More Than A Mile: Ep. 1 - An introduction by Nick Carter of Market Wagon

More Than a Mile's introductory podcast is about local food and the farmers and artisans that produce and provide to their local communities. Nick Carter is the host of the More Than A Mile podcast and is the co-founder and CEO of Market Wagon, an online farmers market. 

Episode 1 Transcript

Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (00:04):

Welcome to More Than A Mile, a local food podcast from Market Wagon, focused on connecting you to local food through farmer stories from across America. I'm Nick Carter, your host, a farmer and the CEO and co-founder of Market Wagon. We are your online farmer's market with a mission to enable food producers to thrive in their local and regional markets. Food is so much more than just nutrients and calories. It's actually the fabric that holds us together. And I look forward to crafting a generational quilt of farmers' stories and experiences, the victories and challenges of individuals, families, and teams doing their part to help democratize food in America. Thanks for joining me for this episode of More Than A Mile, and thank you for buying local food. It's one critical step in making an investment in food for future generations.

(00:54):

Well, my name's Nick, welcome to the More Than A Mile podcast. I'm your host. And normally I will be joined here by some of the esteemed farmers and food artisans, the food producers that really make local food, what it is. But today, just for a brief moment, I want to lay the foundation and let you know why we decided to launch this podcast and I'm gonna share a little bit about my background, how local food is important to me and why I think also it's important to everybody. As a matter of fact, I think it's so important that I wrote a book about it, and I gotta be honest. There's nothing more self-aggrandizing than self-publishing a book. Well, perhaps, self-publishing your own podcast about the book that yoU.S.elf-published. So I'm well aware of that. And let me just say that the point of this podcast is not about me and what I really look forward to is bringing onto the show, those people that I admire, respect, and have been spending my career to try and build a marketplace and a world where their small farms, their small food, businesses can thrive.

 (02:02):

That's what this is all about. I want to let you know how I came to this mission in my career, why it's important to me. And I think it'll resonate with why you have tuned into a podcast about local food. So I wrote this book More Than A Mile, and it's a play on words, right? The question we were asking is what's important about local food and the answer is that it's more than just measuring it in miles. As I was in my late twenties and early thirties, trying to figure out how we could create a business that was viable on our own family farm. That seemed to be slipping away. I knew that the local food movement was our only chance we weren't going to get big. Let's talk about getting big or getting out a little later in the podcast today, including some historical soundbites that I'm going to reflect on.

(02:54):

And so I had to I had to make it into the local food movement. Well, the first question I wanted to ask is a little, what does that mean? How far away am I allowed to sell the stuff that we grow? And what I discovered is that there was very little by way of kind of an orthodoxy of local food that all of its adherence could faithfully commit to and celebrate. Or I guess excommunicate the heretics because people who love local food, its most loyal adherence may be drinking fair trade coffee sourced from Columbia. They'd certainly eat chocolate. And on the flip side of the coin, people that live in Arkansas probably aren't buying Tyson chicken just because it's quote unquote local to them. So there must be something else, something more elemental in this idea of local food that we were really grasping for, that we were looking for as food consumers in the U.S. and I wanted to try and unpack that.

Historic Soundbite: Wendell Berry (July 1974) (03:52):

"I also remember that at the same time in Washington, the word on farming was get big or get out a policy that is still in effect. The only difference here is in method. The force used by the communists was military, with us it has been economic, a free market in which the freest were the richest, the attitudes were equally cruel. And I believe that in the long run, the results will be equally damaging, not just to the concerns and values of the human spirit, but to the practical possibilities of survival. And so those who could not get big have got out, not just in my community, but in farm communities all over the country."

Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (04:37):

That was Wendell Berry. He's an incredibly influential author in the local food movement and in my life in particular. And I have to admit as I write a book and as I venture in this career in local food, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. There's many who have gone before me, Michael Paul and Joel Salitan, Wendell Berry, and others. And I really want to zero in on Wendell Berry's work because what's interesting about his work over and against the others who have written about and pontificated on local food, and the state of our current food supply, Wendell was contemporary in the seventies and eighties, as these transformations were taking place, he was able to see then what would happen if America didn't turn away? And he was right. That is a level of prescience, of almost a prophetic power to be able to stand and warn about the future.

 (05:27):

And if only we had listened, if only we had listened to Wendell and where Wendell was standing in the moment in the seventies, when, when that audio clip you just heard was, was recorded, he was standing up against the most influential person, arguably in the history of American agriculture who has really shaped American agriculture the way it is today. And his name is Earl Butz. Earl Butz was the Nixon era director of USDA, the United States Department of Agriculture. And he fancies himself the hero of American food supply. But what many of us have understood is that he's anything but.

Historical Soundbite: Marshall Martin (Feb 1993) (06:07):

"And then 1980s came along and times are difficult and many family farms faced foreclosure and bankruptcy. And there's still some today who, who claim that they're suffering from overexpansion. So I guess my question for you is Dr. Butz, first of all, did you say that, that the farmers are to plant fence row to fence row? And in retrospect, was that good advice?"

Historical Soundbite: Earl Butz (Feb. 1993) (06:26):

"I probably said it. I said a lot of things when I was secretary and I expect, I did say it, but it was the market who dictated that farmers plant fence row to fence row. Prices were up, exports were good. And the market dictated expand your production. They not only planted fence row to fence row, they tore out the fence rows. I can't even find the fence rows out there now, I guess that's because of large tractors and large combines. But be that as it may, but Marshall, if you don't produce it, you can't sell it. And if you have this program, we've had for years of curtailing production and telling the rest of where we're going to cut back and we're going to raise prices and cut back. That's not the way you expand markets. What we've done in our program around here is we've got our, we've put our prices up here with our price supports and then we've curtailed our production and paid our farmers not to produce.

 (07:11):

We sent a signal to the rest of the world that, that we're not going to be a reliable supplier. We sent a signal to the rest of the world that we're going to cut back on production. We got high price and we sent a signal. You expand your production on your marginal acres and your fragile land. And then just undersell the U.S. by a few dollars a ton, which is precisely what they do. They made us the residual salesman in the world's marketplace. Undersell us $10 a ton until you empty your bins in your warehouses. And then the world can take what they need from the U.S. and that's the position we've gotten ourselves into so that now we've got to heavily subsidize our exports to dig out of the pit that we've dug ourselves into."

Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (07:50):

As a kid growing up on the farm, we spent our summers; spring, summer, and fall, producing food. We spent our winters clearing fence rows, pulling trees down, pulling out old fences and combining and joining fields together to make fields bigger and bigger and bigger so that we can produce more grain. Butz's vision for the U.S. was compelling. It was strong, and you got to hand it to the guy. He pulled it off. His vision was that the United States would become the world leader in grain exports. And in order to do that, he had to activate farms to produce as much grain as humanly possible--farm, quote, "fence row to fence row." That's what we were trying to do. The next quote was to "get big or get out" in order to be the most efficient grain producing nation. We had to be large, massively efficient grain farms all throughout the Midwest and central plain states.

(08:44):

We were going to export to the world, corn, soybeans, and wheat, in such supplies that nobody else would bother to grow it. We would dominate the market. Well, this was a great strategic play, especially in the Cold War era, when the Soviets controlled most of the world's oil supply, maybe we could control the grain supply. What happened though is that that market never really materialized. And while farms like mine, where we grew up originally raising livestock, feeding the grain that we raised to that livestock. And what we said was we walked most of our grain off the farm. We were a ecosystem unto ourselves. The manure went back to the fields and it produced more grain the following year. Just enough grain to feed our livestock, which were also raising alfalfa. And they were grazing. Instead, we became a specialized farm. We were contributing to the United States, food supply, corn and soy, but the world that Earl Butz saw as the customer for that, they didn't need it in the same quantity that we were able to produce.

(09:49):

So what do you do when you have heaping mountains of corn and soy piling up and grain elevators and in store houses and in the U.S. reserves of grain? Well, you release it into the market in new ways, making cheap livestock feed. There's a lot of plots, and many subplots, in the food movement in the U.S. but the overarching plot really has been our obsession and specialization for producing grain. Other things that matriculate out of that are, for example, our desire for pasture-raised or grass fed beef. Well, what's that a reaction against, well, in the seventies and eighties, it became more economical to simply confine your animals and feed them nothing but corn and soy, because well, all that corn and soy had nowhere to go. So it became very inexpensive to buy pure grain feed regimens. And we turned cattle, hogs, and eventually poultry into confined animals. Today, when you see a reaction against CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations), the real root cause of all of that was a massive overproduction of grain produced for Earl Butz's vision of feeding the world. But in the end, the world didn't need our grain that much."

Historical Soundbite: Iowa PBS (Sep. 2013) (11:07):

"In 1973, President Nixon's secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz, responded by calling upon American farmers to plant fence row to fence row. And he told them to get big or get out. Producers took his words to heart and the race to feed the world was on."

Nick Carter (Market Wagon) (11:26):

Earl Butz, fancied himself as the hero of American agriculture. And in many ways what he did was astounding. It was had a deep impact. That's for sure the echo effects of this bubble of grain supply are still here today. We spent most of the seventies, eighties, and nineties building confined animal feeding operations. But even at that, we couldn't consume all of the grain that these specialized Midwestern farmers were producing. Next, if you recall, ethanol became a big thing and even bio-diesel, what else can we do with this corn and soy? Well, maybe we can burn it in our cars? But as recently, as about a decade ago, we hit what's called the ethanol blend wall. We are blending more ethanol than we can use into our petrol fuels in the U.S. And so we had to come up with somewhere else to put it, and the next place ended up being dairy.

 (12:15):

About five years ago, we started to see reports that we had been over producing milk in the U.S. and dairy was being dumped. Milk is now being applied to fields as a nitrogen fertilizer and where we stand today, we've pushed this bubble all the way to the end. And we are sitting in the U.S. on billions of pounds of excess cheese, because we've pushed the grain to the dairy, to the milk, to the cheese, and we have more than we possibly need. So how does that lead us to the original question of local food? What is local food? Is it really just a matter of distance? Well, the distance from you to where the food came from, it doesn't solve any of these issues of overusing the land for grain, specializing farms, putting animals into confined feeding operations. What we really mean by local food.

(13:10):

If we boiled it down is relationship. We want somebody to be local near to us, not just by the miles that I can drive to the place of production, but I'm looking for somebody who I can relate to that's producing my food and that person, the local food producer, stands not just as a relationship to me as a consumer, but they stand in a gap because they mediate a relationship between me and the land. They have a close relationship with their land and a close relationship with the person consuming the food. They become a mediator. My stewardship of the land in the U.S. is effectuated through my relationship with a farmer who's a good steward of the land that they own and that they operate. So what about certifications? What about labels like organic or natural? Well, they're helpful if the farmer that we are trusting to have a relationship with the land--mediate that relationship between us and the land--is actually growing things organically. But the organic certification program in the late nineties became co-opted by the USDA.

(14:19):

None other than Earl Butz's legacy. They trademarked the name and created a list of certification requirements in order to be able to use the label. The label today stands as sort of a proxy for, can I trust the person producing this food? And it's somewhat helpful, but what's more helpful is if I know the person and I understand how they are stewarding the land. I may not necessarily need to see that little round label on their package because the reality today is that little round label can get rather expensive and nearly impossible for small family farms to qualify for. And on the flip side, there are today over 40 synthetic chemicals that are approved by the USDA and still be allowed to be certified organic. The whole program when it became government run lost a lot of its appeal. So how do I know that these stewards of the land that I'm building a relationship with are doing it right?

(15:19):

Do I look for insignia, emblems, certifications? That's sort of what the USDA organic program promised. The reality, however, is that most of the people that are small family farms, they are responsible for the land, not just because they have to, to pass a certification, to make the person with the badge, check a box on a report, but because they have to, so that, that land continues to produce food for them, for generations to come. They have an obligation to the land out of their relationship to the land. Certified organic is helpful if the farmers are actually certified organic. If they're using organic practices. And what we've found is that many of the farmers and food producers who we work with have been organic before organic was cool. And they're organic still today, even if they can't afford or pass the regulatory hurdles that it takes to be able to legally use the little green emblem on their packaging that says certified organic. It may sound like what I'm asking people to do.

(16:19):

It seems daunting, build a relationship with every food producer that's going to feed your family. Yeah, that sounds difficult, but that's actually what we're doing with Market Wagon. And we learned the lessons the hard way. Before Market Wagon, I had started a company that was focused on getting local food into grocers, onto store shelves, where people could buy it and right alongside the rest of the industrial food that they were already shopping for. And we struggled for a lot of reasons, but one of the core problems there was grocery obfuscates, the relationship between the producer and the end consumer. The only way to directly connect you with the people who feed you is e-commerce. We're not trying to go back to Mayberry because, you know, a hundred years ago, everybody was directly connected to the people that fed them. Most of the time it was themselves and at the town square and in the small communities where they live.

(17:13):

And today the world is smaller because of the internet and because of technology. And we are doing this with Market Wagon, by creating more than just an online marketplace, where you can buy--more than buying, you can relate. We've created features that are almost like social media, following farmers, inviting friends, chatting, commenting, and having dialogues through the internet with food producers and the other people who consume the same food. We're creating a community around food and connecting you, using technology directly with the people who are producing the food so that you can trust them and they can mediate your relationship to the land that feeds us. That's also what this podcast is about. That's what I'm here to do is to bring the people onto this podcast, who you can know, learn a little bit more about them. Get to know the farmers, the food producers, the chefs, the artisans, who are mediating our relationship to the land. As we build a relationship-based trust-based food supply. I look forward to helping tell the story of farmers and food producers all across America, who are producing local food, measured more than just miles.

Nick Carter (Closing) (18:37):

Thanks for listening to this episode of More Than A Mile. Be sure to sign up for Market Wagon at marketwagon.com or after downloading the Market Wagon app for iOS or Android. Follow us @MarketWagon on Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook for stories, recipes, special announcements, news, and just digital handshakes from our friendly farming community. If you enjoyed More Than A Mile, please rate the podcast and write a review on iTunes, Castbox, Pod Chaser, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Thank you for continuing to support local food.

 

Credited Historical Audio Clips in Episode

1. “Agriculture for a Small Planet Symposium (Wendell Berry).” July 1, 1974. The Berry Center. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1tioiBrZRE&t=50s
2. “Leaders in Agricultural Policy: A Conversation with Earl Butz.” February 1993. Purdue Ag Econ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46G831BReDs
3. “The 1970s See Good Times in Agriculture.” Sep. 6, 2013. Iowa PBS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azxkm-3g1D4&t=2s