Last Fall, I moved from NYC to north San Diego County, just outside of the Camp Pendleton Marine Base, to work full-time with Colin and Karen Archipley at their hydroponic organic farm, “Archi’s Acres.” After realizing how impressive their ideas and effectiveness are, I decided to invest the money that I earned for writing Greedy Bastards (which when combined with a loan from Whole Foods) to build a 30,000 square foot “farm incubator” that can serve as the prototype for job-creating, water-saving, food-producing, veteran-led hydroponic organic greenhouses nationwide. We’ve even enlisted Major General Melvin Spiese and his wife Filomena to join us in support of our mission to make this program more diverse and robust enough to build it into a nationwide network.
Earlier in that piece, he says these hydroponic farms are a way to cure “food deserts”, which are (generally) inner city areas where access to fresh food is limited, and the residents don’t have transportation to travel to outlying suburbs to get fresh food.
I’m no expert on produce distributing, and Bieber knows that’s an area with incredible expertise, but in my town (Rochester, NY) I see two kinds of failure and two kinds of success. The fails are Target/Wal-Mart and the independent organic food stores (and Trader Joe’s). Wal-Mart and Target have just announced “fresh food” sections, but their nationwide stocking model means they source their produce from big growers who can provide them with relatively stable staples like bananas, apples, broccoli, bagged salad and the like. Generally, anything that can’t sit on the shelf for a week or two is wilty and unappetizing, but at least its cheap. Similarly, the organic produce is also usually wilty and sourced from far away, but it’s incredibly expensive.
The success stories are the local farmers’ markets and the big regional chain, Wegman’s. The farmer’s markets are better than anyplace else when what they’re selling is in season (since it’s freshest), but that’s clearly not a year-round solution. Wegmans has developed solid relationships with nearby (well, a couple hundred miles) hydroponic farmers, so we get a fair amount of year-round high quality produce. And, during the summer, the relationships between individual stores and local farms means that each store has a different set of high-quality local produce.
Of those four models, the place where Ratigan’s farms would fit is clearly the organic stores and chains like Trader Joe’s. They have customers willing to pay a premium for good, organic produce, and they have an obvious need for more of it. If some vets get jobs because of it, that’s great. But I don’t see this model fixing food deserts, because Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and the rest aren’t going to locate in inner city neighborhoods currently served by corner bodegas selling cigarettes, bread and milk.
aimai
I’m not so sure. I mean: I’m not sure about the financing but I can imagine that given the right technology you could start to put up locally run hydroponic farms in food deserts just the way we’ve had success with local community gardens. In fact if you could get the original investment put in and train the local population why couldn’t you run a hydroponic garden all year round on a similar system: city appropriates the land and builds the basic structure. Local people accept shares and work rotations for shares in the produce. Size: the same city blocks that are used for allotments. People served? A couple of hundred at a time?
Schlemizel
No threads for 10 hours then 2 in 20 minutes B-{D
I’m not whining btw. I just am seeing the benefit to the goopers top-down command decision form of discipline. If this were a gooper site everyone would have specific assignments & all the excitement would be drained out of coming here.
Raven
Trade Joe’s produce sucks.
c u n d gulag
A number of years ago, I read an article by several well-respected nutritionists, in which they said that if you can’t buy local produce, you’re better off buying frozen, or even canned, since they’re going to have far more nutrition than what you buy at any large supermarket chain.
The frozen produce you buy, was picked when it was fresh, washed, (chopped, or whatever), frozen, and packaged near where it was picked. And so has so many more vitamins, minerals, and nutrients that what you’d get “fresh” at your supermarket – FSM knows where it was picked, half the time, it was picked before being ripe, treated to stay that way for shipping, and then treated to ripen when it reached the local distribution center for that chain.
Hence, the produce has virtually NO nutritional value.
And they said that, despite the salt, even the canned veggies in many cases, were better than what was sold as “fresh” in the supermarket.
Also, read “Fast Food Nation,” about what we’re eating in those joints.
But, I suppose everyone here knows about that.
c u n d gulag
Uhm…
Mods – how come I can’t edit what I just wrote? I still have over 3 minutes left?
Gin & Tonic
@Raven: Word.
Gin & Tonic
@c u n d gulag: That’s part of the site upgrade.
NotMax
@c u n d gulag
What you mean “we,” kemosabe?”
My body is a temple.
And I desecrate it daily.
But not with that crap.
J.W. Hamner
Walmart actually does local produce, though I believe their definition of “local” is somewhat expansive. Still, it’s better than you make it out to be.
One thing that locavores… and note that I try to be one… often don’t appreciate is that at some point you are going to need to utilize economies of scale. A zillion little organic family run farms all over the world can not feasibly feed the planet. The point is mainly that we’ll need (properly regulated environmentally friendly) industrial farming practices to scale it up, but it also applies to distribution.
Walmarts have to be part of the solution unless it’s just meant to be a yuppie status symbol that you paid $2 more a pound for your locally farmed beets.
c u n d gulag
@NotMax:
Oh believe me, I don’t either.
Though my fat, dumpy, old temple does need the sacrifice of some distilled grains in the form of a little vodka at least once a day!
And once a year, I make a pilgramage to “Five Guys,” for some delicious poison.
Hey, you can’t repent, if you haven’t sinned!
Paul T
Mark Bittman has also made the point about frozen vegetables. Search for “Frosty the Vegetable”(2005) in the NY Times.
Raven
@J.W. Hamner: No shit, I love our farmer’s market and really appreciate the fact that they can give $2 for $1 to SNAP folks but, even at that, their stuff is sky high.
Howlin Wolfe
We have farmers’ markets in Minnesota (Mpls/St. Paul area), but we also have local food coops that have organic produce year ’round, and it’s usually good quality produce. The coop even pays dividends to its members.
Trader Joe’s has its faults, but it’s sometimes a good resource for different things. It’s way better than, e.g., Whole Foods.
Gin & Tonic
Way OT, but I’m sure some here will be saddened to hear that Harry Reems has died.
Librarian
She’s 68, but she says she’s 54.
The Moar You Know
You’re missing something in the chain: storage and preparation. Most of the folks living in “food deserts” don’t have the infrastructure (working refrigerators and decent kitchens) needed to take advantage of good (or any) produce.
Maude
@c u n d gulag:
We have a new Five Guys. It is doing well.
My local supermarket had grapes for sale from Chile. Those grapes are good.
You can’t get out of season produce locally. If it were only local, I’d never be able to buy an orange.
Enjoy you Five Guys.
raven
@Librarian: She who?
Maude
@Raven:
I wondered about that. There is a summer farmer’s market here, but the bus doesn’t go there. It’s para transit. They take SNAP.
Cassidy
Here’s the unfortunate reality: most people can’t afford to shop at Whole Paycheck, unless you’re cool without utilities, etc. Secondly, farmers markets aren’t on every street corner and not always easy to get to. In my area, the fresh local produce is either on the side of the road, at the flea markets (which are a bit out of the way), or in the trendy section(s) of town where poor people don’t congregate anyway. And lastly, local meat. It’s expensive as fuck.
So how do we fix it? Well for one, the first priorityis to make sure people have food to begin with. That’s the first step. Secondly, Walmart veggies are better than nothing and certainly better than a box of twinkies. Lastly, after making sure people have food to eat consistently, we need ot stop focusing on food and focus on exercise. Mass produced food and walmart veggies are adequate for nutrition if people are out there being active. Do I feel bad getting McDonalds? Fuck no. If I find myslef concerned about it, I throw in an extra round or two of exercises.
dedc79
There was a Wegman’s in the town where i went to undergrad and it’s the only supermarket I ever actually looked forward to going to.
schrodinger's cat
@raven: Maggie’s mom
c u n d gulag
@Maude:
I’d prefer those grapes from Chili in the form of wine from Chili.
Hopefully, whatever is lost in nutritional value, can be made up with alcohol.
NotMax
Wash ’em thoroughly. (The spray big markets use on their produce too often has additives just for the produce section.)
After a trip of around 5000 miles, anything needs a shower.
Though I’m sure I’m not passing along info which you didn’t already know.
Cassidy
That being said, when I do get to go to the flea market, the veggies are relatively cheap. I got a whole bunch of tomatoes, eggplant, zuchini, and squash for 20 bucks. The Tomatoes and Eggplant became eggplant parmesan with homemade tomato sauce. With leftovers, I fed the family for about 3 days for $20.
raven
@Maude: Here’s what we have:
raven
@Maude: Here’s what we have:
raven
Another thread!
Roger Moore
@Howlin Wolfe:
I think they each tend to be good for different things. One thing that Whole Paycheck is pretty damn good at is labeling their stuff with useful information like whether it’s organic or not, where it was grown, and frequently even the specific farm it comes from. And they go to the trouble of stocking meat that was raised vaguely ethically. I don’t buy a huge amount of stuff there, but I wish that other places would follow their best practices.
NotMax
So out of the loop, didn’t even know Wal-Mart sold fresh foods of any kind.
The one here does not, except for the occasional bag of Maui onions, which one can find at better quality and lesser price practically anywhere else on the island.
(Once in a blue moon am forced to go there when my normal outlets run out of the cigars I now buy since my favored brands are no longer sold anywhere in the entire state at all. W-M’s prices on the cigars are nearly 20% higher than my regular sources.)
Maude
@raven:
Thx.
schrodinger's cat
@Cassidy: Where I live there is a family owned grocery store, they have really cheap produce. They also own their own farm and sell a lot of their own produce.
schrodinger's cat
@NotMax: Walmart Super Centers sell food. I have been to one once and the quality of the produce was abysmal.
NotMax
@schrodinger’s cat
Still laugh at how Wal-Mart pulled the wool over the local powers that be by promising they would be open 24 hours.
And they were, for only one month after opening.
Violet
Vertical farming is also going to be an upcoming innovation. Using office buildings and the like to farm using hydroponics. Efficient use of land because you can continue to go vertical and still use the same footprint of land. I think they’re already doing this in China.
jibeaux
As I understand it, the supply chain relationship makes it hard for local/regional farmers to get into the national stores, they have a little more success getting into the smaller & more local chains and obviously most directly they’re at farmer’s markets.
I think you’re going to keep seeing the explosion of aggregators for produce and meat — they are indisputably middlemen, but a lot of times the farmers say they simply don’t have the time to take from farming and go personally hawk their goods at the market one steak at a time or personally deliver their lettuce to the restaurant 10 heads at a time. Someone who will give them a decent price and pick up a truckload of their product is probably earning that overhead they get from redistributing it. I use a produce delivery service that lets you have some choice in selection and delivers it, which is a version of an aggregator. But I also use grocery stores, markets, etc., and — get this — I grow my own! Even if you just have pots you can easily do lettuce, cherry tomatoes, strawberries, herbs.
NotMax
@Violet
Not exactly vertical farming, but (one hopes) we’re going to see a lot more of this.
Cassidy
@schrodinger’s cat: For people on a budget, that’s their only option. Walmart is exponentially less expensive than all the grocery stores.
Ronnie Pudding
Since mistermix mentioned Rochester, it’s important to note that the big Public Market includes some local produce, but also a lot of non-local overstock.
Outlying village farmer’s markets often have rules that local must mean local. The Public Market doesn’t do that, and a lot of stuff is just dumped there (though it is cheap).
Walker
Wegmans is a unique supermarket chain, and you cannot really use it to make predictions about endebors outside of its sphere of influence. I fully expect the heirs to screw up that company now that he is gone, but for now I neber want to live in an area without a Wegmans.
jl
Farmers markets here have gotten all hoity toity. Used to be the kind of people I recognize as farmer types from the area I grew up. They would head their pickups into the stalls, lower the back gate of the pickup and start doing business.
Now its all fancy stuff. Too much artisinal cheeses and breads and meats and goodies. Not enough fruits and veggies.
Every stall has to be registered with some schmuck certified outfit. Local farmers in my ancestral stomping grounds complain about gaming the system, schmuck certifying organization restricting trade, and allowing outfits that cater to tourist trade and high income city customers to game the system.
Actually I think the locals (Edit: that is farmers around where I grew up) are mad that a guy can’t throw some excess produce in the truck, drive around and get some good stuff from neighbors and pass it off as all their own produce at the farmers market. Then they job off the excess unsold stuff to little corner stores and whatnot while driving back home. That violates some rule about all the stuff has to be grown by one outfit that has the certificate to sell at a given stall.
I have mixed feelings about it. Some produce has taken a big hit in terms of availability: truck farmed summer vegggies, melons, figs, winter squash. Now the selection is limited, quality lower, and the prices way higher than they should be. And a lot of these fancy schmancy outfits hire city locals to staff the stalls who don’t know squat about what they are selling.
Me, I don’t give a shit of somebody threw a few boxes of melons in the back of their pickup, and rounded up some other stuff from the neighbors. As long as it the person selling it knew their stuff and brought good stuff at a good price.
I used to be able to get way better quality and variety of melons and produce like eggplant and peppers than I can now.
Maybe things are different with farmers markets in non tourist trap areas.
As for out of season, learn to eat seasonally. But OTOH, eff it, after the dry crop season is over in late fall, very hard to get seasonal autumn and winter produce.
Stupid artisinal fancy scmancy farmers markets around here, they can go to hell.
A few Hmong farmers come to the resscue wrt produce, though, all year round. Cynical me says they will be run out soon, on some ginned up excuse.
catclub
@J.W. Hamner: “Walmarts have to be part of the solution unless it’s just meant to be a yuppie status symbol that you paid $2 more a pound for your locally farmed beets.”
This assumes US versus European values regarding food.
We are paying less and less for food, while Europeans have kept paying a larger fraction of their income for food.
Some lady named Elizabeth Warren gave a talk on this.
Food, clothing, television, even cars ( I think) have been declining fractions of household spending.
Education, housing, and health care/insurance have been rising.
schrodinger's cat
@Cassidy: That was not the case, at this Walmart. It was more expensive and crappy than the regular grocery store. Also understaffed. Had good selection of fish at reasonable prices in the freezer section, though.
Death Panel Truck
I’d rather scrub Maggie’s floors than work for her pa. That motherfucker will put his cigar out in your face just for kicks.
schrodinger's cat
@jl: You are so right about the fancy pants farmer’s markets. The bread and cheese they sell is so darned expensive. No loaf of bread under $5.
schrodinger's cat
@Death Panel Truck: I never understood why his bedroom was made out of bricks?
Cassidy
@schrodinger’s cat: The WMs in my area are all the super variety with the full size grocery store. The pricing is lower than all our grocery stores and we really don’t have local places. The produce is relatively decent. I don’t care for the fruit slection too much and go elsewhere. The meat is expensive, but less os than others. I usually go to the base for meat.
schrodinger's cat
@Cassidy: I have mostly lived in New England and New York. And the Walmarts here tend to be rather sad. Understaffed and not much cheaper than Target. Also not great for groceries in general, even just in terms of price.
I thin the understaffing is sort of a good sign, that means people have better job options than working at Walmart.
edited for clarity.
Librarian
@Death Panel Truck: And his bedroom window is made out of bricks.
jl
@schrodinger’s cat: Damn straight. Used to be farmer’s market down by ferry building was mostly pickups headed into the stalls with farmers selling very good very reasonably priced stuff out of the truck beds.
Some of them, I am pretty sure they did not grow it all themselves. But who cares.
Now, mostly it is outfits who have a marketing schtick. Effing farms with effing names, don’t you know. ‘River Bend Farm’, ‘Weeping Willow Riverside Cutesy High Price Organic Produce’, “Fancy Over Priced Smoked Shit in Plastic from Fancy Overpriced Smoke d’house Nicoise”. Eff you.
Need a cutesy banner with a cutesy graphic.
“Oh, I don’t know what that is. I live in the City and just work here part time. I’ll see if I can find the guy who drove it down.”
Scruffy dry farmers from Central Coast and Hmongs seem to have an exemption, so far. Very few what I consider ‘real farmers’ left.
Edit: thought there are some eccentric people who are left who bring interesting novelty items. Some folks by Escalon are trying to start a California paw-paw industry. They do grow good paw-paws, but they are steep. No way some little outfit who is pioneering California paw paws can fill the gap, though.
Mnemosyne
@NotMax:
When we visited Kauai, we made a point of going to a farmer’s market and they had some great home-grown produce. The lady we bought a pineapple from asked us to return the top to her if possible so she could replant it, which I had no idea you could do with pineapples.
And the starfruit was a revelation. We can sorta get it occasionally on the mainland, but it doesn’t taste anything like it did from that farmers’ market.
Mnemosyne
@jl:
The Giant Evil Corporation has started sourcing local produce for employees — for $20, we can get a giant bag of locally (ie Central Coast) grown organic produce. You don’t get to choose what goes in the bag, but they let you know ahead of time what they expect will be in it. Since it’s still winter out here, there’s a lot of cauliflower and brussels sprouts, so I haven’t gotten one in a while.
Though one of my co-workers reported that the tomatoes he got last summer had worms in them. That was a little too organic for him.
schrodinger's cat
@Mnemosyne: That’s really a good deal. I suspect, California probably has much better produce than New Ingerland.
jl
And still let in real apple people in from northern wine country and Sierra foothills. For some reason, pear people scarce (meebbe because the over priced and uneven quality but oh so fancy organic farm from Brentwood would squeal? I dunno).
schrodinger's cat
@jl: Does your school have an agriculture program? Usually those student run farms are a good deal, with lots of choices.
jl
@schrodinger’s cat: Neighborhood farmers markets are better in terms of letting regular folk in. The academic burger stand where I work has one, with more down to earth outfits, but it is very small, usually only three or for outfits, so limited variety, especially late autumn and winter.
Michele C
@Raven: Indeed. I’ve never understood why people shop there, but I’m learning that lots of people don’t seem to make food or eat vegetables every day (and I don’t mean the people who live in food deserts, but people in NYC with me).
ThresherK
@catclub: Even cars?
I’d love someone (like the Texas Transportation Institute) to geek out on this, if only because my nose tells me that the cost per mile of automobile driving is not declining, and people in Suburbia USA (like my town) aren’t driving fewer miles.
Demographically, where are the shifts? I mean, I know the kidz today aren’t getting licensed at the rates they used to be when they hit driving age, but is it really that much of a decline to equate the commute horror stories (i.e. Portland to metro Boston is now “commuting distance”) and two-part-time-job commutes?
JustRuss
Food deserts exist because they happen to be in the middle of cities, where real estate is way too expensive to be used for agriculture. I don’t see how hydroponics changes that. Sure you can grow a few tomatoes, but we’re talking about food for hundreds of thousands or millions, I can’t see it scaling. But I’d love to wrong.
Michele C
@JustRuss: I’m hopeful that tops of roofs are doable, but they seem (just in my head) to be likely to be expensive. Of course, if we could subsidize it because we actually believe that our citizenry eating healthy is a good thing, that would be nice.
Ha!
Violet
@NotMax: Yes, green roofs are a great idea, but the buildings have to be built to handle them. Not all buildings can handle the increase in weight, as water and soil can be heavy.
ranchandsyrup
Way to rep North County, Ratigan.
The only bad thing about living there is that Issa is your rep.
WereBear
Walmart puts up to 20% of a water solution in their meat. Not so cheap.
Huge aggregators make meat cheap; by loading them up with antibiotics and making them stand in their own shit. This is why chicken so often tastes like dirt to me; I might as well not buy it when I cook it and it’s awful.
Then places like Tyson’s built lagoons of shit and let the community deal with it. Not cheap at all.
There needs to be an upheaval in the food “industry” and the first step is to make it NOT an industry.
J.W. Hamner
@catclub:
If Elizabeth Warren can get us the social safety net the average European enjoys then I’m all for paying more for food. Indeed I personally do waste a lot of my paycheck on arteeeshunaal what-have-yous (having a food blog probably plays some role here).
I appreciate that farmers need to be able to make a living, but poor people need to be able to buy food… and the current climate is cutting SNAP not increasing it. So people like Alice Waters… and I guess Elizabeth Warren… who say “we need to pay more for food” can stuff it until they figure out how we can “give more money to poor people.”
jibeaux
@jl: Paw paw grows real good in North Carolina, but I’d rather have the avocados, grapes, citrus…California produce doesn’t lack for much even if you can’t grow paw paws.
jl
@jibeaux: Thanks for your CA produce appreciation. But California CAN grow paw paws. Darned good ones too. Not sure whether there will ever be a California paw paw industry. I would like to think so. They are delicious.
Sly
I am by no means an expert on food deserts, but I found this interesting.
fuckwit
Dude, I live in San Francisco, and around here, “hydroponic” means one thing and one thing only.