Abundant Resilience
Green bean harvest has begun, and our double row of 75 feet of plants is producing true abundance. It’s a bit much to keep up with, even with several children out there every day to pick and snap (this is why you don’t have school in the summer, I remind them; giving them an audiobook to listen to while they work is a concession to modernity that I’m comfortable with).
Because I have an engineering background, I’m incapable of simply enjoying the blessings of taste and nutrition these green beans provide — I need to measure it. So the other day I started doing some calculations and figured out that if we were buying the same amount of frozen beans from Costco that we get every day from our garden, it’d amount to about $20 a day. It doesn’t take an engineer to realize that our family is putting in a lot more labor than $20.
But we gain something else by growing our own green beans — besides a more nutritious and delicious product and meaningful work for ourselves and our kids. In some unmeasurable way, we improve our resilience. We’re not expecting the zombie apocalypse, but if a supply shock like we experienced with COVID happened again — which doesn’t seem completely crazy as a possibility — we won’t be without green beans.
We’re trading raw efficiency for some amount of resiliency. I think this is a good frame of mind to develop for our personal endeavors, but it also applies to farm businesses and to our food systems in general. As Eric Jackson reminds us in this month’s opinion piece, consolidation in the beef and pork and other industries is great for efficiency — but as a society it made us much more brittle when some of the large, consolidated processing plants were forced to shut down during COVID. Even if looked at from the perspective of the processing company alone, diversifying by various means — including operating more regional plants — would have helped their bottom line during the crisis.
Regardless of whether you’re comfortable applying this principle to government and giving it a role in trying to ensure nationwide resiliency, in the domains that any of us are regularly able to affect — our families and businesses — it’s worth remembering that sometimes becoming more efficient leads to an overall increase in fragility.
This issue of Acres U.S.A. is dedicated to helping you understand a part of the food system — processing and distribution — that in some ways did show itself to be fragile during COVID. Tim Crosby and Anthony Corsaro both explain, in different ways, what regenerative growers need to know about processing and distribution and how this “invisible middle” of the food chain can become more resilient. Marty Travis also discusses how a co-op, or food aggregator, can aid growers in getting their products to consumers.
One other note: you’ll notice a new feature on the last page of this issue. Good things sometimes come to an end, and we decided to substitute the long-running “eco-farmer” profile with an “eco-graphic.” Let us know what you think at editor@acresusa.com.
And that’s the view from the country.
