Help the Farmer, Fight Food Deserts -- Promote Local Ag

Over at Dakota Today, Doug Wiken posted a graphic from the National Farmers Union pointing out what a small cut of the prive farmers earn from the food they make. Consider that the farmer makes 68 cents on a $3.29 10-lb. bag of potatoes. Those ten pounds of potatoes can be processed into about 12 bags of chips worth about $36. Farmers get seven cents on each bag. If I'm reading Doug's numbers right, that's an increase for the farmer -- 84 cents on those ten pounds of potatoes -- but not in terms of percentage of final value. Turn potatoes into junk food, and the farmer's cut declines from 20% to 2%.

Lesson #1: You can make your food dollar go further and see more of it go to your local farmer if you buy more real, raw food, stuff that looks the way it did when it came out of the ground, instead of all that processed junk that makes the corporations rich.

Wiken also made an interesting comment in his Wednesday post about a concept I'd never heard named: "food deserts." You don't have to be the Sahara or the Badlands to qualify; a "food desert" is an area in which residents have "low access to large food retailers," or, practically speaking, have to drive more than ten miles to get to a supermarket*.

Doug notes that his home turf, Tripp County, meets this academic definition. Even though they have a couple of grocery stores, the selection isn't that great:

Two grocery stores selling almost wholly "Surefine" products leaves much to be desired. Their rice and pasta is nearly inedible compared to some brands, and the canned goods are almost never as good. A spoonful of good-tasting food may be better than a cheaper cupful of food with the wrong taste, texture, or sauce. Of course, your food mileage may vary especially if you have to drive out of the food desert for a good dessert..even if they aren't your just desserts [Doug Wiken, "Farmer's Share of Your Grocery Bill," Dakota Today, 2008.03.26].

As my South Dakota readers know all too well, Tripp County isn't alone. Click the below image to see the 31 SD counties that can be called "food deserts" [image from Brooks et al. 2008*]:


It's more than ironic -- let's call it downright messed up -- that in a state where our farmers broke all sorts of production records last year and where agriculture has a $19-billion impact that makes up more than a third of the state's economy, folks in 31 of our 66 counties have trouble getting access to good groceries.

Brooks et al. cite economic and health consequences that can arise from not having a good grocery store nearby:

1. Higher costs in time and money, especially as gas prices go up.
2. Folks substitute less tasty, less healthy food.
3. "Food desert residents consume less protein, fruits, and vegetables" (p. 2).
   

So here we sit, surrounded by thousands of acres of rich farmland, yet South Dakota kids are behind national averages in eating fruits and vegetables, including green salad [Brooks et al., 2008, p.3]. But what do you expect when farming is all mechanized monoculture, growing raw grains to feed cows and cars?

Lesson #2: Small towns should add food policy to their economic development strategies. Good jobs and good housing** are essential, but so is good food. Even in Madison, which has one good grocery store, lots of people say we need more choices. Our LAIC should work on drawing a second grocery store (Hy-Vee, we're ready for you!). Better yet, the LAIC and other local economic development organizations should promote local agriculture through Community-Supported Agriculture programs, cooperative grocery stores, and other ways to connect communities with their own farmers and land.

Maybe there's a tie-in here with the LAIC's goal of bringing in more residents. As I've suggested before, we could take a typical 640-acre farm with one farmer driving one big tractor through row on row of corn and turn it into 80 small farmsteads with 80 families producing a wide variety of vegetables, fruits, and meat for local consumption (and still have 320 acres to turn back to CRP land). Eighty families could produce a lot of groceries. They'd also send their kids to school, buy lots of tools and seed in town, and pay more taxes than the one industrial-scale farmer they'd replace.

One square mile of good farmland turned to a full-tilt small-scale ag community could go a long way toward turning a food desert into an oasis of healthy eating and economic growth.

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*Trevor Brooks, Stacey Trushenski, Mike McCurry, and Donna Hess, SDSU Rural Sociology Department, "South Dakota's Food Deserts" [PDF], Rural Life Census Data Newsletter, No. 1, Feb 2008. This article also cites some good journal articles on rural life and food supply. Here's their full bibliography:

1. Accent Health. Retrieved September 2007 at www.accenthealth.com.
2. Blanchard, Troy and Thomas Lyson. 2006. Access to Low Cost Groceries in Nonmetropolitan Counties: Large Retailers and the Creation of Food Deserts. Paper Presented at the Measuring Rural Diversity Conference, Washington, DC. Accessed July 2007 at http://srdc.msstate.edu/measuring/blanchard.pdf.
3. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. YRBSS: Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System. www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/yrbs/ (Retrieved September 2007).
4. Farm and Food Policy Project. 2007. Making Healthy Food More Accessible for Low-Income People. Accessed September 2007 at http://www.farmandfood project.org.
5. Johnson, Kenneth M. 2003. Unpredictable Directions of Rural Population Growth and Migration. In D.L Brown and L.E. Swanson, editors, Challenges for Rural America in the Twenty-first Century. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.
6. McCurry, Michael. Business Thresholds in South Dakota. Unpublished Document.
7. Morton, Lois Wright, Ella Annette Bitto, Mary Jane Oakland, and Mary Sand. 2005. Solving the Problems of Iowa Food Deserts: Food Insecurity and Civic Structure. Rural Sociology 70(1):94-112.
8. Morton, Lois Wright and Troy C. Blanchard. 2007. Starved for Access: Life in Rural America’s Food Deserts. Rural Realities 1(4):20-29.
9. U.S. Census Bureau 2000. www.census.gov. Retrieved August 18, 2007.

**By the way, it's been five weeks since I last heard from the Lake Area Improvement Corporation on my request to look at the housing study. What gives?
--update: I e-mailed after breakfast, and Kari got back to me. The study is done. We can read it. Copies cost $250. My breakfast came back up.