Many American Farms, Faced with High Gasoline Costs, Will Go Local Again
by Christopher Steiner
Tim Fuller is something of an expert when it comes to soil health. He can tell dead soil from vigorous soil the way a normal person can tell sand from clay. Fuller, a farmer, also knows that our soils across much of North America have been nutritionally bankrupt for decades on account of our industrialized methods of farming. The only thing that keeps crops rising from our flaccid soils year after year is the liberal application of fertilizers. Fertilizer has become the key to human population. Without it, humankind simply wouldn’t have enough food. And as with most things in our current world, fertilizer has more to do with oil than most think.
Fuller slumps to a knee, burrows his hands into the loosely packed soil, and digs out a weed that’s infiltrated his neat and flourishing row of onions. He flicks the invader away from his crops and pulls his faded hat from his head, rubbing his bald pate with a look of contemplation. Fuller’s fingers, stained brown like his compost- rich soil, smooth out the dirt like a carpet salesman proudly petting his wares.
“I’ll tell you, there wasn’t a living thing in this soil when we got here, far as I could tell,” he says. He rises up, puts his hat on his head, and points out at the homogenous sea of soy that surrounds his farm on three sides. “It was all like that, mass-farmed, sterile, and bombed with herbicide three times a year.” His disdain for big-business farming, like that which surrounds him, and its chief enabler—Saint Louis–based Monsanto—is plain. Fuller reclaimed this plot to grow produce for local customers and restaurants in 2001. It took two years of tilling in compost, manure, and dried molasses to resuscitate the beat-up soil. “There’s nothing worse you can do to farmland than what they have going here.” He again raises his arm and sweeps it toward the fields of soy.
About fifteen feet from Fuller, a weed stalk at the edge of the big soy field crawls with several dozen large, lumpy, disfigured insects that look like giant brown ladybugs with patches of moldlike fur dotting their shells irregularly. Fuller fingers one of the critters and gives it a squinty examination. “Well . . . isn’t that gross. These things have survived three cycles of Roundup this summer.” Roundup is a popular herbicide made by Monsanto, the agriculture giant. He turns one of the bugs over in his fingers and rubs his head again with his free hand. “Hmm. Well, I think they’re Colorado potato beetles, but these are the weirdest-looking ones I’ve ever seen.”
Farming is not Fuller’s first career. He’s sixty-four. He has an MBA from the University of Chicago and taught business school classes there for seven years. Before farming the Illinois prairie, Fuller owned a management consulting business that, while it paid better than willing green beans from dirt, left him unfulfilled. A longtime Northern Californian, he reveled in the aura of the cultural revolution cradled in Berkeley’s 1960s. Its echo never quite left him. Fuller grew organic crops in his yard for several years and found an outsized amount of satisfaction in that compared with his lucrative consulting business. So in 2002, he pushed all his chips into his hobby and opened up Erehwon Farm, a six-acre plot fifty miles west of downtown Chicago. He’s at ease milling about his hand-tilled produce rows. “I’m broke,” he says, chewing on a tomatillo he just plucked, “but I’m happy.”
Small farmers of Fuller’s ilk are few. But their day will come in a world of $16 gas, when our transportation networks for produce become untenable and volume loses out to vicinity. Fuller’s farm is ideally located for a future world. One side of his field straddles the start of hundreds of miles of megafarms that stretch west all the way to the Rockies. The other side of his farm borders the burgeoning exurbs of Chicago. Fuller grows a little bit of everything: sugar snap peas, Swiss chard, eggplant, arugula, raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, spinach, and an uncountable variety of tomatoes. “It’s challenging,” he says. “It’s the most complicated thing I’ve ever gotten involved with. Our mission is to see if we can run a local, sustainable farm profitably. It’s elusive. But that’s what I need, something that’s impossible.”
Fuller’s operation, at a mere six acres, is small for any farm, but especially compared with the multi-thousand-acre spreads that supply much of our grain and produce. Because gasoline comes so cheaply, compared with the price of produce, it currently makes perfect sense to grow tomatoes in California and Mexico for consumers in Minneapolis, Cleveland, or Boston. “I was talking with some shipping companies about what it costs to get produce from California to Chicago,” Fuller says. “The numbers were under fifteen cents a pound. Fifteen cents a pound? That’s nothing when you’re talking about produce prices of one to two dollars a pound.”
The price of moving food mingles with other costs, too, the biggest of which are storage and refrigeration. When a tomato is picked in California, it’s nabbed from the vine long before it becomes ripe so it can weather the tumbling, chaotic journey from its remote Western field to an East Coast grocery store. The tomato needs refrigeration, sometimes during its voyage, and almost always upon arrival, because local stores may not yet be ready to put it out. So the tomato travels across the country hard and green, surviving roads’ potholes, handlers’ drops, and forklifts’ shakes. Upon arrival, it waits and waits until its number is called, which rescues it from the age-defying chill of deep
refrigeration. What grocery store shoppers are left with at the end of this process is a round, red fruit with a spongy interior and a wisp of tomato flavor that can be teased out with some granulated sodium chloride. “Consumers think salt is taste,” Fuller laughs. But for most consumers, salt is taste, when without it your tomato tastes like an irradiated watermelon.
All that trucking, refrigeration, and storage costs money. But it’s not enough money, Fuller points out, to outweigh the rewards of growing produce in mass quantities in a hospitable place such as Central California. “At what point, in terms of the price of gas, are we going to be able to overcome the advantages of the yearround growing season in California and other parts of the world?” Fuller says. “I’ll tell you one thing, it’s going to be a high number, nothing as low as ten dollars a gallon. It will be closer to twenty.” The ultimate disrupter to our food web, outside of natural disaster, Fuller says, will be the price of energy. Rising gasoline prices will be the incorrigible gorilla that trashes our complex weave of food producers, shippers, and wholesalers, ultimately changing the equation for good at $16 per gallon. Ferrying Central California’s bounty to New York will be economically unsavory. The yearround growing seasons of places like California, as Fuller says, gives them large advantages in maintaining hegemony of our produce supply. But the world’s ebbing oil supply will force the price of transportation from these places to far-off coasts past a tipping point. When gas reaches $16, packing a piece of produce from California to the Midwest will cost $1 a pound or more.
“Will we get to a point when human labor becomes cheaper than gasoline-powered machinery for some tasks?” Fuller asks. “I think that’s possible.” Couple that with the transportation costs that $16 gas brings us, and there won’t be many Spaniards grinding up South American lemons for a post-siesta refreshment or an evening aperitif. They’ll grind Spanish lemons. And fish won’t likely be crossing Asia twice on their way from North Sea waters to Norwegian restaurants. Our food world will condense.
“What I think will happen is this,” Fuller says. “Cities like Chicago will be ringed by a series of farms that go from ten acres to a hundred acres, maybe even to five hundred acres. Not nearly as big as the biggest farms today, but big enough to take advantage of scaling their costs,” he explains. “Each one of these farms will specialize in something. One might be tomatoes, one might be peppers, I’m sure several of them would grow all sorts of greens.” The farms’ fields would fill the landscape wherever the urban clutter of people and their homes stopped. They would displace fields of corn, soy, and wheat close to cities, relegating those crops, for which freshness isn’t paramount, to places where barge and train transportation can be fully leveraged. So Atlanta would get its tomatoes, its cucumbers, its carrots, and its greens from farms all within a hundred miles. The economics of avoiding transport from Mexico, the West Coast, or even locales farther away will usher in an era of freshness and proximity for American produce consumers. It will be yet another chapter in this strange saga of massscale economics and globalization that has pushed our food farther and farther away from us, only to reverse field at the point of exploding energy prices and $16 gasoline.
Americans will still be able to enjoy French goat cheese, Italian olive oil, and if there’s any left, Hawaiian bigeye tuna. These are luxury items that already carry premium price tags; their prices will simply become more premium. The higher-priced items, in general, will weather the deglobalization of food. It’s the commodities, the staples of rice, wheat, soy, and apples, that won’t be cutting Magellanic wakes through the world’s oceans, as they do now.
Reprinted with permission from the Hachette Book Group (www.HachetteBookGroup. com), publishers of$20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Oil Will Change Our Lives For the Better by Christopher Steiner (2009)
