Community-Responsive Agriculture

On iTunes I can download a little-known song by an obscure band that I happened to hear about from my cousin. On Amazon I can buy a book that has only sold a dozen copies in the past year. On Etsy, I can buy every one of my friends a different one-of-a-kind gift handmade by an artist. The internet has opened up a commercial universe that can satisfy every quirky taste. The rule of thumb usually is: if it exists, I can find it and buy it. And I'm not alone. So many people are shopping this way now that the collective purchases of the odd and unusual surpass those of the blockbuster. Is the food marketplace ready to follow suite? Ready to shift to filling numerous niches instead of mass-producing a few dozen tried-and-true (and shelf-stable) varieties? This trend is already in evidence at farmer's markets nationwide, but even so, when it comes to fruits and vegetables, my choices, and yours, are limited by what local farmers decided last January to grow for this market season. As a result, I simply cannot find the foods that I drool over in the online seed catalogue anywhere, and therein lies an opportunity. An opportunity for me to get exactly what I want to eat, and for farmers to earn a premium growing it for me. 

As Wendell Berry said, "Eating is an agricultural act." Every time we buy or prepare or eat food, we are acting as co-producers of our agricultural system. The recent boom in farmers’ markets speaks volumes about the growing public interest in a different kind of food (or food-buying experience) than that offered by grocery stores. But the overall system, skewed as it currently is towards large mono-crop production, grocery stores, processed foods and mature farmers, faces several distinct challenges that extend even to the farmers’ market. Without better information management tools, the traditional “market” forces of supply and demand could turn the farmers’ market into an inconvenient outdoor version of the grocery store produce section. Here’s why: Many of the people who are making food purchasing decisions today have never done so outside of the grocery store whenever/wherever produce paradigm. The fruits and vegetables they are familiar with, and therefore comfortable buying and eating, are the very ones they recognize from the grocery store. When shopping at a farmers’ market, the impulse to try something new will only translate into an enduring purchasing behavior if the customer has a good experience cooking and eating that “new” food. Kale wilting in the crisper doesn’t help to increase the variety of locally grown foods any more than kohlrabi left un-purchased on the market table. When it’s time to develop the coming year’s crop plan, farmers review the profitability of the crops they’ve previously grown for market, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that “new” vegetables that don't gain popularity quickly disappear from those crop plans. So, if farmers grow what people will buy, and people buy what they know, and what people know is based on what they can buy, how can we break out of this cycle into a universe of expansive choice that we enjoy so many other places?

The key is for the eater to buy before the seed has been planted. Literally. And for consumer demand to inform the formation of crop plans. This is Community-Responsive Agriculture, in which farmers grow crops in response to their community's food interests, and are able to do so because the community members make their preferences known in advance of planting. 

What would be the result? Farmers would be able to directly meet the needs of their individual customers in unprecedented ways. Identifying fruit and vegetable varieties that will be profitable would become easy and the financial risk of testing the viability of those crops on the farm would be distributed. Individual farm crop diversity could increase which in turn would increase regional food-crop diversity. More heirloom and specialty crop varieties would become staples at local markets. Food choice would expand, even when eating locally and in-season, and the increase in crop diversity would makes farms, farmers and foodsheds more economically and physically resilient. 

That's the potential power of Community-Responsive Agriculture, and we're about to start testing various models of it in action.  If you are interested in prototyping with us, please send us some information about yourself and your organization so we can connect. We would love to learn with you as we all work together to build stronger, more resilient, more vibrant food communities.

Do you know any fruit and vegetable jokes?

Q: What’s the fastest vegetable?
A: A runner bean

Q: What’s orange and sounds like a parrot?
A: A carrot

Q: How do you fix a cracked pumpkin?
A: With a pumpkin patch

Q: What is Beethoven’s favorite fruit?
A: Ba-na-na-naaaaa (sung to Beethoven's 5th)

These are borrowed from online sources and friends, and we encourage you to copy them and to give us more in the comments. Like the food crops that nourish us, jokes like this are part of our common patrimony: coaxed into shape by our anonymous forejokers, lost in the mists of time; they're adapted well to survive adverse delivery conditions and to yield maximum laughter or groans. We think they should be retold as widely as possible!

Why do seeds matter?

Seeds are our common inheritance from nature and the farmers, gardeners, and plant breeders of the past. They are the key to our future and they require active preservation. The best way to preserve a crop is to grow it!

Two important facts you may not know about seeds:

1. Seeds have a limited shelf life.

Did you know that for many crops, their seeds only have a shelf-life of one year, or a few years? After that, the seeds begin to degrade and may not grow. Those crops need to be “grown out” each year or two, so fresh seed can be harvested, in order for the seeds to remain viable.

2. There’s a difference between "open-pollinated" varieties and "hybrids".

Did you know that some crops are not true-breeding? That is, if you take a seed from their fruit and plant it, the next year you will NOT get the same variety of plant. You’ll get something a little different. So if you want the same thing, next year you have to go back to the seed seller and buy seeds again. This is true of “hybrid” plants.

(Hybrids* are created by crossing two parent plants that are true-breeding, to get desirable traits from both parents. Hybrid plants have many good features, so they’re commonly grown. But the “children” of hybrids don’t -- the hybrid can’t reliably pass down its good features, and has to be created fresh every year by breeding the two stable types together. It takes many years to “stabilize” a hybrid into a true-breeding plant that reliably passes on its features.)

Most older varieties, however, are true-breeding – they are called “open-pollinated.” These true-breeding varieties are valuable and should be preserved. One reason to preserve them is because they allow independence from seed sellers. They allow the home grower to save seeds from her own plants and know that she can grow those plants in the future.

So:

To preserve many open-pollinated varieties as viable seeds, the seeds need to be grown out every year. The more people who want to eat a variety, the more reason farmers and seed companies have to grow out that crop.

Building demand for an open-pollinated variety helps to preserve it as viable seed stock.

* Hybrids are not sterile; they can produce offspring, but their offspring are just not of the same type. Also, the general process of hybridization is part of conventional plant breeding and has been around for much longer than today's lab-based genetic modification methods.