuff people like to eat. Since then, I’ve pointed in
Gristmill to fast-food execs hailing high commodity prices as good for business, and cash-strapped school-cafeteria administrators spurning fresh fruit for pre-fab cookies.

Annoyed by my analysis, several readers confronted me with a question:
If higher commodity prices won’t “level the playing field” between
industrial and sustainable food, what will? How can we convince more
people to think outside of the Big Box, and to flee the Golden Arches?

Leveling the Playing Field

Standing amid the clamor, the scents, and the conversations of markets
like the one in Carrboro, it’s easy to forget the massive built
environment for industrial food that surrounds us: fast-food outlets by
the hundreds of thousands, massive supermarkets hawking aisle after
aisle of processed “food,” school and hospital cafeterias serving up
not fresh-cooked fare but rather reheated, boxed pap and pabulum — to
the very folks who could use a good meal most.

Why does industrial food dominate the culinary landscape?

The more I think about it, the more the question seems to come down to
supply and infrastructure. No matter what happens to industrial-food
prices, “good, clean, and fair”
food (to use Slow Food’s rhetoric) won’t conquer the American diet
until we produce more of it and have the means for distributing it.

Even in places like Chapel Hill/Carrboro, the incredibly vibrant
local-food scene is essentially confined to the farmers market and a
few visionary, and necessarily relatively expensive, restaurants.
Conventional supermarkets offer an abysmal sea of industrial-food
“choices,” and the area’s food co-op and Whole Foods branch, for all
their buy-local marketing rhetoric, sell mostly industrial-organic fare
hauled in from long distances.

Nationwide, farmers markets and other local-food institutions, for all
their vibrancy, generally remain niche operations catering to a
relatively tiny portion of the population. The Kellogg Foundation (no
longer related to the industrial-food giant famous for its corn flakes)
reckons that nationwide, just 2 percent of food consumed truly qualifies as sustainable.

One reason: although the farmers market model works well for farms
small enough to sell all or most of their produce directly to
consumers, it makes only limited economic sense for mid-sized family
farms. And it’s precisely these mid-sized farms that could ramp up
local and regional food chains to a point where they supply a large
part of the American diet.

Middle of the Story

So why isn’t that happening?

It’s not for lack of numbers. According to a 2007 USDA study,
the U.S. now houses just under a million “working farms” — that is,
farms generating at least $10,000 in annual revenue. And mid-sized
farms — those with annual revenues between $50,000 and $250,000 —
represent fully a third of that total. In fact, they outnumber large
farms (those bringing in more than $250,000) by about two to one.

The problem, rather, is market structure. In the United States today,
there are essentially two marketing channels for farms. You can sell
your produce directly to consumers, through farmers markets and CSAs;
or you can sell it to gigantic corporate buyers that have tremendous
leverage to set price. The former model works well enough for small
farms; the latter works best for large operations tightly focused on
one or two crops — mostly corn and soy.

In that light, it’s not surprising that spaces like Carrboro Market
brim with the bounty of small farms, and our supermarket shelves groan
with goods that amount to clever combinations of processed corn and
soy. As a group of agriculture scholars led by Fred Kirschenmann wrote
in a seminal paper called “Why Worry about Agriculture of the Middle?”
[PDF] mid-sized farms get squeezed in this arrangement. They are “too
small to compete in highly consolidated commodity markets, and too
large … to sell in direct markets.”

As a result, they operate under severe pressure. The above-linked USDA
document tells a grim story. Despite the fact that mid-sized farms make
up a third of working farms at present, we are losing them at a rate of
more than 10 percent every five years. Meanwhile, the number of large
and mega-farms is growing robustly.

Between 1997 and 2003, for example, 10.9 percent of farms with revenues
between $50,000 and $99,000 closed their barn doors, as did 11.2
percent of farms bringing in between $100,000 and $249,000. Over the
same period, the ranks of mega-farms with revenue exceeding $5 million
swelled by 42 percent.

Another USDA study
[PDF], this one from 2006, illustrates the obliteration of mid-sized
farms in stark economic terms. On average, farms with revenues between
$100,000 and $249,000 have an operating profit margin of negative 1.8
percent. Their operations lose money or make very little, and they
augment family income with off-farm work. By contrast, farms that do
between a quarter and a half million in business have operating profit
margins of 10 percent, and farms with revenue of more than a half
million have an average margin of 16 percent.

These large-scale farms don’t respond to the needs of their surrounding
communities; to remain profitable, they toe the line laid down by the
huge multinational food conglomerates that buy their crops. Mid-sized
farms could fill the void between the farmers market and the grocery
section of Wal-Mart at the local and regional level, but right now, the
marketing infrastructure needed to move their goods to nearby consumers
doesn’t exist.

As Kirschenmann et al put it, huge buyers of farm goods like Wal-Mart,
Archer Daniels Midland, and to a large degree even Whole Foods have
serious incentives to deal with only the largest farms. It simply costs
less “to contract with one farmer who raises 10,000 hogs than ten
farmers who raise 1,000 hogs,” they write.

Thus to break the stranglehold of industrial food over the American
diet, we need to find new ways to connect consumers with mid-sized
farmers. The infrastructure for doing so — locally owned grocery
stores, dairy-processing plants, slaughterhouses, canneries — has
withered away as the food industry consolidated over the decades. And
farmers themselves, with their razor-thin if not negative profit
margins, don’t have the resources to make those investments. Closing
the gap between mid-sized farmers and their nearby communities counts,
I think, as the major challenge of the sustainable-food movement going
forward.

So far, the most promising efforts to meet that challenge have come at the local level. Last fall, I wrote about
one such effort in Woodbury County, Iowa. There, farmers and consumers
have worked hard to raise money to create a farmer-owned restaurant,
processing center, distribution business, and grocery store —
explicitly to give the area’s remaining mid-sized farms a viable market
other than the one for corn and soy. All over the country, similar
initiatives are bubbling up, and I’ll continue highlighting them.

“If present trends continue, mid-sized farms, along with the social and
environmental benefits they provide, will likely disappear in the next
decade,” Kirschenmann and his associates wrote several years ago. Since
then, with the rise of the biofuel boom and the jump in corn and soy
prices, those trends have intensified. As go mid-sized farms, so likely
go the prospects for any real challenge to the myriad ravages of
industrial food.