OPB News
Guy Hand

A just released Zagat survey found that 68 percent of restaurant goers say they prefer locally grown food.

Sixty percent of those would pay more for that food. That’s good news for the small, but increasing number of farmers and ranchers who grow products for local markets.

Guy Hand finds out why Idaho farmers and ranchers are joining the local food movement.

Today, farmer Janie Burns is selling lamb, chicken and eggs at Boise’s farmers’ market. She’s the first in her farming-family to become an outspoken advocate of the local food movement. For Burns, the reasons are obvious.

Janie Burns: “I think you only have to drive through rural Idaho to see the kind of hollowed out towns, the lack of wealth and you don’t have to be a genius to see that there’s just no money in rural Idaho. Those rural economies that once depended on agriculture, their money is somewhere else.”

Burns says the local food movement not only offers consumers fresh food; it offers struggling farmers and ranchers a way off a poorly-paid, commodity-driven tread mill.

Janie Burns: “The farmers are captive into a large-scale commodity system in which they take the price that they’re given. You take a cow to the auction to be sold and you don’t really have a choice on what the auction price is that day. You’re going to take what you get.”

Burns says local food producers can avoid those low commodity prices by selling directly to restaurants and consumers.

According to a recent study commissioned by the Treasure Valley Food Coalition, the Treasure Valley spends $1.7 billion annually on food produced outside the region.

Janie Burns: “1.7 billion of our food dollars are going to producers in California or Chile or China or anywhere across the world . . . So there’s $1.7 billion of opportunity out there . . . .”

That’s money Treasure Valley farmers and local economies could capture — if consumers were willing to buy a lot more local food.

Janie Burns: “And granted, we’re not going to grow the citrus or the avocados here, but the percentage of things that we don’t grow is overwhelmed by the things that we could grow.”

Surrounded by cattle munching on grass, Bill Gale is a rancher hoping to grab some of the food dollars flowing away from the Treasure Valley. Gale was a commodity dairyman who recently switched to selling his own grass fed beef, locally.

Guy Hand / Boise State Radio
Bill Gale and Ed Wilsey, former commodity ranchers who have joined the local food movement

Bill Gale: “I guess I was burnt out on the whole commodity thing . . . So lowering your head and going to town every fall and saying ‘What will you give me for this product for my year’s work?’ I just got tired of that whole scenario.”

Gale’s business partner Ed Wilsey was a commodity beef producer who raised calves, then sent them off to distant feed lots.

Ed Wilsey: “I just made up my mind I was never going to send another calf to the feed lot. It just wasn’t for me.”

A year ago, Gale, Wilsey and two other partners formed Homestead Meats. They raise their cattle from start to finish on open pasture. And, like most local food farmers and ranchers, they market the final product themselves.

Gale and Wilsey both find personal contact with customers a rewarding change of pace.

Ed Wilsey: “When we would take our cows to Lewiston or Cottonwood to the sale . . . you always wondered where your work went, who ate our beef . . . and this is kind of a neat deal. You have people send you emails or call you up. I’ve got a message on my phone now from a woman that bought meat from us at the market and she just raved about it. That’s kind of cool knowing where your product ends up and the people are really enjoying it.”

Not all farmers want that direct contact; that’s one reason they stick with conventional agriculture. But others are attracted because of it — as well as the local food movement’s small-scale, low-tech approach to agriculture.

First-time farmer Mary Rohlfing.

Guy Hand / Boise State Radio
Farmer and local food advocate Janie Burns

Mary Rohlfing: “You can start with a shovel and you can do a lot, honestly, with nothing but a shovel. But one of the factors that blocked me from getting into farming was the whole notion of $100,000 tractors, wow, you know I could not only not afford it, I didn’t know what you’d do with one if you had it. But I did know what you could do with a shovel and a pitchfork . . . and these are the tools of my trade to this day.”

Yet, it’s that small-scale, low-tech approach that skeptics find hard to take seriously. Last spring, Senator John McCain and others criticized the U.S.D.A. for spending public funds on what they called “small, hobbyists . . . whose customers generally consist of affluent patrons at urban farmers market.”

Rohlfing disagrees.

Mary Rohlfing: “I would ask those people what do you have against having more farms and farmers?”

The last agricultural census found that, for the first time in decades, the number of small farms in America is increasing.

Guy Hand / Boise State Radio
Produce that local food farmers sell directly to customers at farmers’ markets

There’s also more diversity among farmers: Nearly 30 percent more women, 10 percent more Hispanics and an increasing number of Black, Asian and American Indians are farming.

Rohlfing attributes much of that increase to the local food movement and its small-scale, direct marketing approach to agriculture.

Mary Rohlfing: “People really want to do this work. We forget most of us are only one or maybe two generations removed from farming in our families. So it’s not that unusual that we would have people wanting to go back to this way of life. And small acreage farming is creating jobs right now and that’s one sector of the economy that is growing.”

But it’s a life with challenges. Small-scale, local food farmers don’t have access to the subsidies, crop insurance and bank loans common to large scale farming operations. And at only 1/3 of 1 percent of the Treasure Valley’s current agricultural output, it’s hard for direct-marketing farmers to shake the “hobby farming” stereotype.

Still, Mary Rohlfing is hopeful.

Mary Rohlfing: “I hope it doesn’t just become an us vs them, big vs small, elite vs whatever is the opposite of that. I hope that isn’t were it goes. I hope it is a true national discussion about how we want to use the resource of the land that we have.”

Whether one believes the local food movement is a boon to rural communities or an elitist hobby, more farmers are joining every day.

Participation in Idaho Preferred — a state program that promotes agricultural products grown and purchased in Idaho — has doubled since 2006. Boise’s downtown farmers’ market is expanding by 20% a year.

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