Eating Local in New England?

Eating local is all the rage. 

As someone who dropped out to become a farmer in the 1970s, and who has stayed involved with community and educational farming ever since, I am pleased.  As someone who eventually dropped back into academia to become an environmental historian, I am skeptical of some of what I hear.  Watching many of my students head down this path, I feel I owe their parents an explanation.  What does history teach us about growing food in New England?  Is this a reasonable proposition?

The idea that we should attempt to grow all our own food “locally” is easy to dismiss.  By 1790, when its population stood at less than a million, New England was already importing substantial amounts of food—in particular, grain from the Mid-Atlantic states.  This trend only accelerated in the decades that followed, even while much of New England was virtually deforested to feed booming cities and textile mills.  Our farmland couldn’t keep up then, and as a practical matter no combination of animals, vegetables, and miracles will suffice now, as our population approaches fifteen million. 

Today, only 7 percent of New England remains in agriculture.  We would have to cut down a large part of our recovered forest to come even close to feeding ourselves.  But why would we want to do that?  There are plenty of good reasons to move in the direction of a substantial increase in local food production, without worrying about complete self-sufficiency.  The key is to specify which crops really do make sense to grow here, given our soils and climate.  And here again, history proves instructive.  What were we growing a century ago, when New England was already an urban, industrial society? 

The answer is surprisingly encouraging.  New England farming did not immediately collapse when the railroad delivered a flood of cheap grain and meat from the Midwest in the middle of the 19^th century, as is often supposed.  Instead, local farmers adapted and found crops for which they had a comparative advantage.  In particular, dairy: farmers allowed millions of acres of degraded pasture to return to forest, at the same time feeding that cheap grain to their cows to increase the flow of milk.  The story was much the same with local poultry production.  New England apples and other fruits found strong urban markets, and intensive truck farming boomed around the region’s cities.  The peak of New England food production actually occurred in the early 20^th century.  If we want to contemplate what New England farming might look like after the fall of oil, the era that immediately preceded the age of oil is worth our attention.

Bascom Hollow Farm in Gill, MA. © Josh Daskin

There was much to like: plenty of high-quality local produce, exemplary recycling of nutrients, suburban and rural landscapes with nicely balance of forest, farmland, and clustered development.  Unfortunately it was all doomed by the rise of cheap oil, which drove large-scale production and transport not only of grain and meat, but of milk, fruits, and vegetables from far beyond our region—not to mention suburban sprawl that ate up much of our best cropland.  New England farming was not done in by the 19^th century rise of the railroad, the mechanical reaper and the steel plow: it was done in by the 20^th century rise of trucks, planes, tractors, combines, and the automobile.  It was a victim of industrial agriculture.

As we look to increase local food production in the era of reduced carbon footprints, the agricultural system we had a century ago has other lessons to teach.  There were flaws in that system—the flow of grain was subsidized by exhaustive soil mining in the Midwest, for example.  Good rotational pasture management eluded our forebears, who fell instead into reliance on cheap grain.  We need to put our dairy production, along with whatever beef and lamb we grow, back onto a foundation of grass, because that is what ruminants should mainly eat, for their health and ours.  We could conceivably produce all our own milk, butter, and cheese in New England, though the trend has been steadily in the other direction under industrial agriculture.  But it would mean doubling our dairy herd, and finding a lot more pasture and hay for the cows to eat.

But even if we revive pastures we will still need to import grain into New England, both for our own consumption and for feed—even pastured poultry and pigs eat mostly grain.  And here’s the thing: it makes good sense to import grain, along with vegetable oil, and the bulk of our meat.  Grain stores well and ships at very low cost, so there is no reason to grow more than a limited amount in New England.  Buying in feed grain also provides a flow of soil nutrients to our farms, via manure—something farmers have always understood very well.  Given our large population and the limited amount of land available, sustainable farming in New England will always require links to sustainable farming in the Midwest for grain and meat.  Similarly, we can greatly expand our local seasonal fruit and vegetable production, and support it almost entirely on compost and recycled nutrients, without going overboard and completely swearing off the many wonderful imported foods—like, coffee, tea, oranges, bananas—that enrich our lives.

New England is full of innovative farmers pioneering this new version of an old food system.  We only need more of them, and land for them to farm.  Could we afford to see farmland re-expand to 15% of New England, still keeping more than half the landscape safely in forest? Absolutely: it would mean that more of New England would look like Vermont, basically.  Nothing wrong with that.  At the same time, tens of thousands of intensively-farmed acres could come not from the forest, but from the progressive greening of our cities and suburbs—and this, also, is already happening.  Farming on small lots close to where people live is an appropriate way to produce fruits, vegetables, some chickens and eggs.  Just as we need to be wary of ideologues posing false dichotomies between total local self-reliance and unswerving allegiance to global industrial agriculture, we need to avoid absolute choices among forest, farmland, and sprawling development.  These are challenges that have balanced, mutually reinforcing urban and rural solutions.

My students, who are acutely concerned about social justice, always ask whether sustainably-grown local food can be affordable and accessible to all.  That is a fair question, but it can only be fairly answered once we address the subsidies that make fast food so inexpensive, and the enormous hidden costs to our health and environment that must somehow be paid.  Why wouldn’t we devote similar support to farming that provides a wide range of social and environmental benefits?  We don’t need a hopeless quest to make our region totally self-sufficient in food by subsisting on kale and parsnips, which is a chimera for a few naive idealists and a handy straw-man for their cynical critics.  We can use a targeted expansion in local production of foods that really make sense in New England, tied to parallel sustainable reforms throughout our global agricultural system.  This would bless us with not just healthier food but also an attractive landscape in which to live, habitat for open land plant and animal species, opportunities to reduce energy costs and sequester carbon, and chances for people to become more engaged with how their food is grown.

That is what attracts my students to local agriculture, just as it attracted me.  Most of them won’t remain farmers all their lives—though some will, and they will be good ones.  But more people can enjoy spending part of their time on earth farming, and in the process give us a form of agriculture which is nice to live around.  That is the real point of local farming.

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