Photo New West
A story from the New West website caught my eye this morning. Factory farming and the loss of agricultural infrastructure was the topic at the recent annual meeting of the Powder River Basin Resource Council, a conservation group based in Sheridan, Wyoming. Mike Callicrate, a rancher and critic of factory farming said in a talk he gave to the group:
“Industrialized food is killing us. We’ve never had such a food safety problem as we have now. The question is, ‘How do you rebuild the infrastructure of a food system once it’s destroyed?’ That’s where we are right now.”
The loss of infrastructure — the small mills, slaughterhouses and processing plants that once dotted America’s rural landscape and provided a place to process food locally and on a small scale — is only one of numerous complaints leveled at factory farming and its tendency to consolidate processing into just a few massive and far-flung facilities.
I experienced that lack of infrastructure first hand here in Idaho when, a few years ago, I tried to find a source for locally grown chickens. There weren’t any. Any chicken in any store came from California or the Deep South. Period. That’s because locally grown chicken required a state or federally inspected processing plant and I quickly found that Idaho’s had flown the coop probably fifty years. I say “probably” because no one at the Idaho State Department of Agriculture or any other organization I called could remember. Now that’s a loss of infrastructure.
Luckily, that changed when HomeGrown Poultry opened up in New Plymouth in 2007 and began offering Idahoans locally grown chickens in area stores. Co-owner Janie Burns said in a story I did back then for Edible Idaho:
“Every time we lose processing, we’re a little diminished as a society and a culture. When we lose a processor we lose it, they’re gone, and a farmer loses a rotation crop and people lose the option of eating local foods . . . And so we’re trying to bring that back.”
HomeGrown Poultry has been a success. Idaho chicken growers now have at least one place to process the poultry they grow and, finally, consumers have the ability to buy them. But that’s still a long way from the kind of infrastructure that’s needed to support a truly varied locally grown food system.
The New West story goes on to say that rancher Callicrate “has a vision of a new future for independent ranchers, one where they collectively get together and are given an opportunity to sell their products directly to the consumer.” That won’t happen without infrastructure. And infrastructure won’t happen without money. HomeGrown Poultry co-owner Janie Burns suggests one solution to that problem may be “Slow Money,” a new type of investment structure that puts money directly into sustainable farming. Here’s an article on the subject: “Bringing Money Back to Earth.”
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Guy Hand is a writer, public radio producer and photographer specializing in food and agriculture. |
