Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Guest Column: Restoring values, balance and choice in new food, farming era

Back to Leopold Letter Spring 2009

By LARRY YEE, Guest columnist

EDITOR'S NOTE: Agriculture of the Middle is one of six core issues that help guide the work of the Leopold Center and clarify our role and response in critical areas. Retired University of California extension specialist Larry Yee has worked closely on the national Agriculture of the Middle initiative with the Leopold Center's Fred Kirschenmann and Steve Stevenson from the University of Wisconsin.

Often I am asked to define a farm “of the middle.” Most people want an answer quantifiable either by number of acres or dollars earned. The quick but certainly not the definitive answer is any farm between $50,000 and $500,000 in gross revenue.

The reality is a great diversity of farming operations that numbers cannot define. For example, a 20-acre strawberry farm in California might have higher gross revenue than a 2,000-acre corn-and-soybean operation in Iowa, but both would be considered midsize. Trying to nail down a midsize family farm is like trying to describe beauty – hard to describe but you know it when you see it.

Midsize farming operations used to be present everywhere in our rural landscape. The number of farms in the United States peaked at about 7 million in the 1930s, and most were midsize farms. Today there are fewer than 2 million farms, with the largest number classified as small (those with income derived primarily from off-farm sources), and many others being the very large, corporate operations. Those farms traditionally in the middle mostly have disappeared and the trend continues.

Ironically, there is now a great demand for high-quality, differentiated food products, those which are best produced by midsize family farms. For these products, quantity is not as important as the quality, the story associated with that product, and the trust that consumers have for the producer of that product. This presents a tremendous opportunity for midsize family farms. But we need to first have the will, and then the resources, to create the infrastructure needed to aggregate these products and move them to regular markets through new innovative business arrangements.

We have been calling these new arrangements “value chains” or “values-based value chains.” Traditionally, most farmers have been and still are price takers. In a traditional supply chain, it is every chain link for itself, competing for its own self-interest. A value chain is simply a supply chain in which people play by the “golden rule.”

In a value chain, the links (producers, processors, distributors, wholesalers, food services and/or retailers, and consumers) are partners in getting high-quality, differentiated products to market, adding value and values along the way. The partners cooperate as much as they compete, they serve the common interest as much as their own self interest, and they look out for each other, recognizing the importance of the other partners and their need to thrive economically.

In a value chain, trust is paramount and profits are optimized not maximized. Value chains strive for transparency and to the greatest extent possible all participants are treated fairly and equitably. Relationships are of the utmost importance, in fact, there is a bridge between producer and consumer where a chasm had existed.

Under this system, midsize farmers would have more choices. The current system offers two options: selling direct to consumers or selling into the commodity system. Consumers also would have more choices of products. If these value chains could be created in regions throughout the country, and networked with one another, a new third tier in our food system could develop.

Agriculture of the middle also can be seen as a return to center or balance. Is this not what the global economic meltdown was about – the need to return the economic system to balance after wildly swinging to unrealistic extremes of excess? Nature evolves and adapts and natural systems seek equilibrium, of which diversity plays a key role. A healthy food system is no different; we need farms of all sizes, shapes and stripes. And we need both food as commodities and food as highly differentiated products and everything in between.

The Association of Family Farms (AFF) is the business development arm of the Agriculture of the Middle (AOTM) initiative. AFF is a market-oriented, not-for-profit, national organization whose mission is to enhance the economic viability and long-term success of family farmers and local/regional food systems by creating and managing value chain networks to bring significant quantities of high-quality, differentiated family farm products to market. The AFF business plan is in its final draft and soon AFF will begin seeking resources to put it into action, beginning with pilot projects and setting the foundation for the structure of the organization. Our goals are ambitious, but the world seems ready and before we lose yet another family farm, we need to act.

Nothing is inevitable. The food system we now have was developed and evolved through conscious choices. AOTM and AFF seek to create a food system that is diverse, fair and sustainable. We have the potential not only to develop a third tier food system where mid-scale family farms can thrive, but also to have a healthy influence on the entire food system by restoring balance, diversity and values.

My friend and founder of the VISA International, Dee Hock, once said, “In such times as these, it is no failure to fall short of realizing all that we might dream; the failure is to fall short of dreaming all that we might realize.”

Read about the Agriculture of the Middle and AFF concept in Food and the Mid-Level Farm: Renewing an Agriculture of the Middle, edited by Thomas Lyson, Steve Stevenson and Rick Welsh (MIT Press, 2008)
 

Back to Leopold Letter Spring 2009