[lofo List] Toward a less efficient and more robust food system

[Daryl Hepting <hepting@cs.uregina.ca>]

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-toward-a-less-efficient-and-more-robust/

Toward a less efficient and more robust food system
Editor’s Note: This is a version of an address delivered before the  
High Country Local Food Summit on March 26, in Boone, N.C., organized  
by Appalachian State University’s Sustainable Development Department.  
The High Country is a three-county region in the mountains of western  
North Carolina.

I’ve been asked to talk about how to create a robust, diversified food  
system here in the High Country.

Now the High Country is a largely rural area, constructed around a  
relatively small town called Boone. But I’m going to start by doing  
something odd. I’m going to quote someone who’s probably the most  
famous urban theorist of our time: Jane Jacobs, who died in 2006.  
Don’t worry, I will circle back to what an urban theorist’s work has  
to do with our situation here in rural north Carolina.

In her great book, The Economy of Cities, Jacobs praised what she  
called the “valuable inefficiencies and impracticalities of cities.”  
To illustrate her point, she invited readers to consider two examples  
from Victorian England: Manchester and Birmingham—or as she put it,  
“Efficient Manchester,” and “Inefficient Birmingham.”

A 19th century marvel and widely hailed as the “city of the future,”  
Manchester represented a break from the past. What Manchester did that  
was so new and different was simple—it specialized. The city threw its  
lot with one industry—textiles. Jacobs refers to the “stunning  
efficiency of its textile mills.” By the 1840s, the textile industry  
dominated the city entirely, Jacob tells us. The industry was brutally  
competitive; less efficient producers got swallowed up by larger, more  
streamlined players.

Contemporaries were impressed. For boosters, Manchester’s textile  
industry represented the triumph of the industrial revolution, the  
vindication of the power division of labor and specialization. As for  
detractors, a German writer named Karl Marx witnessed Manchester’s  
boom period and loathed the inequality he saw—a few wealthy mill  
owners and the thousands of impoverished mill workers. He also  
deplored the dehumanization of labor—the need to force humans to  
behave repetitive-motion machines. But like the boosters, Marx saw  
Manchester as a portent of the cities of the future—places that  
consolidate economic activity into a single industry, and then produce  
a single kind of product with terrible efficiency.

Now, a little ways to the south of Manchester lies a city called  
Birmingham. By the mid-19th century, Birmingham looked mired in the  
past. No one gaped at its “terrible efficiency.” Birmingham had a few  
relatively large industries, Jacob writes, but nothing to compare with  
Manchester’s textile behemoth. What really made Birmingham’s economy  
tick were its small operations. Jacobs tells us that “most of  
Birmingham’s manufacturing was carried out in small organizations  
employing no more than a dozen workman; many had fewer.”

There was a competitive spirit in Birmingham, but also plenty of  
cooperation. “A lot of these little organizations,” writes Jacob, “did  
bits and pieces of work for other little organizations.” In other  
words, they worked together; they formed networks, loose informal  
cooperatives.

And unlike in Manchester, there wasn’t a lot of big fish swallowing  
little fish. Birmingham’s little organizations “were not rationally or  
efficiently consolidated,” Jacobs writes. “There was a lot of waste of  
motion, duplication that could certainly have certainly been  
eliminated by consolidation.” In fact, organizations were more likely  
to spawn new organizations then to swallow old ones. “Able workman  
were forever breaking off from their employers … and setting up shop  
for themselves, compounding the fragmentation of work,” Jacobs adds.

She says few people took time to comment on Birmingham’s economy—and  
those who did were puzzled that it worked at all. Observers scratched  
their heads about why the people of Birmingham weren’t striving to  
imitate the emerging textile barons to the north.

Jacobs didn’t mention, but I will, a key difference between the two  
cities: Manchester geared its economy outward; it sought to maximize  
trade, to import what it didn’t produce, and export what it did  
produce, which was textiles. It strove to be the textile supplier to  
the British Empire and beyond. Meanwhile, humble Birmingham was mainly  
taking care of its own needs, turning to outside trade only at the  
margins.

Of course, as you’ve probably guessed, things turned out quite a bit  
differently than most 19th century observers predicted. Efficient  
Manchester turned out to be a bust. In short, people in other places— 
namely, in Britain’s colony on the Indian subcontinent—learned how to  
churn out textiles more cheaply. The city’s textile industry peaked  
quickly, and then entered a long and slow phase of decline. Manchester  
was built not for the future, but rather for obsolescence.

Meanwhile, inefficient Birmingham thrived. “Its fragmented and  
inefficient little industries kept adding new work, and splitting off  
new organizations, some of which are very large but still outweighed  
in total employment and production by the many small ones,” Jacobs  
writes. She adds that by the middle of the 20th century, “only two  
cities in England remain[ed] vigorous and prosperous. One is London.  
The other is Birmingham.”

Now, there are many lessons and analogies we can draw from this tale  
of two cities. One obvious analogy from our own time is Detroit. That  
one-time city of the future threw its lot with the automobile. Today,  
Detroit is hollowed out and economically depressed. Ironically, its  
greatest physical asset is not its rusted and shuttered car factories,  
but rather the prime prairie soil it stands on top of.

While Detroit’s car industry lurches to oblivion, its community  
gardens thrive. Citizens are claiming abandoned land and using it to  
grow food and a time when cash is short. Pondering the city’s budding  
urban farms, the writer Rebecca Solnit recently went so far as to  
declare Detroit a kind of city of the future. She writes: “Detroit may  
be the shining example we can look to-the post-industrial green city  
that was once the steel-gray capital of Fordist  
manufacturing.” [Harper’s]

What I really want to talk about, though, is our own economy here in  
the High Country. Since moving here five years ago, I’ve seen our  
economy specialize in three separate but related industries— 
construction, tourism, and real estate. We’ve allowed box-like condos  
to line our ridge tops so tourists can gaze at Grandfather Mountain.   
We’ve cleared productive forest stands from mountaintops to plunk down  
second-home McMansions with “360 degree views.”

As old tobacco farms shut down because of low prices, gated  
“communities” sprouted up in their place—swallowing farmland while  
often preserving the word “farm” in their names. Today, according to  
Watauga County economic development sources, about half of properties  
in the county are absentee homes; a third of new building permits  
relate to seasonal housing.

No doubt, this flurry of activity has brought thousands of jobs to our  
area. Construction has been a massive employer, as have the  
restaurants, hotels, and country clubs that cater to the second-homers  
and vacationers. Many of my friends—including excellent artists,  
musicians, and farmers who contribute mightily to our community— 
supplement their incomes by working in construction and tourism- 
related trades.

But just like Efficient Manchester, the High Country is learning that  
booms that rely on external forces can quickly lead to busts. It turns  
out that engine for growth in our area was fueled by a gusher of  
speculative cash, essentially funny money—a gusher that has now run dry.

The U.S. government is now preparing to use your tax dollars to coax  
hundreds of billions of real estate-related “toxic assets” off of bank  
balance sheets; that effort may or may not stabilize teetering  
megabanks like Citigroup and Bank of America, and it may or may not  
bail out the investors who took home billions in profit from those  
deals in the first place. But what the government’s program most  
certainly won’t do is restore the flow of easy money that has been  
clearing ridgelines and mountaintops for second homes—and employing a  
huge swath of our population.

Happily, I’ve also witnessed another economic trend since I moved here— 
the gradual, steady build out of alternative food networks. I’m  
thinking about institutions like the Watauga County Farmers market,  
which started decades ago but has experienced rapid growth in recent  
years; New River Organic Growers, a cooperative of small farmers that  
band together to market their produce to restaurants that care about  
quality and want to buy local.

And then there’s Maverick Farms, which I helped start, which started  
the High Country’s first CSA in 2005. This year, with a grant from the  
NC Rural Center, Maverick is rolling out High Country CSA, a multi- 
farm effort designed to open the CSA model to more consumers and more  
farmers. We’re partnering with New River Organic Growers for the  
effort; small-scale farmers learn the hard way that cooperation, both  
among farmers and with the broader community, are key to survival.

These efforts, while growing fast, remain micro-scale. The great bulk  
of the High Country’s food supply comes from the outside, dominated by  
a few supermarket chains and Wal-Mart. There’s not a slaughterhouse in  
our area that can legally process meat from local farms for sale, but  
we do have a McDonald’s, a Burger King, and a Wendy’s—all highly  
efficient operations. These large companies dominate our food supply.  
They create some low-skill, low-wage jobs, but they carry most of the  
food dollars we spend off the mountain, to distant shareholders.

But what if much more of our food dollars stayed within the community— 
and got cycled through organizations like New River Organic Growers  
and the Watauga and Ashe County Farmers markets? Here’s a rule of  
thumb: Communities spend about $1,000 per person on food. About 83,000  
people live in our three-county area full time. That means we’re  
spending something like $83 million every year on food. And that  
doesn’t even count the money that tourists and second homers spend  
eating. The great bulk of that money drains out of the community and  
into the pockets of the people who own Wal-Mart and McDonald’s and  
Lowes Foods.

Now imagine we had a locally owned slaughterhouse that could process  
the pastured cows that so many people grow here—and now send off to  
feedlots in Kansas to fatten on corn. If you can access a nearby  
slaughterhouse, you make a lot more money selling grass-fed beef to  
your neighbors than selling cows to the meat industry; wouldn’t that  
draw more folks in?

And imagine a locally owned dairy processing plant, that could give a  
decent price to our few remaining dairy farmers. Given the popularity  
of real milk from grass-fed cows, wouldn’t that be a booming market— 
and draw more new dairy farmers in? And imagine a community-owned food  
co-op that could sell all of this stuff at a central place, and maybe  
a farmer-owned restaurant that could give community members the  
freshest food possible, while giving farmers a cut of the value that  
gets added to their produce?

Suddenly, we’d start looking less like Efficient Manchester, relying  
on outside forces for our economic well-being, and more like  
Inefficient Birmingham, with a set of thriving, interlocking, highly  
creative crafts based around food. And we’d eat a lot better, too.

And think how much more robust our economy would be. At a certain  
point, people stop thinking they need a second home. But they don’t  
typically decide to stop eating. Because of the natural beauty of our  
area, we’ll always draw tourists. A vibrant, accessible, delicious  
local food economy could be a new calling card—and a way to get  
tourist dollars flowing broadly through the economy, and not siphoned  
off to a few resorts and lodges.

The question becomes, how do we get there? I know from hard experience  
that profit margins on farming tend to be relatively low. There’s no  
way one farmer, or even a group of farmers, can make the investments  
we need to bolster our food economy. This is a community-scale  
opportunity that requires community-scale efforts. That means farmers,  
consumers, elected officials, and landowners working together to  
harness our assets and overcome our obstacles as a food community. And  
that is a process that can gain force today.----
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