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Local Agriculture: A Series of Debits and Credits

By Mary Berry, Executive Director My very smart husband Steve Smith said to me recently, in response to my complaint about a particularly unfocused meeting I attended some a few months ago, “I think we can stop brainstorming now.” He did not mean that we should stop having conversations but that we should acknowledge that we have some fifty plus years of history behind us in our efforts to work toward an agriculture that uses nature as the standard, that accepts no permanent damage to the ecosphere, and takes into consideration human health is local communities. We have good work to build on and we have mistakes to learn from. For most of us our best work will be done when we accept our own places as the context for our work. The context of work in a particular place will present particular problems that need to be solved. It takes a good deal of time and work to come up with the correct set of problems to work on. I would like to suggest that a list of “debits and credits” is useful for work in anyplace. Here is The Berry Center’s:

1. Metropolitan Louisville is adjacent to a fertile, well-watered countryside potentially capable of supplying a regional food economy, but also vulnerable to erosion, currently much misused by highly erosive and toxic corn-and-bean production, and populated by too few farmers.

2. Louisville is probably a city small enough to establish a coherent and responsible partnership with the food producers of its region.

3. We are pleased and much encouraged by Louisville’s efforts in recent years to establish such a partnership as a necessary part of “economic development.” Such a partnership would offer improved food security and food quality to consumers as well as needed protection to food producers and their land.

4. This is a large undertaking that divides immediately into a lot of small problems looking for small solutions.

5. At present the demand for local food in Louisville appears to be running well ahead of the available supply.

6. The reason for this is that there is no existing apparatus for bringing together representatives of the two economic sides (demand and supply) to negotiate prices and assurances. There is currently not even an apparatus for determining who, and how empowered, such representatives might be.

7. The problem, which will have to be complexly and patiently solved over probably a long time, is that most farmers will not trust a market for which they don’t individually know how much to produce, or in which they have no asking price.

8. The farmers of our region remember favorably the now-defunct federal tobacco program, which combined price supports with production controls, a combination of principles that has been revived by the dairy cooperative Organic Valley.

 

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9. But the major part of our farmers’ experience has been of gambling year after year as price takers on the agribusiness “free market”. They are not going to enter a Louisville-region food economy if it offers only another opportunity to gamble.

It is testimony to our problem that this list is too broad and will look remarkably the same anywhere a list like this is made in our country. But, the list gives us places to start and we have started just like so many of you have in your places. It is easy to be impatient and to think that small steps forward don’t amount to much. I believe that something that makes things a little better in a place is our best hope. Especially when efforts that make things a little better are springing up so many places. All over this country there are people doing the good thing that is right in front of them to do without waiting for permission from some official entity. My father says that it will never get bad enough that a person of good intention can’t do the good thing that is right in front of them to do. Wherever you are look around for those people and join them, be one of them.