Let’s switch gears a minute and really go off the wall, since we have been looking at variation and crop prices in the last week or two. Some of you may be aware that there is a growing moment in the country to encourage the production of locally produced food. It is sometimes called the “slow food” movement which is to distinguish it from “fast food” which is almost uniformly condemned by everyone except those who consume it. The movement is more than just the local farmer’s market that may be springing up on your town square every weekend.
The slow food movement is an outgrowth of the sustainability movement which really got its start in one form or another with the growth in average farm size which began before World War II and has continued at an increasing to linear rate since that time. The university extension version of sustainability began to form and grow as a potential solution to the farm crisis years of the 1980’s. You old timers will remember in the early 1970’s, the Soviet Union was facing a rather extreme shortage of grain due to weather problems (they claimed a harsh winter did in the wheat crop) and needed to reach into the global market for a substantial buy, primarily to feed its large livestock herd. The United States responded with a one billion dollar deal over three years and crop prices jumped dramatically. Happy days followed…for a while.
Eventually, inflation, rising input and land costs and “Food as a Weapon” in foreign policy brought about the time of national suffering called the early 1980’s. Universities responded to this problem in two distinct ways. The main-stream within the Ag Colleges made a big push to encourage producers to treat farming as a business. Those in the Sustainable Movement figured that global business and politics was the cause of all the problems and pushed for farmers to unplug from the global agricultural system with its dependence on more and more capital, increased borrowing, increased input use and chemical treatments etc. to increase yields. This reaction to the massive destruction of equity in the 1980’s produced a set of solutions which is now rising into a global collection of cooperative ventures focused on local production and consumption, decreased energy use, local markets and diversity of production.
Locally produced advocates are beginning to make a significant push to compel local school systems, for instance, to support (read purchase) locally produced food. There is even a strange new connection to global warming as one of the presidential candidate's wives indicated she would probably not consume some types of fruit (Tangerines) that are not grown locally since we need to be thinking about the energy used to ship food thousands of miles from areas of concentrated production. I'm getting a little nervous about where my morning coffee is going to come from in the next five years if this catches on...too late...its catching on.
