New West Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming
As a county extension agent based in Glendive, Mont., Bruce Smith helps farmers who export their food to distant places for processing. But his real passion is in keeping food at home.
Smith, who stands 6-foot-11 and weighs 360 pounds (“So you don’t have to ask, I wear size 16 shoes”), used to play basketball for Montana State and, briefly and professionally, in France. But recently, he was at the front of a Denver audience at a conference called Community Matters passing around a piece of candy.
Smith, among the conference’s invited speakers, asked the 34th member of that audience to raise his or her hand when the candy came around.
“We’ve gone from producing food to producing ingredients,” he said. Almost nothing stays at home. Instead, the wheat grown in Dawson County gets put on trains – east to Duluth, Minn., or west to Seattle – for processing. Either way, it costs producers money, he said.
“I am a big advocate of food within 150 feet,” said Smith.
A hand went up in the audience. It was No. 33, but never mind. “I used to work for food companies. I worked for three of the top 11 food-processing corporations,” he said. “Who wants to eat candy after it has been passed around 34 times? But that’s what happens with your food.”
In a somewhat odd way, Smith represents two different but overlapping movements. Like urban agriculturists, he argues for locally sourced food. But Smith also believes that rural communities must do their parts, too, in figuring out how to keep food close to home instead of shipping most of it elsewhere.
“You don’t want to turn your food over to large corporations or the government,” he said. “I can teach you how to make cheese in five minutes.”
His community of Glendive, a town along the Yellowstone River that Smith describes as the sort of place most people would rather see at night while driving through on Interstate 90, is doing better than most.
Dawson County now has as many residents as it did in 1915. Farmers have become more efficient, each one producing enough food for 127 people, compared to 27 midway through the 20th century. There’s a farmer’s market, a community garden and a miniature greenhouse, portable and without the heat, that’s used to add several months growing season. Spinach, for example, grows November to March.
Smith also helped set up a Farm-to-Table operation, targeting an area of Montana and North Dakota within 150 miles of Glendive. The co-op includes food-packing business called Western Trails Food, which offers local beans for soups and hull-less barley, which the website touts as “the new rice,” with no loss of nutrients in processing.
Also a part of the food culture there: culinary instruction, offered through the local community college. Eventually Smith hopes for a restaurant that specializes in local foods. Blood sausage could be on the menu in addition to chicken-fried steak.
He didn’t always sound like a guy locavores love to love. He grew up in far northeastern Montana, a few miles from North Dakota and not much farther from Saskatchewan. He picked up two degrees in Montana and then a Masters in business administration from California Polytechnic University. Along the way, he became known for what he could do on the basketball court, eventually moving to France for the game.
That was big part of his food education.
But as a young man, he had corporate aspirations and made a personal vow to manage a food plant by age 40. He did it by 35, first in California, followed by major postings in Illinois and Idaho. He worked for three of the nation’s top 11 food processing companies.
In 1994, he returned to Montana and eventually to Glendive, where he eventually figured out a mission to revitalize his part of rural America. “The financial centers and the educational institutions are all outside of our area, so people gravitate and they rarely come back,” he explains. That, he wants to believe, is not an inevitability – just a lack of creativity.
As for processed food, after being on the inside, Smith advised his audience in Denver to steer clear of it – but not to attempt that feat cold turkey. Start with just one item, he said.
“Making conscious decisions about what you will eat and where you get it may be the single most important thing you can do to support yourself and your community,” he said.
Justin: your point is valid only if you have cheap energy, where one can afford to ship food hundreds and thousands of miles around the country.
But what happens if cheap energy goes away, ala Peak Oil forecasts and nightmares?
Keeping food local means that consumers can see how it is grown, whether the agriculture is sustainable or industrialized. Shipping food to distant points means consumers have no clue what happens behind closed doors, whether a centralized meat plant combines meat from dozens of sources into one product, where it becomes impossible to determine sources of contamination.
The safest food is food you grow yourself or can watch being grown down the road. The unsafest food, potentially, is processed at giant factories hundreds of miles away, where workers are cowed immigrants,inspectors are bribed and owner/managers cut safety and sanitation to maximize profits.
Bon apetite! Time to read “The Jungle” again.
Your expensive energy scenario is multiplied 100 fold for a tomato grown in an artificially heated and lit hot house. Did you think that post through?
Be careful, Montana Locavores. Montana exported about 1.25 billion dollars worth or agricultural products in 2008. I’d hazard an opinion that Local food production is kind of a passing fad. Can you grow Bananas, Other tropical fruit, or Coffee and Coco in Montana? Got chocolate?
There is nothing complicated about this idea, I buy “local” when and where it is avialable.
Transportation accounts for about 14 percent of the total energy consumed by the American food system. Agriculture accounts for just 2 percent of national energy usage. The best practice is to grow lettuce, oranges, wheat, peppers, bananas, whatever, in the places where they grow best and with the most efficient technologies and then pay the relatively small energy cost to get them to market, as we do with every other commodity in the economy. Sometimes that means growing veggies in your backyard. Sometimes that means buying veggies grown in California or Costa Rica.
Mickey assumes that the current system of industrial agriculture will always enjoy cheap, fast transportation and ignores US history.
Importing lettuce from California, bananas from Central America and beef from Argentina is entirely dependent on cheap energy. If energy costs rise dramatically, the economic viability of importing food from afar shatters very quickly.
Until the advent of refrigerated railroad cars or trucks, cities and towns were surrounded by truck farms that supplied vegetables and fruits. And we haven’t always had efficient transportation of bulk goods like wheat. Two hundred years ago, transporting grains was difficult and costly over primitive roads. That’s why so many farmers converted grains to high-value alcohol, which was less costly to move.
While it is disturbing to consider the consequences of an end to the era of cheap energy, it is all to easily to imagine scenarios where that could happen. Meanwhile, Mickey can ignore this risk and indulge in wishing-will-make-it-so magical thinking that nothing can or ever will change. So why worry?
I usually don’t weigh in on these thingsd because it doesn’t seem like anyone ever wants to change their minds and defends their postions fervently. Just a couple of things about the high tunnel, there is no added light or heat other than solar. We started to project as an experiment to see if we could produce “more” of what we eat, not everything…although we are not big advocats of eating bananas. One of the biggest objections we heard about developing local food systems was that there wouldn’t be enough diversity. We came up with a list of over 122 food items that we currently grow or could grow in our climate. Since the average American consumer only lives on about 14, we think there may be enough diversity. We are also looking at eating seasonally, which should reduce the amount of infrastructure, storage, and handling required to get food on the table. I’m not against processed food, I just think we can help ourselves economically and nutritionally by eating more locally produced foods. I’d be the last person to tell anyone they have to eat this or that. Eat what you want, just allow that for some of us, eating/producing locally may be the best choice for our families and our communities.
10-25pm-10
I would like to add that eating locally as much as possible also eliminates the possiblility of large food contamination situations with resulting illnesses and deaths (and many man hours of trying to track down the source of the problem).
Eating seasonally is certainly more sensible (less costly, more efficient, less storage and energy).
Are there accurate figures to back up the comment about it taking more energy for home refrigeration (or other preservation methods) than to have it refrigerated by businesses and relocated by refrigerated transport?
Another question is how can there be as much farmland now as
there was a hundred years ago? Just near where I live and places I’ve been, there is less and less farmland than 10, 20, 30, … years ago. Most of it seems to be covered with housing developments, stores, manufacturing, and, of course, parking lots.
There are definite “costs” to the current system of food supply
that have not been mentioned. Are you aware of how much food is wasted as it goes through the present complicated system? You might want to check out how much is thrown away at many points along the way. Perishable items that spoil, outdated items (that could still be used), items that are not going to be carried anymore at that selling point, fast-food and restaurant items that are “left-over” and tossed, …. just to name a few.
Of course in the present time with the changes in our culture and the lack of training in basic “waste not, want not” attitude,
there is more waste in most home environments than there used to be also.
We could learn much on this topic by informing ourselves of the many things that were learned in the past.