HOW CAN “CONSUMERS” AND MARKETS BE FAIR TO REGENERATIVE FARMERS?
Our groceries and restaurants are flooded with cheap food. Neither the seller nor the consumer are paying the true ecological or human costs.
A conversation with ecologist, farmer and philosopher Daniel Griffith, of Central Virginia
HART HAGAN: Let's look a little bit at what's messed up about supply and demand. Our local markets are flooded with cheap food that's not very healthy and not ecologically produced. You’re not paying the true cost of the food that you're eating. And you’re not paying the true cost of food that would be much healthier. So, for example, how can we do a better job of marketing direct to consumers?
DANIEL GRIFFITH: That's a good question. After two years, we have determined that your question has no answer. As long as the consumer remains a consumer, there's no marketing to them.
No verified regenerative, truly collaborative, human-scale local farm can out-price any larger entity. White Oak Pastures, Force of Nature Meats, Rep Provisions, Paleo Valley, Wild Pastures--I can keep naming them--Whole Foods, Grayson Natural Beef--all of these larger systems …
I'm not saying here that these are bad systems, right? I'm just saying, no local, human-scale, verified regenerative, truly healthy and collaborative farm can compete with that financially. In addition, we cannot compete on convenience.
Go online to any of those organizations I just named and place an order. Your order will arrive two or three days from now in beautiful packaging. Two of those organizations that I just named I know personally. One of them just got tens of millions of dollars of investment for marketing and product development.
They are reaching consumers and that is a very good thing. I've said in the past that we have Mother Culture and Mother Earth. We can only have one mother. We need Mother Earth to be a resilient and truly parallel system to sustain us.
The organizations I just mentioned are scaffolding Mother Culture. And this is a very good thing. The individuals who typically buy their beef at Walmart now have the ability to buy their beef similarly priced from these organizations and maintain their convenience. This is exactly what needs to happen. This is a necessary development in the creation--or I should say co-creation--of a more beautiful world.
But local farmers can't compete with that. We just can't. That is never going to happen.
The crazy thing is this: In collaborative and community based systems full of resilience and diversity and reciprocity and collaboration, we can’t even say the word “compete.” In a system full of collaboration, why do we feel like we have to compete? This is another serious problem.
The source of this problem is consumerism. I would venture to say that there's a farmer of decent quality around most people. And I'm not talking about people who live in downtown, New York City or downtown Boston, or downtown Chicago. But if you're in Richmond (Virginia) or Charlottesville or Lynchburg, Alexandria, Washington, D.C, Baltimore … there are so many good farmers all around. They need to stay farming. They can't give you the convenience that your consumerism is demanding.
The need is to nurture the ecology of the system.
Not to be a salesperson, not to be a marketer but two years ago, when we started the Commonwealth Network. We did this huge survey. We surveyed a lot of people. We found that on average, human-scale farms--under 800 to 1000 acres--in the Mid-Atlantic, they work 80 hours a week farming and 37 hours a week marketing.
We just filmed this mini documentary that's going viral all over the internet and social media. There's a moment in it when I bring up these stats and then I say, we can't even get marketing companies to work 37 hours a week, and our farmers are doing this week in and week out.
This, to me, gets down to equity. This gets down to truly creating a new system. It's a new vision. I can't even call it a system. It's unbounded and open. But 80 hours a week farming and 37 hours a week marketing. And on average, these farmers are taking home $18,000, pre mortgage and pre-tax.
They are literally not making anything. Nothing, right?
What I'm saying is, these are huge problems. We don't have the solution. We are working in community to postulate pilots that might form the questions or the foundations of a new system.
My point is that we are in the early stages, and we need literally all of us to start embarking on this deeper work. It begins with individual farms working in their community and working in this way. And what emerges from there I don't know.
We formed The Commonwealth Network. We're bringing together a large network of verified regenerative, human-scale farms. We’re trying to start this process, start the conversations, and begin formulating pilot projects.
The solution is going to come from everyone. The Commonwealth Network is a meeting ground for the conversation. The Commonwealth Network includes Ecological Outcome Verification (a scientific method for evaluating the ecological health of pastures). It includes mentorship, support, classes and trainings for farmers.
We have financing options for farms. Let's face it, land acquisition and infrastructure funding is currently not an equitable system for all farms, especially new farms.
We have some real work to do there. We're slowly playing in that space. We're also trying to work as an aggregator. The Commonwealth Network is an aggregator, so that farmers can farm, and the local community can still be nourished by their provisions without the farmers having to do all the excess work.