Postcards from the Heartland - Part 3
A Local Revolution
by Ingrid Evjen-Elias
In the third installment of the Postcards from the Heartland series, Food First intern Ingrid Evjen-Elias chronicles what she learned during her 500-mile bike trip through the American Midwest about the troubles facing small farmers and their innovation.
Read Part I and Part II of the series.
Dodging semis on a roadbike has its joys. Well, maybe just one joy; biking uphill, you can ride the tailwind for a few glorious seconds before the exhaust slams you and almost knocks you over. On a highway with only a couple feet of shoulder, this can be scary. My new theory is that the main obstacle to a local food economy in the U.S. must be the massive trucking lobby. Huge semis bearing brightly colored corporate food logos seemed to whoosh past us constantly.
Whizzing through the Kansas night on our fossil-fuel free vehicles.
We saw a lot of roadkill -- turtles, snakes, and birds that, like local economies, became hapless victims of long-distance production. One day we found a freshly killed pheasant that we later plucked and cooked, under a full moon, in an abandoned lot next to Interstate 70.
Junction City, Kansas is exactly what it sounds like. Across the freeway loomed the garish lights of Sap Bros, a gas station where tired truckers can also shower and fuel up on greasy rehydrated pizzas and individually-wrapped cookies. We noticed that almost everything, including the cookies from California, came from elsewhere – not surprising, considering that from farm to plate, the average American meal travels about 1500 miles.
Here we were, in the heart of agricultural country, and the only local food we could find was a roadkill pheasant! Mmm, but did that pheasant taste good!
A couple days later we finally managed to find some nutritious regional food in the college town of Manhattan, Kansas. In front of People’s Grocery Co-op Exchange store the Emrich Family Creamery truck was pulling up.
A woman who shares Amber Emrich’s mission is Nancy Vogelsberg-Busch of Bossie’s Best. Returning to Marysville on our way back to Lincoln, we visited Vogelsberg-Busch to talk about raising healthy kids and grass-fed cattle.
Though refreshingly devoid of traffic, the gravel country roads to Nancy’s place ravaged our thin tires. As we pulled up, late after changing the first flat of the trip, Nancy came running out of the barn to report a baby calf had been born just minutes before. Wet, on shaky legs, the newborn emerged from the barn into the sunlit meadow.
Nancy, her son Isaac, and the newborn calf.
Living with Nancy and her son Isaac on the farm were an Indian pony that she let us ride bareback, a pet pig, a friendly dog and about 100 cows. Isaac eagerly let us taste-test the snap peas he had growing in their large vegetable garden. After two weeks adrift in seas of wheat monoculture, this was the first farm in Kansas that came close to my naive vision of a REAL farm.
Nancy told us, over a kitchen table cluttered with papers, about her decision to follow in the footsteps of her father, who farmed organically “before it became cool to do so.” To the neighboring conventional farmers relying on biotechnology, chemicals or government subsidies, a farmer whose only purchased input for her small flock of cattle is rock salt is an oddity. But Nancy was determined to raise her son in a healthy environment.
Nancy encourages her customers to come to the farm and buy their meat directly. The rest of the distribution she does herself, traveling to the few co-ops, sporting events and stores around Kansas willing to front the higher prices she asks for her organic, homemade hot dogs. Nancy has had offers to market her hot dogs to trendy out-of-state locales, but she’s refused, maintaining that her goal is to produce food locally.
The single mother-farmer leads a hectic life. In between farming and her time on the road, she works a 12-hour shift at the local envelope factory three nights a week. She hates the assembly line work, but needs the health insurance benefits the job provides; over the years she’s developed stress-related health problems. Her co-workers, says Nancy, are mostly other farmers also trying to keep their land and to pay for healthcare.
The small farmers we met a few days later at the Centerville Market in Lincoln, Nebraska adopted a similar strategy when they realized that innovative marketing is the key to their survival. The Nebraskans were visibly heartened to see emissaries interested in their region, greeting us with a plate of steaming hot pancakes and an invitation to camp in the back room of the market. A group of local farmers and academics from the Nebraska Sustainable Agriculture Society joined us to chat.
John Ellis, the primary founder of Centerville, has farmed for over 30 years. Faced with the dilemma of selling out to agribusiness or growing larger, he decided to do neither. Two years ago John and other former corn-and-soybean farmers came up with an alternative: a daily indoor marketplace for value-added products bought directly from producers. The Centerville ambiance couldn’t be further from that of the typical impersonal superstore full of teetering towers of identical processed foods.
Inside Centerville Market. Customers can browse for primarily local items including farmed buffalo jerky, ostrich meat, fresh milk and eggs, small bags of cereal grains and flours, handcrafted soup mixes and cut flowers.
The market is run by middle-aged, formerly conventional Midwestern farmers – who, I was pleased to discover, seemed to share the same do-it-yourself spirit as Berkeley collectives I’m familiar with. John envisions not only a business venue, but a community space for workshops, events, music, and the exchange of ideas.
Centerville customers won’t find the familiar rock-bottom prices they would pay at the Wal-Mart on the other side of Lincoln. But for John, cheap, imported food doesn’t include the true costs of the industrial production process: the health of the land, our bodies and our communities.
As in Marysville and most other rural communities, young people are leaving Lincoln for opportunities in bigger cities. John hopes that the Centerville Market will encourage people of all ages to experiment with creative small enterprises and to stay in the area.
That Saturday, we took a stroll around the lively outdoor farmer’s market held across the street from Centerville once a week. Jason Baliban and his wife Anna sell their jams at both the outdoor market and at Centerville.
“Well it helps the economy, it helps keep us going and it’s more local. A lot of the bigger companies use pesticides -- some do, some don’t – all our stuff is pesticide free. The little guy likes people to help him out and we like Centerville because it’s a farmer-started deal, it’s started by a lot of local farmers, everybody does everything all-natural, and it keeps everything in-state,” said Jason Baliban.
Worldwatch research associate Brian Halwiel describes the Centerville vision in his article Eating at Home: “Ellis really is talking about revolution—about taking power away from an oligarchy and returning it to the public.”
But wrestling power from the corporate food industry is no easy task. John had to sell most of his farm to keep the market afloat, and works morning, noon and night reorganizing empty shelves, dusting unbought packages and scheming up ideas to bring in new clientele. But slowly, more and more people are poking their heads in and asking what’s for sale, what’s going on, how can they get involved in this cultural experiment.
Because that’s what Centerville is really about – a cultural shift which encourages everyone to get behind a table and think up a product or skill to share. Centerville Market, the antithesis of the corporate-controlled food system, models an alternative to a homogenized Wal-Mart culture that smashes creativity and regional diversity.
Centerville’s competition: the Lincoln Super Saver store.
As farmer and writer Wendell Berry warns:
“The people will eat what the corporations decide for them to eat. They will be detached and remote from the sources of their life, joined to them only be corporate tolerance. They will have become consumers purely – consumptive machines – which is to say, the slaves of producers…it is impossible to mechanize production without mechanizing consumption, impossible to make machines of soil, plans and animals without making machines also of people.”
The biking leg of our journey complete, I departed Lincoln on Greyhound. As the bus lumbered east through Iowa, past corn corn and more corn, I thought about how most of my life I had been “a consumer purely” – a “consumptive machine.” That was going to change. I too, would become a producer.
