Rebuilding rural communities with food webs

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — The current food production system is extracting wealth and disinvesting in rural communities, according to a food systems analyst.

“Central Illinois buys $1 billion of food every year from a farm or a store. It has a pretty significant market for food and a lot of farmers, but we’re exporting most of those commodities and importing our food from somewhere else,” said Ken Meter, author of “Building Community Food Webs.”

Meter recently visited Heartland Community College and Illinois Wesleyan University, where he spoke of his experiences as a local food systems analyst. His work features economic analysis of the extractive rural economy that he says makes the community foods movement necessary.

Income Volatility

From an agriculture production and income standpoint, Meter said there’s been a slight average net income rise over the past 50 years, but there have also been many ups and downs.

“If you’re farming for your livelihood you can expect a lot of unpredictability, a lot of up and down cycles that you can’t control very much, and for all of the growth in the food system, not much new wealth coming back to farmers,” he said.

“However, this is only one way of looking at this data set because it turns out that the value of the dollar has diminished by sevenfold since 1969.

“When adjusted to inflation, farmers are earning $400 million less today than they were 51 years ago, even after doubling productivity.”

—  Ken Meter, author, “Building Community Food Webs”

“Adjusted to inflation (based on the 2020 dollar value), the peak year for next farm income was 1973 during the energy crisis when we were trading grain, mostly wheat and corn, to the Soviet Union when they were willing to buy grain in dollars to help us replenish our dollar supply because we were spending so much money on oil.”

Net income adjusted by inflation went down steadily after 1973 and went below zero several times.

“There was a little rise during the housing financial crisis where investors who were investing in housing stocks and mortgage loans bailed out of those sectors because they we’re making any returns and they started investing in commodities which jacked up the price of commodities,” Meter added.

“Essentially the good farm income years have come from national or international crisis, not because of the basic workings of the central Illinois economy themselves were sound.

“Also, when adjusted to inflation, farmers are earning $400 million less today than they were 51 years ago, even after doubling productivity.”

Reduced Share

Farm income was 25% of sales 51 years ago and only 10% of sales in 2020.

“There has been a real fundamental erosion in the fundamentals of farmers making wealth,” Meter said.

“Despite all of the $500,000 combines, the new tractor technology, the precise planting and all other technical assistance we can now get, crop income is only slightly better now than it was 50 years ago and it’s really erratic. So, it’s not something you can actually count on.”

Food insecurity in rural America has also increased over the past 50 years, according to Meter.

“Our ability to admit there was hunger and give people benefits for hunger was almost zero in 1969. It’s good we’re getting benefits, but also there’s something about a farm community that has to have (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits to help its residents survive. It’s really troublesome and some are farmers who are farming full time and still qualify for SNAP benefits,” he said.

Reversing Trend

The long-standing practice of rural wealth extraction can be reversed with the development of local food networks that would benefit farmers and communities.

Meter said the purposes of any food system are to build health, build wealth, build connection and build capacity.

“The food system we have is failing on all four counts. We’ve getting very bad health outcomes at considerable cost in the United States today, largely because of bad exercise and faulty food that we’re eating,” he said.

“And clearly farming is not making wealth for rural communities because we’ve seen a disinvestment in rural communities quite drastically.

“Also, I’ve never been to a policy discussion that talked about the need to connect around food. The need that we have to express our culture by saying, where do we come from, what can we grow in this area that is really unique to our place.

“Finally, we have this food that looks really beautiful. It has beautiful packaging. It has lots of bells and whistles. You can zap it in a microwave for 2 minutes and come out with something you can eat, but actually we know less about food than we did 100 years ago.

“So, 100 years ago at a meeting here in Bloomington or Normal, we might well have found that everybody knew a farmer, everybody knew how food was grown. Now we have low-wealth people who are only buying food from fast-food joints who don’t know how to cook and don’t even have pots or pans in their kitchens.

“I think it’s really ironic to say we’re feeding the world as America. We have these very elaborate sophisticated foods that are very nicely packaged and prepared and sit on a shelf for a long time, but actually we don’t as people have the skills of managing food that we used to have.

“So, in those four ways I think the system we have is failing and if we want a system that accomplishes these visions, we have to really do some very different thinking than we have.”

Food Webs

In his role as president of Crossroads Resource Center, Meter specializes in developing new tools communities can use to create a more sustainable future, including the promotion of local food networks.

His economic analyses have promoted local food networks in 140 regions in 40 states, two provinces and three tribal nations.

As Meter’s latest book’s title states, building community food webs can provide a solution. He defines a food web as overlapping networks of grassroots leaders and organizations working to define their own food choices.

The “web’s” strength is developed by a team of farmers, aggregators, processors, wholesalers, researchers, policy-makers and others in collaboration.

Grassroots Impact

Meter noted the “eat five, buy five” campaign that promotes eating five fruits and vegetables for healthy per day and buy $5 of food a week from a local farmer.

“If you asked everyone in central Illinois to buy $5 worth of food each week directly from some farm in that region, it would produce $127 million of new income,” Meter said.

“It’s only 7% of what farms currently sell, but that money would multiply and cycle through the community in a way that export trade just will never do.

“So, it’s not going to be the panacea, but $127 million is not trivial in the economic upheaval of the farm sector we’ve experienced.”