Photo: emprachtTwo members of Congress earlier this month introduced legislation
The “Local Farms, Food and Jobs Act” sponsored by Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine, throws about $200 million to local farm programs. That’s a rounding error in the $3.7 trillion federal budget. But the bill follows on a federal rule that gives preference to local farms in contract bidding for school lunches. It also builds on high-profile advocacy by Michelle Obama, who has become a leader of the food reform movement, joining the likes of Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and famed-chef Alice Waters. The bill’s introduction came as the world population hit 7 billion, a milestone that provides a stark reminder of the challenge agriculture faces to feed a world population expected to grow to 9 billion by 2050. Experts estimate that in the next 50 years, the global food system likely needs to produce as much food as it did in the previous 10,000 years combined.
Amid heightened concern about global climate change, it has become almost conventional wisdom that we must return to our agricultural roots in order to contain the carbon footprint of our food by shortening the distance it travels from farm to fork, and by reducing the quantity of carbon-intensive chemicals applied to our mono-cropped fields.
But implicit in the argument that local farming is better for the environment than industrial agriculture is an assumption that a “relocalized” food system can be just as efficient as today’s modern farming. That assumption is simply wrong. Today’s high crop yields and low costs reflect gains from specialization and trade, as well as scale and scope economies that would be forsaken under the food system that locavores endorse.
Specialization and Trade
Economists have long recognized the welfare gains from specialization and trade. The case for specialization is perhaps nowhere stronger than in agriculture, where the costs of production depend on natural resource endowments, such as temperature, rainfall, and sunlight, as well as soil quality, pest infestations, and land costs. Different crops demand different conditions and vary in their resilience to shocks. So California, with mild winters, warm summers, and fertile soils produces all U.S.-grown almonds and 80 percent of U.S. strawberries and grapes. Idaho, on the other hand, produces 30 percent of the country’s russet potatoes because warm days and cool nights during the season, combined with rich volcanic soils, make for ideal growing conditions.
In 2008, according to the USDA, Idaho averaged 383 hundredweight of potatoes per acre. Alabama, in contrast, averaged only 170 hundredweight per acre. Is it any wonder Idaho planted more acres of potatoes than Alabama?
Forsaking comparative advantage in agriculture by localizing means it will take more inputs to grow a given quantity of food, including more land and more chemicals—all of which come at a cost of carbon emissions.
It is difficult to estimate the impact of a truly locavore farming system because crop production data don’t exist for crops that have not historically been grown in various regions. However, we can imagine what a “pseudo-locavore” farming system would look like—one in which each state that presently produces a crop commercially must grow a share proportional to its population relative to all producers of the crop. I have estimated the costs of such a system in terms of land and chemical demand.
My conservative estimates are that under the pseudo-locavore system, corn acreage increases 27 percent or 22 million acres, and soybean acres increase 18 percent or 14 million acres. Fertilizer use would increase at least 35 percent for corn, and 54 percent for soybeans, while fuel use would climb 23 percent and 34 percent, for corn and soybeans, respectively. Chemical demand would grow 23 percent and 20 percent for the two crops, respectively.
In order to maintain current output levels for 40 major field crops and vegetables, a locavore-like production system would require an additional 60 million acres of cropland, 2.7 million tons more fertilizer, and 50 million pounds more chemicals. The land-use changes and increases in demand for carbon-intensive inputs would have profound impacts on the carbon footprint of our food, destroy habitat and worsen environmental pollution.
It’s not even clear local production reduces carbon emissions from transportation. The Harvard economist Ed Glaeser estimates that carbon emissions from transportation don’t decline in a locavore future because local farms reduce population density as potential homes are displaced by community gardens. Less-dense cities mean more driving and more carbon emissions. Transportation only accounts for 11 percent of the carbon embodied in food anyway, according to a 2008 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon; 83 percent comes from production.
Economies of Scale
A local food production system would largely upend long-term trends of growing farm size and increasing concentration in food processing and marketing. Local “food sheds” couldn’t support the scale of farming and food processing operations that exist today—and that’s kind of the point. Large, monocrop farms are more dependent on synthetic fertilizers and tilling operations than small polycrop farms, and they face greater pest pressure and waste disposal problems that can lead to environmental damage.
But large operations are also more efficient at converting inputs into outputs. Agricultural economists at UC Davis, for instance, analyzed farm-level surveys from 1996-2000 and concluded that there are “significant” scale economies in modern agriculture and that small farms are “high cost” operations. Absent the efficiencies of large farms, the use of polluting inputs would rise, as would food production costs, which would lead to more expensive food.
Health Implications
A local food system would raise the cost of food by constraining the efficient allocation of resources. The monetary costs of increased input demands from forsaken gains from trade and scale economies will directly bear on consumer welfare by increasing the costs of food. And, as we try to tackle obesity, locavorism is likely to raise the cost of precisely the wrong foods. Grains can be grown cheaply across much of the country, but the costs of growing produce outside specific, limited regions increase quickly. Thus, nutrient-dense calories like fruits and vegetables become more expensive, while high fructose corn syrup becomes relatively cheaper.
Finally, higher costs on certain foods may be a solution to the big health challenge in the developed world. But higher prices on any food are precisely the wrong prescription for the great health problems in the developing world, where millions remain undernourished. As the food crisis of 2007-08 revealed, winning the war on human hunger requires a constant commitment to getting more food out of less land, water, and other inputs.
From roughly 1940 to 1990, the world’s farmers doubled their output to accommodate a doubling of the world population. And they did it on a shrinking base of cropland. Agricultural productivity can continue to grow, but not by turning back the clock. Local foods may have a place in the market. But they should stand on their own, and local food consumers should understand that they aren’t necessarily buying something that helps the planet, and it may hurt the poor.
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You use Corn and Soybeans as the crops (and potatoes) for making assumptions about the local food movement. That does not make sense as those are a large scale crops. What about looking all the other fruits and veggies that are grown? Lettuce, berries, apples, carrots etc. Buying local with those make sense in regards to health, fuel consumption, etc. Sure, to get my local corn syrup supply from the farmer down the road I would need more cropland. But what about the everyday fruits, veggies, and meat we eat?
It is very cheap to truck or boat food from around the world. It will always be cheaper. But basing an anti-local movement based on corn and soybeans makes no sense to me.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
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Most of the foods you eat are those large-scale crops. The bulk of the typical human diet is grains, not fruit. Look at the plant foods on your breakfast plate: toast, bagels, muffins, and cereal are grains. The contribution of berries, if any, is present only in that thin veneer of jam.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
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I think there is an externality that you are not taking into consideration: health.
This came into focus when I read this paragraph:
My conservative estimates are that under the pseudo-locavore system, corn acreage increases 27 percent or 22 million acres, and soybean acres increase 18 percent or 14 million acres. Fertilizer use would increase at least 35 percent for corn, and 54 percent for soybeans, while fuel use would climb 23 percent and 34 percent, for corn and soybeans, respectively. Chemical demand would grow 23 percent and 20 percent for the two crops, respectively.
What you’re describing is a locavore system that continues to supply inputs (corn, soybean and wheat) to the broken processed food industry. While it might be efficient by some measures, the processed food industry is killing us (and costing a lot of money in the associated medical and pharmaceutical intervention).
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Or he’s remembering that most of us don’t live in climates that are especially well-suited for producing non-starchy fruits and vegetables.
If you live in Iowa and Nebraska, corn and soybeans (and pigs) are what your local farms are good at growing. If you live in Kansas and Oklahoma, wheat (and cows) is the local crop. There is nothing about “eating local” that actually means “eating fruits and vegetables”. If you live in a climate that is well-suited for growing grains, eating local probably means eating more starch and meat, and less fruits and vegetables.
I agree that a diet (very) low in processed foods would significantly improve everyone’s health. However, there’s no need for these unprocessed foods to be grown within a certain number of miles of each person. California’s good at growing strawberries, so they should sell them to the whole nation, not just to Californians.
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What prevents local food from going under the same process? Pretty much every local farmer I know takes his or her animals to a livestock-market. The animals from this farmer are then purchased by larger operations and shipped to a feed-yard where the animal is fattened up and “finished.” After the animal reaches a certain weight for its frame (so it has good cuts of beef), it becomes your food.
There are regions, just like with corn, beans, etc., where beef is raised more easily than other places. And the same is true for all animals. It has alot to do with the protein levels in grasses of particular regions, weather, etc. at least where beef animals are concerned. These grasses, naturally, are the same ones that are used in hay, feed, etc.
You have identified a problem: the processed food industry, but really haven’t given a solution. The local farm movement, just by virtue of the agriculture happening locally, doesnt mean that farmers products wont undergo the same process before it gets to your grocery store.
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The bulk of the typical human diet should not be grains, it should be vegetables. But in America, half our plate is bread, the other is meat…
Also.. not everyone only eats berries in jam!
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Acording to a dietry book i just read called Fit for life , vegtables and fruit are the only things we should eat .the question is . What amount of food do we need to be healthy ? We westerners could probably eat a lot less .
“Look at the plant foods on your breakfast plate: toast, bagels, muffins, and cereal are grains. The contribution of berries, if any, is present only in that thin veneer of jam.”
That may be your breakfast. Mine is typically a cereal bowl with about as much fruit as cereal, plus some milk. Depending on season, the localness of the fruit may vary from bananas (presumably from Central America) to strawberries, peaches, &c from my own garden.
Actually, the plant-based foods on my own breakfast plate are normally starch-free (most commonly nuts and sometimes a piece of low-sugar fruit), but I am aware that my diet is not anything like normal.
When you’re dealing with large-scale economics, it’s not really useful to pretend that people will eat anything other than what they’re already eating, especially since (until last year) we were spending millions of dollars trying to convince people that grains should form the foundation of their diets.
Ah, yes but if you have looked at the research into wheat consumption, compiled nicely in ‘Wheat Belly’ by William Davis MD, you’d know that grains are the driving food behind obesity, diabetes, and all kinds of metabolic, neurological and auto-immune diseases. Other industrial grain/legume crops such as corn & soy are similarly making us ill (‘The Paleo Solution’ by Robb Wolf documents this as well.)
Along with a move toward locally grown produce and bio-dynamic raising of meat (See the work of farmer/activist Joel Salatin to learn how cows, chickens and pigs can be pasture raised without the use of chemical fertilizers.) must/will come an awareness of which foods actually make our lives more productive and efficient, via improved health and less disease, which will guide what is grown, to what scale and in what quantities.
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pretty sure i can google anything wheat/corn/soy/meat/dairy and it will get the blame for all diseases, cancer you name it.
doesn’t mean it’s true…
funny I recently had someone trying to convince me that milk aka dairy was to blame for the exact same diseases. *huge eye roll*
moderation tends to be a good thing. Eating nothing but white flour bad, whole wheat tends to be okay.
Well, it sounds like you can enjoy you efficient, cheap, tasteless monocultured grains and straches and I can enjoy my inefficient, expensive, delicious locally grown and harvested meats and produce. You can also enjoy being dependent on an exploitative agribusiness and all the global infrastructure it relies upon and the nasty side effects of a diet high in starches and grains, while I enjoy getting my food from my rural neighbors and all the wonderful side effects of a diet high in nutrition and flavor.
To each their own.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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That’s kinda the whole point of this article, Swin — you, and your neighbor, and his neighbor might be able and willing to use local food, but when you expand that beyond an immediate neighborhood (or aggregate the effects of every neighborhood doing this), you run into inefficiencies of scale and comparative advantage problems. That’s why the author began with the proposed “Local Farm, Food and Jobs Act” — it’s unrealistic, and perhaps harmful, to require the entire nation (and, given the US’s oversized impact, perhaps the entire world) embrace an inefficient system merely because you and your buddies like your fancy grains. Since you say “to each her own,” I’m going to assume that you really meant to agree with the author’s point, were being ironic, and weren’t trying to sound as ridiculously smug as you came off.
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Tasteless grains and starches? Non-sequitur…and in December, the oranges and grapefruits from Florida and the brambleberries from Chile are far superior to the ones produced by the farms near my home in the city of Cambridge.
Steve, this is completely wrong as you are projecting the current ill production methods of food onto the local farmer in your hypothetical. Study the farming style of Joel F. Salatin and his farming and please revisit the assumptions in this article http://www.polyfacefarms.com/
Regards,
Pawel
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Yes, local food production is less efficient than a centralized system. That’s good, because the opposite of efficiency is resilency and robustness.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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You seem to be relying on a key assumption yourselves: that what can be produced in California or Idaho must also be produced in Alabama. This is not, to my knowledge, a part of the eat local movement. Rather it would prefer eaters to enjoy the foods local to their region, a big change. But what that means, as described in the dilemma, is that you can’t/shouldn’t get apples outside the north east, as it is a local NE crop.
The other argument, is that there are certain externalities of the current food system, such as pollution, soil erosion, fattier meats, and fossil fuel consumption, that rather than internalized through taxation, are actually subsidized. The argument is made then, small, poly-crop farms, such as polyface, are more efficient in that they limit some of these externalities.
There is, however a compelling case to be made that the efficiencies of polyface, cannot be translated into a system to feed 7 billion. Or that consumers will not sacrifice the variety afforded to them by the modern system.
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Not to mention that, modern manufacturing of food itself is energy rich, you are transporting not only the killed cows but you are transporting the corn you feed them using combustion engines to do the work that on an organic farm a grass fed cow does her self by just walking around and munching on grass… the current mass manufacture methods are of food are completely unsustainable from that energy perspective. That is before you go into the health issues and drugs required to keep the cows alive in the modern manufacturing process versus the lot stronger grass fed cow with its own healthy immune system.
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Interesting. I think this must be directed at some audience that the author believes wants to fully replace modern agro business. I see small/local/urban agriculture as enhancing the current system.
Consider. What are we really talking about if not creating or repurposing greenspaces? To me that suggests there are a host of positive externalities that the author didn’t consider. Urban heat island reduction, the clean up of brownfields and wasted or disused urban spaces, the opportunity use gardens as a lab to teach science and social design and the health benefits of community gardening as an activity spring to mind.
Moreover, many if not most, local farmers who favor this sort of growing promote organic methods. Simply subtracting the benefit of industrial scale to make claims about fertilizer/chemical requirements is specious as it doesn’t take into account farming methods that obviate the need for those products.
You also have to consider that in many cases these projects are being run on a nonprofit basis, so that is a cost reducer. : )
I would also add that the author uses industrial ag’s formulation that maximum calorie production equals ending hunger. But as is become clear with the plauge of first world obesity, calories might fill stomachs but that doesn’t mean the food produced is nutritious or healthy. A fair assessment would take into account the long term health costs of a highly processed diet.
Obviously, we are going to need industrial agro business for many years to come but there should be space for experimenting with alternatives and assessments of relative value of those alternatives needs greater scope.
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The industrial food system is “efficient” under a very narrow definition. Yes, it is efficient at converting fertilizer and pesticides into food calories, however negative externalities of this conversion process, including soil erosion, groundwater contamination, exodus of carbon from the soil to the atmosphere are exempt from the balance sheet. This article assumes that small farms emulate the industrial practices of large farms – this is not the case: wise small farmers use completely different methods. Pioneers of ecologically sound agricultural practices such as the late Masanaobu Fukuoka in Japan, Sepp Holzer in Austria and Elliot Coleman in the US do not use chemical or petroleum inputs: no tilling, no pesticides and no fertilizer. Many thousands of other small farmers around the world utilize similar practices, and have done so for millenia. They demonstrate that local agriculture can produce as many or more calories per acre than industrial farms without any petrochemicals nor any of the negative side effects. Moreover, small farming actually reverses negative effects of large industrial farms by sequestering carbon dioxide, increasing topsoil and maintaining water quality. The ‘fact’ that food produced industrially costs less than foods produced locally is due to a dumping of ‘externalized’ social costs (e.g. groundwater poisoning, climate change) downriver to other places and future generations. Local food is only ‘inefficient’ if you define efficiency in the narrowest of terms, ignore its high social costs and shun the evidence that small, ecological, and economical farms are in fact quite efficient if all costs and benefits are counted.
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Interesting points, and interesting comments. I think you should also elaborate more on your claim about about population density being reduced due to housing units being displaced by community gardens. Is this necessarily the case? In fact, are you ignoring another inefficiency which is often cited in food production – i.e., the claim that residential housing units are often built on the most productive crop land, displacing actual crop production to areas of relatively less soil fertility? To what extent do inefficiencies of land use do to “palaces on a postage stamp” measure up against your claims of inefficiency in local farm production? To what extent does subsidizing use of local, productive farmland offset our existing subsidy of inefficient large single-family homes (through mortage interest deduction and the like)?
Like many of the writers, I enjoy going to farmers’ markets and buying locally grown food.
Unlike many writers, I do not have the ego to force my preferences on millions of people who live in cities or who cannot afford to do this.
Go into stores in New York City and try to imagine how many “local farms” would need to exist to provide fruits and vegetables to 8 million people. There would quickly be food riots and starvation due to the lack of food–because you won’t allow mass produced or non-local food (no Idaho potatos!).
There are farmers’ markets in NYC and they are well received. But they serve a tiny % of the population.
Making it harder to feed people is not a good policy.
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The whole argument against the Local Food movement is the assumption that local producers will be lots of small copies of the big infrastructure. There is very littel need for high-fructose corn syrup, if the goal is providing hearty local food, and not preprocessed look-alikes. f we look carefully at the unsustainability of mass produced high fertilizer food, we will need to cahnge course. The local food movement is just one part of the search for ways to get out of the dominance of big mono-crop “genetically enhanced” patented industrial food. If we do not move in to that direction we will be very unhappy to learn that we can not build it up quickly enough, when we will need it in the future.
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