Farmers Markets Are Not Simple

See this post.

The study identified five preference-based consumer segments: market enthusiasts, recreational shoppers, serious shoppers, low-involved shoppers, and basic shoppers -- each with significantly different demographics and behavior characteristics. 

New Idea: Farmers Markets

Not so.  As the Universal York blog reminds us, in the old days there were market buildings, some of some distinction.  See here for the interior and here for exterior.  Those who push farmers markets today need to examine the reasons why they almost vanished in the first place. (DC has the Eastern Market and I think a couple others, so they didn't quite vanish, but there's a fine balance of population density, transportation, refrigeration, economy, female cooks, household help, etc. which formed the ecology in which such buildings could be erected and maintained.)

A Question for Foodies

According to this post at Universal York, by 1900 the small city of York, PA had five thriving farmers markets.  So my question to foodies, who push farmers markets, what happened?  Why did the markets fade away, and what does that mean for their current renaissance? 

My own answer is--efficiency and lower costs in satisfying consumers desires was the cause, which means only a small niche in the future for farmers markets.

Farm City Novella Carpenter

I enjoyed this book, maybe because I like too much humor (the complaint of one Amazon commenter). Child of hippie parents creates a garden in a vacant lot in the bad part of Oakland, including eventually chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, rabbits and pigs.  She's honest and accurate, though I did wonder about collard greens in July--I think of them as a cool weather crop but I guess not.

From my praise you can guess there's a minimum of locavore/organic ideology in the book.  The main thread of the book is the garden, but the small bits about neighbors, friends, and relatives make it more than one-dimensional.

Locavores Versus Consumers

The NY Times Magazine had a food theme yesterday, including an article by Mark Bittman in which he argues for a quantum leap forward in grocery shoppiing:

"This is my fantasy about virtual grocery shopping: that you could ask and be told the provenance and ingredients of any product you look at in your Web browser. You could specify, for example, “wild, never-frozen seafood” or “organic, local broccoli.”

He also wants his preferences recorded with the ability to be notified of the arrival of his favorites. He interviews a software vendor about the possibilities and concludes existing retailers aren't really focused on filling his individual wants. 

I think a big hurdle to this is the almost reflexive opposition by small and local growers to tracking and animal identification systems.  That's going to be needed to get the data needed to keep Bittman happy into the IT system.

On Not Knowing Your Farmer

James McWilliams writes at the Times of the pros and cons of farmers markets. There are some extroverts who want a social interaction with their vendors; others of us want an arms-length transaction.

The Problems of Farmers Markets for the Poor

From the experience of an LA market:

"On a recent visit to the Harambee site, there were few visible signs of a vibrant farmers market. There were only three booths, with only one — Williamson’s — providing fresh fruits and vegetables.
Several years ago, the area was booming with Black farmers and produce. But according to Williamson, who set up shop there three years ago, many of the farmers either died, were too old to continue farming, moved on to flourishing farmers markets like the one in Hollywood, or simply could no longer afford it."

In part it's the old problem of a vicious circle, one problem feeds on another which feeds on another.  Minorities don't have the income, so they focus on the cheapest calories, which are unhealthiest, meaning more sickness, and since they are less likely to have health insurance (except Medicaid in some cases) they get worse, meaning they're less reliable workers, meaning more likely to be fired, meaning less income, meaning no cars, etc. etc.  All of which means poor returns for those who try to serve the minority market.

And, in today's Times, there was an article on a development in the Bronx, where there's a fight over including a supermarket.  As best I can tell, a supermarket is needed, but there's already a small chain in the Bronx which has cemented alliances with community activists, and is opposing the additional competition.

Dana Milbank on the Obama Farmers Market

Dana Milbank is a columnist for the Post who snarks everyone.  Today he mocks the Obama Farmers Market.  The prices he quotes are too high for federal employees, at least those who support a family and are saving to put kids through college. (Over at Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr cites the case of a Federal judge resigning because the pay is too low.) Meanwhile, Obamafoodorama gushes over Michelle's speech and leadership.  (I'm trying to resist the urge to imagine what the right may do in 2012 with Milbank's material.  All too easy to mock this as elitism for the few, far far away from the plight of the jobless and the middle class.)

Problems of Locavore Agriculture

Obamafoodorama has a post on various ag issues, including the problems faced by a farm in the DC metro area.

Some challenges: Georgia and Zach lease their land, for a shockingly high amount of monthly rent. They’ve spent thousands of dollars and thousands of hours boosting the quality of their soil with amendments in order to grow better vegetables—but when their lease is up, they’ll have to start over elsewhere. There’s a huge problem with deer eating their crops; the growing area is fenced, but better, deer-secure fencing is incredibly expensive. Figuring out better direct marketing techniques would help, too; Zach and Georgia could have a big local CSA project where they sold to near-by residents, instead of having to drive more than an hour to DC for farmers markets. Although DC is considered local in food speak, it’s not Georgia and Zach’s own community—so they’re “relocating” their wealth elsewhere, as well as spending money on gas—and contributing to greenhouse problems.

Asymmetric Information on the Croft

Economists talk about "asymmetric information", where the two parties to a transaction have different information. The classic case was selling a used car--where the owner knows how good it is or isn't, but the buyer can't tell.

Musings from a STonehead, the small farmer/pig grower in Scotland, runs into a case of that. He knows his product, but his potential customers often don't know pigs from pokes. As he writes:

The typical customer wants a fantasy, a lifestyle statement, a “product” that says something about them, and they want it now because that’s the fantasy of the moment.

They have an image of themselves as a “modern urban farmer”, as a “saviour of rare breeds”, as someone capturing “the good life”, of being a “modern smallholder”, of joining the ranks of “celebrity pig keepers”, showing their “anti-supermarket” credentials, and so on.

Certainly, we do have people that come to us with a genuine, practical, reality based desire to fatten a couple of pigs but they are in the minority.

But I also know from talking to the wide array of people that come to us, that the real motivation for buying pigs is to “live the dream”, just as it is for buying any other consumer item.

A Dose of Reality

Nothing like disease to modify one's views. Dan Barber, an entrepreneurial restaurant owner and organic farmer near NYC, has a piece in today's Times. "Late blight" has hit tomatoes hard, apparently especially, heirloom varieties. So he writes this:

"The food community has a role to play, too — by taking another look at plant-breeding programs, another major fixture of our nation’s land-grant universities, and their efforts to develop new varieties of fruits and vegetables. To many advocates of sustainability, science, when it’s applied to agriculture, is considered suspect, a violation of the slow food aesthetic. It’s a nostalgia I’m guilty of promoting as a chef when I celebrate only heirloom tomatoes on my menus. These venerable tomato varieties are indeed important to preserve, and they’re often more flavorful than conventional varieties. But in our feverish pursuit of what’s old, we can marginalize the development of what could be new."

Mr. Barber even cites the extension people at Cornell

Homesteading Hickory, Goodbye Ron

Ron and family have had their ups and downs homesteading somewhere in the Ozarks, mostly chronicled on this site. I risk reading too much into this, the penultimate post on the site, but the agrarian/locavore lifestyle seems sometimes to be a temporary fix, not something which today's generation is willing to endure/enjoy for a lifetime. People such as Ron and his wife have options, and they can use them. That's good; that's better than being stuck in a rut.

The Perils of CSA--Cabbages Galore

The economist Brad DeLong writes a lively blog. I didn't know until this post his family was into community supported agriculture, which this week gave them four heads of cabbage. Now in the old days, in the old country, my great grandmother would have known how to preserve it (sauerkraut), but that's a lost art these days.

A Warning on Locavore

In 1840 Ireland was primarily locavore, organic agriculture.

This piece from extension.org reminds us of the problems of such agriculture

"Late blight, a potentially devastating disease of tomato and potato, has been found in Ohio and may threaten home gardens and commercial operations alike — particularly as wet, cool weather conditions this week in most of the Buckeye state will create a favorable environment for the spread of the fungal pathogen that causes this disease.[It's the disease which caused the Great Famine in Ireland.]"

One of the limitations of local agriculture is its vulnerability to local weather, local disease, local earthquakes.

Recession and Locavores

Mr. Wells in the NYTimes Magazine writes about adapting his family's food buying in light of the recession's impacts:

Until recently, whenever we went to the farmers’ market, we would lug home $50 pork roasts and $14 gallons of milk. We would spend over $100 on food that might not last more than three days. Sometimes we’d shop on Saturday morning and have nothing to make for dinner on Monday. I shrugged this off as one of those oddities of New York life, like getting a ticket because your neighbor put out his trash on the wrong day. But the $35 chicken made me reconsider. Buying sustainably raised beef and sustainably squeezed milk and sustainably hatched poultry is a way of life that, these days, I just can’t sustain.

Have Any Architects Ever Gardened?

Here's a sentence from a proposal for a Dallas project,which is supposed to be "economically, environmentally and socially sustainable": "Some of the unusual features to be included in the 2.5 acre block include enough garden space to feed around 300 inhabitants, 40% affordable housing, an educational element that serves all of the residents and fully renewable, off-the-grid energy." That's roughly 350 square feet per person. Not sure how you do much meat off that area, so presumably these are 300 vegans. And I personally doubt the ability of 350 square feet to provide all the fruits and vegetables for a person, much less the grain.

[Some may say I'm willfully misreading the description, that "sustainable" doesn't mean self-sufficient. That may be true, but still a reasonable modesty in claims would be fitting.)

ERS and Locavore

ERS is doing a conference on locavore. It's not true USDA is in thrall to big ag--it's better to view agencies like ERS and Extension as bureaucratic entrepreneuts--willing to follow the crowd whereever it wants to go because that's the way to get the right people on the Hill to support your appropriations.

A Video Is Worth a Thousand Locavore Words

Ann Althouse has a link to a video from gapminder.org which shows how the world has changed in the last 200 years, both in income and health. I may be wrong, but I attribute these gains to the work of human reason working across boundaries, which seems to me to be the antithesis of the locavore movement.

A Stereotype Confirmed: The Talkative Italian

From a post at treehugger talking about slow food:

Mr. Petrini points out that Italians used to spend 32% of their income on food. Now they spend 14% on food and 12% on their mobile phones.

(I missed commenting on a report showing that people in nations who ate slowly were less obese than those who eat fast. I wonder if the slow eating was the result of lots of talking.)

Concentrated Vegetable Feeding Operations (CVFO's)

Otherwise known as high-tech greenhouses. This LA Times story describes "energy-neutral" greenhouses, built by the Dutch in CA. (Of course the Dutch--who else believes so completely in human control over the environment, starting with reclaiming land from the ocean.)

The yields are high: 482 tons of tomatoes per acre isn't bad at all.

I'd point out the story describes an innovation which sits on a potential fault line between global warming people and foodies. On the one hand, the greenhouse complex has a low impact on the environment, creating electricity through a solar panel farm, reusing water, cutting water and fertilizer use. But there's some parallels to CAFO's, in the attempt to measure and control all the inputs and outputs. And there's certainly no locavore aspect or organic farming, at least in the romantic, living with nature branch.