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Growing Local Markets
Aired April 6, 2000
There's a growing interest in this country in organic food and locally-grown foods. Most people think the products taste better and many believe they're better for us than foods produced by conventional farming. In recent years, there's been an effort to create new markets for organic, locally-grown foods. Supporters say there are many reasons to market local foods. They believe local marketing not only improves the quality of our health, but can reduce reliance on fossil fuels, support small-scale agriculture and preserve farmland - and can actually feed the local economy. 90.3's Karen Schaefer takes us to Lorain County, where a diverse group of people is creating new markets for local foods.
Grower Gerry Gross has hundred of seedlings
ready for transplants. Photo credit: Karen Schaefer |
Once, all our foodstuffs came from the local farm. Choice was limited to the growing season, but what we lacked in variety, we made up for in flavor, freshness and cost. Today fully one third of the fresh fruits and even more of the fresh vegetables in our grocery stores come from outside the U.S., from Canada, Mexico, and countries in Latin and South America. Congressman Sherrod Brown of Lorain says the flood of imported foods constitutes a growing threat to the health of American consumers.
Sherrod Brown: ...the trade agreements have allowed countries...to export fruits and vegetables into the U.S. that very well may not pass our safety standards, where the growing conditions often include a lot of pesticides that are banned in the U.S....I think that threat is beginning to be felt and will be felt in greater and greater numbers in the future.
There's new evidence that organic food is more nutritious than that produced by conventional agri-business. Brad Masi, director of sustainable agriculture projects at Oberlin College's Environmental Studies program, quotes a recent study by Rutgers University.
Brad Masi: They just went to grocery stores and took samples...and actually determined that, in several cases, that the organic food had ten times more nutrients...than conventionally-produced food....So the purpose of this local food program was to begin to use the college as a way of creating a local market for local producers.
Masi says every morsel of food we eat has traveled an average of 1,300 miles from its source. He says the creation of local markets not only reduces the use of fossil fuels for transportation and agriculture, it provides a place in the economy for small farmers, and helps preserve disappearing farmland. Four years ago, a group of Oberlin students and townspeople decided to test that idea. They created the Oberlin Sustainable Agriculture Project or OSAP, which runs a small, community-supported organic farm and a seasonal farmers market.
Gerry Gross: Be honest with you, I don't really know if there is a long-range future in the Farmers Market in Oberlin, just because of the Oberlin population, it's so transient. When the produce is here, the people aren't.
But OSAP Grower Gerry Gross says creating a local market hasn't been easy.
Gerry Gross: We cannot be sustainable, not even close to sustainable, so what it causes me to do as a grower is to create wholesale markets and sell wholesale. That's much more energy and much more investment and much less capital return.
An enticing array of sustainable products
include green cleaners, bulk herbs, and organic herbs and canned
goods. Photo credit: Karen Schaefer |
One of Gross' new wholesale customers is the Black River Cafe, owned by former Oberlin College student Joe Waltzer. He says his natural foods restaurant is beginning to exert a local market force.
Joe Waltzer: I try to focus on local foods whenever I can, when they're in season...One of the farmers from the Farmers Market called me a couple weeks ago and told me he was getting ready to plant and asked what I needed.
Waltzer also buys another locally-produced food that's found its way into the Oberlin Farmers Market. Anne Hauser runs a goat dairy farm in New London, 20 miles from Oberlin. She sells her fresh goat cheeses to area restaurants.
Anne Hauser: I wasn't going to do farm market...But they said, oh please do come, you know, and the first Saturday I was there I sold out! I came home early...and I do enjoy the people that come back, it's such an ego trip. Love your cheese!
But while Hauser has been in business for six years, she says this is the first year she's made a profit. Recently she acquired a new contract with the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association, which runs food programs in student residence halls. She says steady income sources help balance riskier, high-profit ventures for small farmers like herself.
But it's not just small farmers who can benefit from new markets for local products. For years Sarah Kotok dreamed of starting a small grocery store like the one her grandfather once owned in New Jersey. Kotok's Market in Oberlin opened this year, selling everything from organic produce to alternative cleaning products. But Kotok says economic sustainability in the local food industry is tough, even for grocers.
Sarah Kotok: Really, it's about volume and people being able to make a living selling vegetables, which you don't make a lot on, so you have to sell a lot of them...And I think that selling those things to the cities where no one's going is where the real economic sustainability is going to come.
Reality is the hardest sell of all. Last year, OSAP's efforts failed to create a local farm market in a blighted Hispanic neighborhood in Lorain. While everyone admits the system of new markets being created in Lorain County isn't perfect, most think the concept has a future. And next year the OSAP farm will move to a new 25-acre home, where it will supervise the agricultural portion of a project to create all kinds of new Midwestern models for sustainable living. In Lorain County, Karen Schaefer, 90.3 FM.
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