Buy Local Food In Kitsap

You see a lot of well meaning slogans. A slogan like “support local farmers” is one that might you see a lot in combination with talk about the environment, nutrition, grassroots economic development, farmland preservation, carbon footprints and other popular topics of the day. The fact is that farmland is disappearing at a rapid rate to urban sprawl, the environment is losing cultivated lands that provide a critical balance to urban pollution and the smaller local farmer is falling prey to economies of scale, land values that have been pushed out of reach because of their development value, overly burdensome regulation and severe price competition. It is sometimes difficult to see how well meaning slogans like “support local farmers” is doing any good at all.

But if you read through this entire brochure you will learn the simplest and most effective way that you can make a difference.

So what does it mean to support local farmers? How do you do it? Buying local helps, like shopping at farmers’ markets, co-ops, retailers that buy local food, CSA’s (community supported agriculture) and just visiting your local farms to see what they have. Buying through farmers’ markets and CSA’s will deliver a higher portion of your food dollar to the farmer. Economists have also determined that purchases of food and goods produced at a local level have a more beneficial multiplier effect to increase the incomes of all people in a local area or region. The money circulates more effectively when you buy local. Your willingness to vote with your money in favor of local is a valuable approach through what might call the realm of buying and selling.

Chances are that if you are reading this brochure you are already somewhat knowledgeable about the importance of local farms and you may even be a regular shopper at a farmers’ market but the loss of farmland, farms and farmers continues on in spite of your well intentioned purchases. Nonetheless the farmers that you do support and their friends are very grateful for what you do.

It’s possible that if people would buy in greater numbers directly from farmers that maybe whatever else it is that is wrong would somehow work itself out.

Maybe.

Anybody with eyes to see the crowded parking lots at the grocery stores can believe that the large retail chains have learned a lot about consumer behavior and do many things in combination to attract and keep consumers spending their dollars inside their stores. The convenience, reliability, variety and availability of the wide range of products available at your local grocery are designed out of the wisdom of hundreds of years of retailing knowledge and ongoing research which no individual farmer can hope to match. In order to attract large numbers of people back to direct from the farm purchases farmers and market managers would need to compete. Unfortunately this is not likely to happen. But if local farmers and their friends learn to forge new alliances then they will have a fighting chance to survive and prosper. What is needed is an expansion of the effectiveness in the realm of buying and selling into the realm of lending and borrowing or investing.

You see, agriculture is a very capital intensive business. For a farm as small as 5 or 10 acres it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars over years and decades to properly cultivate and equip the farm and the farmer to produce the high quality local, biodynamic, organic, pesticide free, GMO free, free range, grass and grain fed farm produce that most people would opt for if it was available to them. It isn’t much better for farms of 100 acres on up into the thousands. Farm producers selling into the large chains can match the economy of scale of the chain distribution systems with farms of thousands and tens of thousands of acres and combined can sell very low cost “food” to consumers. The retail price of a mass produced item in the store of course does not fully account for the resultant loss in nutritional value, soil fertility, pollution from transport, land fill costs for packaging, etc.

Because of low margins, high land costs and expensive capital local farmers are typically starved for capital to acquire farm implements, build barns, fences, grain storage facilities, processing equipment, greenhouses, etc. The usual methods of acquiring capital from banks, ag lenders or wealthy individuals effectively freezes out the entrepreneurial small farmer from starting new ventures or growing existing ones. The truth is that there are many young people who are interested in local agriculture as a career path that are shut out as well.

Preservation of farm land, farms and farmers depends on developing healthy farm businesses. The constraint on the development of healthy farm businesses is capital.

What is needed is a new alliance of farmer as entrepreneur and manager and the consumer as angel investor and supporter.

The good news is that because of amazing new services provided by internet companies, local farm supporters can now become providers of capital to their farmer friends securely, conveniently and profitably in amounts ranging from a low of $50.00 to $25,000.00. If you spend a couple of hundred dollars per year at a farmers market or more in a CSA you could do more to help by making a loan to your local farmer to help produce the variety and year round consistency of the local foods that you would want to eat.

You can do so with as little as $50.00and access to the internet.

To download a copy of this article in 3 column, brochure style right click Support Local Farmers.