A Tale of Two Markets: Part I, Telluride, Colorado

As some of my recent posts (here and here) suggest, I've been thinking for some time about the booming farmers' market phenomenon in relation to the slow/local food movement and, in particular, how local--and affordable--the food at farmers' markets really is.

Stall of hole foods farm, La Sal, Utah, at Market on the Plaza

As a ruralist, I'm also interested in what the farmers' market phenomenon says about our connection to rural places and the extent to which rural economies benefit from it.

This week I had the opportunity to visit two markets in southwest Colorado, one in the posh town of Telluride and the other in the equally posh (but more obviously nouveau riche and glitzy and less old West cowboyish) neighboring town of Mountain Village.  In a two post-series, I am going to compare these markets with a newly established one in my hometown, Jasper, Arkansas.  This first post will be dedicated to the Colorado markets. 

High Wire Ranch booth, TFM, July 13, 2012.

Before I get down to what I saw at the markets, let me provide some background on Telluride, which I have written about previously here and here.  As these prior posts indicate, I see Telluride as a prime example of rural gentrification.  With a population of 2,221, Telluride is the county seat of tiny San Miguel County, which has a population of 7,490, a very low poverty rate of 9.8%, and a median household income of $66,399.  (To put this in perspective, the median household income for all of Colorado is $56,456, and for the nation it is $51,914).  Another demographic feature that really stands out is that nearly half of the county's residents have college degrees, whereas the national average is only about 30%. Many of the homes in Telluride and Mountain Village are second homes, occupied only part of the year.  Telluride in particular is a rigorously slow/no growth community, and nimbyism is rabid there.  On both days last week when I read the local paper, it featured front-page stories covering San Miguel County Planning Commission news. 

It is not surprising given the demographic profile of Telluride, Mountain Village, and the surrounding county that the offerings at these markets were, well, upmarket.  Lots of organic produce and grass fed beef, lamb, elk, and bison were for sale.  Both weekly markets--Wednesday afternoons in Mountain Village and Fridays in Telluride--also featured pottery, jewelry and other such artisinal wares from places as far away as Durango.  Prepared food was for sale, too, and at the Mountain Village market, you could even get a massage.  In fact, the Mountain Village market is called "Market on the Plaza" rather than farmers' market, and it offered far less food than other stuff.  Perhaps 4-5 stalls/tables out of 15 or so featured fresh fruit and veg, beautiful flowers, and one offering grass-fed beef.   The Telluride Farmers' Market (TFM) was much larger, with perhaps half of the several dozen stalls featuring farm produce.  Plus, as many of the food vendors were offering meat as were offering fruits and veg--something I don't see so much in California.  This meant that most of the meat vendors had brought entire display freezers, plugged in to central electricity outlets.  One stall had its organic whole chickens on ice.   

Canyon of the Ancients near Cortez offered

wild apricots and grass-fed beef. 

As for the provenance of the food, the TFM website indicates that it all comes from within a 100-mile radius, and the same is probably true of the Mountain Village Market.  At the latter, I chatted with one vendor, hole foods farm (highly recommend the sugar snap peas at $4/pound!), out of La Sal, Utah.  As the crow flies, that is certainly within a hundred miles, though it's no short journey through the mountains into Telluride's box canyon.  The same is true for the vendors from Cortez (population 8,482), Paonia (population 1,497), Hotchkiss (population 968), Norwood (population 438), and Colona (population 30).    

The vendors included:

• Buckhorn Gardens 
• High Wire Ranch 
• White Buffalo Organics 
• Indian Ridge Farm and Bakery
• Tomten Farms 
• Canyon of the Ancients Guest Ranch

James Ranch, a farm stall, "Harvest Grill & Greens," guest ranch, and all around agritourism operator was at TFR promoting their operation, which is north of Durango.

Parker Pastures of Gunnison was at the Telluride market offering eggshares, CSA, and sales of meadow-fed bulk meat.  Parker also offers herdshares for purposes of providing raw milk because simply selling the milk is illegal in Colorado, as it is in California.  The brochure they provide indicates that if you buy in, "we will present you with two legal documents, the Bill of Sale and Boarding Contract."  The cost for a half gallon of raw milk each week is $35 for the share and $5.50/week to cover the cost of feeding, housing and milking the cows.  The milk can be picked up on certain days in either Crested Butte or Gunnison.  Their motto is "Nourishing our Community.  Nourishing our Lands."

Mesa Mix is offered by TomTen Farms, Placerville

I talked to several of the meat vendors.  One told me that he and his wife make a living from what they sell at the Telluride market on Fridays and the Aspen market on Saturdays.  Their farm is about half way between the two. Of course, they also acquire customers at these markets, customers who then place mail orders.  A lamb vendor told me she was there for her daughter, a recent college graduate who raises the lambs (and began doing so as a 4-H'er) but whose day job as a supervisor at a meat packing plant in Durango prevents her from being at the market herself.  The 20-something lamb rancher wasn't the only youngster represented at the market.  I also talked to three young farmers from Buckhorn Gardens, Colona, whose motto is "feed the soil, feed the body."  Their blog features photos and bios of their "New Agrarians," who come from around the country to work on the farm.   Other farmers and ranchers I met were a bit longer in the tooth, but one of the things I really enjoyed was actually meeting some farmer/entrepreneurs, not just their marketeers.  

It was hard for me to assess the price points on the meat offered at the markets since I rarely buy meat.  The brochure I took away from High Wire Ranch, however, put the price of a pound of ground elk or ground bison at $9, while elk tenderloin is $50/lb, bison tenderloin is $40/lb, and elk skirt or flank just $10/lb.  Sausage ranged from $10-$12/lb.  These folks also sell duck eggs for $6/half dozen and they feature Wild Alaskan halibut and salmon--presumably caught and packaged by someone other than themselves.  It all looked tempting, even for someone like me who doesn't eat red meat and who had no place to cook it.

Stall of hole food farms, La Sal, Utah, at Market on the Plaza

The fruits and veggies were perhaps more expensive than what you find in local grocery stores in the area--which are already quite pricey because of the place's remoteness and size and demographic of the population.  One stall at the Mountain Village market featured tomatoes at the especially dear price of $6/lb, and the going price for cherries and apricots was $6/bag.  Japanese cucumbers were $2/each and Sweet Walla Walla onions, $3/lb.  Greens tended to go for about $5/bag, and prepared sauces for more than $10 a pint.  Still, these upscale Colorado produce markets were only marginally more expensive on most items than what I find at farmers' markets in greater Sacramento--except on items like tomatoes, which are quite a bit less expensive down here in "Sacatomato" land.     

The TFM website enumerates the following goals for its market, which it calls a "living, evolving event that actively and tangibly enhances the quality of life in Telluride":

• Fresh, local foods for residents and visitors
• Supports organic agriculture and environmental issues
• Improves community spirit
• Additional attractions for tourists
• Improve/maintain bioregional biodiversity
• Reduced environmental impacts with shorter transportation of local foods
• Increases rural/urban links
• Invigorates secondary shopping areas
• Educational--awareness of farming, sustainability, etc.  

Stand of Buckhorn Gardens, Colona, at TFM

As this tiny sampling of photos indicate, both markets offered very salubrious experiences--come rain (Telluride on Friday) or shine (Mountain Village on Wednesday).

In my next post, I'll compare these markets to a new one in Newton County, Arkansas, a persistent poverty county in northwest Arkansas whose agricultural history runs primarily to subsistence farming. Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.

Market on the Plaza, July 11, 2012

Does urban farmers' virtue differentiate them from rural ones?

I know the association of urban ag/slow food/organic/locavore movement with all things virtuous has been going on for some time, but just because the movement has proved so self-congratulatory (and mostly bourgeois) didn't necessarily make rural farmers the "bad guys."  I figured that, more than anything, the slow/local/urban ag craze was, at worst, implying (if only to those too myopic to look beyond their own food needs) that large-scale farmers (and, by extension, rural communities and populations) were (becoming) obsolete.  

But a story in the New York Times a few days ago left me wondering if the urban ag trend (the fruits of which I admit to regularly indulging from my suburban home in greater Sacramento, where many posh farmers markets surround me) also makes rural farmers look less virtuous, even a bit like "the enemy."  Kirk Johnson's story focused on what he called a new business model of farming, one marked by smaller-scale farms on the outskirts of cities, producing food primarily for metropolitan areas, including their fine dining establishments.  Johnson asserts:

[T]he movement toward local food is creating a vibrant new economic laboratory for American agriculture.  The result, with its growing army of small-scale local farmers, is as much about dollars as dinner:  a reworking of old models about how food gets sold and farms get financed, and who gets dirt under their fingernails doing the work.  

* * * 

Economists and agriculture experts say the "slow money" movement ... a way of channeling money into small-scale and organic food operations, along with the aging of the farmer population and steep barriers for young farmers who cannot afford the land for traditional rural agriculture are only part of the new mix.  

OK.  That's an interesting business story.  I have written here, here and here of some of these phenomena, e.g, the obstacles facing new farmers and the aging farmer population in the United States.

But then Johnson goes on to suggest that this small farm/locavore phenomenon is not only in opposition to intensive production agriculture, but also in opposition to rural places, which he seems to collapse into "big ag." Johnson writes

A looming shortage of migrant workers ... could create a kind of rural-urban divide if it continues, with mass-production farms that depend on cheap labor losing some of their price advantages over local grown food, which tends to be more expensive.  

[While] big agriculture ... struggle[s] to find willing hands ...[l]ocal farm sales are becoming more stable, predictable and measurable.

Johnson goes on to note that the USDA has adjusted upward the value of "local revenues" from food sales to $4.8 billion.  The adjustment came from including sales to stores and restaurants and not only those at "road stands and markets."  (I wonder if that prior accounting included urban farmers markets.  I've written some about the distinction between road stands and farmers markets here).  Johnson notes that the economic pathway for these small scale farms that sell their food locally is somewhat supported in the new farm bill (which a NYTimes editorial recently labeled "mediocre")

Certainly, a lot of locavore/organic/slow and boutique food is grown in urban, suburban and exurban locales.  Read more here.  What Johnson overlooks--especially in writing of a "rural-urban divide"--is that these more "virtuous" types of food are also grown in rural places.  I (and my students) have written of instances of this here, here, and here.  Also illustrative is Low Gap, Arkansas, shown in these two photos I took in May, 2012.  Low Gap is a wide spot in the road in Newton County, where I grew up.  Low Gap is not even a Census Designated Place; nor does it have a wikipedia entry.  (As the sign indicates, it is near Shiloh, a similarly obscure place).  So I was surprised a few years ago to see it listed as the provenance of food on the menu at the Greenhouse Grille, 80 miles away in Fayetteville, where I doubt that even 1 in 100 diners had previously heard of Low Gap, let alone know where it is.  Surely this is not a lone example of a small, rural farm producing organic food for an urban population (yes, Fayetteville is urban, part of the Northwest Arkansas Metropolitan Statistical Area) and--if the sign above is any indication--for its rural neighbors, too.  Ditto Rivendell Gardens, also in Newton County, pictured in this post.  It is probably not appropriate, then, to suggest that urban/suburban farmers have cornered the market on either virtue or small.  

One thing seems certain:  If urban farmers are now sole (or even primary) bearers of the badge of agricultural virtue, we have come a long way not only from the rural yeoman farmer of Thomas Jefferson's day, but also from that of my grandparents (read more here) and a fair number of rural folk still operating smallish farms across America.

Yes, I know I am a little sensitive about this, but food and ag are two of the only justifications that rural people and places have for their existence these days.  If they lose the virtue associated with these--if only rhetorically--to "the city," they arguably lose a lot.   

Plus, I just think Johnson's invocation of the rural-urban binary in this way is misplaced.  Or maybe his use just reflects a common lack of precision in how the terms "rural" and "urban" get used.  Many of the farms Johnson refers to are far enough outside the cities they serve to be in places that are rural by several definitions, or at least exurban.  Alternatively, when Johnson talks about small farms and urban ag, he may actually be thinking less about where the food is grown and more about who is consuming it.  And that is as much a matter of class as it is geography.  

P.S.  On July 8, 2012, the NYTimes published this story on the front page of the Business section, "Has Organic Been Oversized?" which disputes the popularly held connection between small and organic.  It also disputes, in a sense, the authenticity of the designation.  Here's a key paragraph:

As corporate membership on the board [that sets standards for organic labeled products] has increased, so, too, has the number of nonorganic materials approved for organic foods on what is called the National List.  At first, the list was made up of things like baking soda, which is nonorganic but essential to making things like organic bread.  Today, more than 250 nonorganic substances are on the list, up from 22 in 2002.  

Cross posted to Legal Ruralism.  

U.S. District Judge Rejects Organic Farmers' Suit Against Monsanto

U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald, Southern District of New York, last week dismissed a lawsuit that a group of organic farmers, seed companies and food safety groups had filed in March, 2011, against agribusiness giant Monsanto Corporation. The plaintiffs acted preemptively, essentially seeking protection against lawsuits by Monsanto should the corporation sue for patent infringement based on the anticipated but unintended (and, indeed, undesirable) presence of genetically modified crops among their yields. The plaintiffs sought a ruling that that Monsanto's patent were invalid because they are "injurious." The plaintiffs claimed that Monsanto's practice was to "aggressively assert[]" patent claims against U.S. farmers. They plaintiffs alleged that Monsanto engages in "baseless litigation to intimidate farmers and restrict competition with its transgenic seed."

Buchwald rejected these arguments, writing:

There is no evidence that plaintiffs are infringing defendants' patents, nor have plaintiffs suggested when, if ever, such infringement will occur.

Indeed, Judge Buchwald found the plaintiffs' claims "unsubstantiated ... given that not one single plaintiff claims to have been so threatened." Judge Buchwald also found that the plaintiffs had "overstate[d] the magnitude of [the defendant's] patent enforcement." Monsanto brings an average of 13 patent-enforcement lawsuits each year. Judge Buchwald found this "hardly significant when compared to he number of farms in the United States, approximately two million."

In addition to fearing patent infringement claims by Monsanto, the organic farmers and other plaintiffs note that genetically modified organism (GMO) material also lowers the value of their product. Because of unavoidable cross-pollination, most organic corn in the U.S. contains between half a percent and two percent GMOs. Read more here.

The case is Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association v. Monsanto Co., 11-02163, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

Read NPR's coverage of the matter here. The Sacramento Bee ran this Monsanto Press Release.

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism. Photo above: organic farm in Newton County, Arkansas.

Back to the Land: A Greece-U.S. Comparison

A front-page feature in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago reported on a trend in Greece--a trend for people to get back to the land, back to agricultural livelihoods. Journalist Rachel Donadio links that trend to Greece's economic crisis and the fiscal austerity with which the government has responded. Of course, it has also become trendy in the United States (though not necessarily a widespread phenomenon) for young(ish) people to get back to the land, to take up farming of certain types, e.,g., organic, boutique. So I thought I would compare and contrast what is happening in Greece with what is happening in the United States. "Apples to apples" data are not available for the two countries, but a partial look at the who, what and why of "new" farmers is possible.

Greece: Donadio writes of an "exodus of Greeks who are fleeing to the countryside and looking to the nation's rich rural past a guide to the future." With Greek unemployment at 18% and as high as 35% for those between the ages of 15 and 29, the agricultural sector is bucking this trend, having added 32,000 jobs between 2008 and 2010. Significantly, "most of them [have gone to] Greeks, not migrant workers from abroad." While the story features two 30-something couples who have moved to the island of Chios (closer to Izmir, Turkey than to Athens) to take up smallish agricultural enterprises, Donadio reports that the greatest increase in new farmers has been among those aged 45 to 65.

Donadio doesn't make a big deal of the distinction between agricultural entrepreneurs and farm laborers, though she mentions both in the story. (A Legal Ruralism post about this distinction is here.) Regarding the entrepreneurs, Donadio writes:

In Greece, as elsewhere in the Mediterranean, most families have traditionally invested heavily in real estate and land, which are seen as farm more stable than financial investments, and it is common for even low-income Greeks to have inherited family property.

Donadio quotes the president of a farm school in Salonika, where applications have recently tripled: "young people frequently come to him and say, 'I have two acres from my grandfather in such-and-such place. Can I do something with it?'"

Agricultural roots seem to have influenced the decisions of the two couples Donadio features, both of which moved to Chios, where they had family connections. One couple, trained as agriculturalists but working in other sectors in Athens until a few years ago, are growing edible snails for export. They used $50,000 in family savings to get started. The other couple are cultivating mastic from 400 trees in southern Chios. Neither couple has yet to turn a profit, and the mastic farmers have turned to ecotourism to supplement their income. The edible snail farmers will have their first harvest this year. Both couples expressed confidence in their undertakings, and one is quoted:

In big cities, there's no future for ... young people, the only choice is for them to go to the countryside or to go abroad.

The same can hardly be said of the United States, where the fiscal crisis that began unfolding in 2008 has not been as acute as in Greece. I doubt that many young Americans take up farming because they feel they have no choice. Rather, those set to inherit farms still take over from their parents because of attachment to the lifestyle and place. In addition, the newfound popularity of certain types of agricultural undertakings seems attributable to rising attention to where our food comes from--to locavore, vegan, and organic trends. My students and I have discussed these trends on Legal Ruralism here, here here, and here. A story in the Sacramento Bee in April, 2010 suggests that--as in Greece--those starting up small farms in the United States are typically urbanites and suburbanites drawn back to the land. (A related post is here). As in Greece, younger people in the United States are increasingly the ones drawn to these sorts of farming.

While Donadio reports that many Greeks have access to family land, the same cannot be said of the United States. A recent survey by the National Young Farmers Coalition found that access to land was a major obstacle to those desiring to farm in the United States, second only to the barrier presented by lack of access to capital.

Based on Donadio's story, it seems that those who have recently started farming in Greece include not only the youngish in their 20s and 30s looking for an out from the economic disaster, but also the middle aged. In the United States, farmers tend also to be an aging group. As of 2007, about 30% of U.S. farmers were 65 or older, and the age of principal farm operators was 57 years. According to a recent publication of the National Young Farmers' Coalition, one in four farmers will retire in the next 20 years. So, even as fresh blood is flowing into farming, the business/vocation remains dominated by the middle aged. What is not clear is the extent to which the middle aged--whether new to farming or not--engage in intensive production agriculture or in smaller-scale boutique and organic farms. Either way, it seems that the demographics of farmer/entrepreneurs in the two nations are similar. Another similarity between Greece and the United States is that agritourism (especially in relation to boutique agriculture) is helping keep farms out of the red. See earlier posts on Legal Ruralism here and here.

One distinction between Greece and the United States, however, may lie in who is doing the agricultural labor--versus the agricultural entrepreneurship. Donadio reports that most farm jobs in Greece are going to Greeks. In the United States, however, little doubt exists that immigrants do the vast majority of agricultural grunt work. Read more here, here and here.

Donadio makes no mention of what, if anything, the Greek government is doing to foster the back-to-the land movement. Of course, the USDA has several programs that seek to assist would-be farmers with obstacles to getting started, though the recent Young Farmers publication suggests that the programs are insufficient.

A final similarity is worth pointing out: what I label the "back to the land" movement is not subsistence farming in either the U.S. or Greece. These farmers are relying on markets for their products--and those markets appear to be very often associated with foodie trends and relatively affluent consumers. What better example of this than edible snails for export?

See another post about Greece that links agriculture to rural self-sufficiency here. Listen to yesterday's NPR story about Arizona farmers reclaiming land sold previously sold to land developers; that story notes that both established and new farmers are taking advantage of the land available--though the new and younger farmers are typically able only to lease, not to buy. A recent story about how the South African government is encouraging a new generation of farmers is here.

Cross posted on Legal Ruralism.