Editorial

What I Like About Wal-Mart

Well, not much. However, I did read an article about Wal-Mart, maybe in the November issue of ***Money*** magazine, that covered, among other things, Wal-Mart’s outstanding inventory control system. An employee at any Wal-Mart can go up to any item on the shelf, scan its bar code, and learn immediately how much of that item is on the shelf, in the back room, in trucks en route to the store, or in any other store or warehouse. If an item, such as golf balls, is not selling well in Minnesota in February, the Minnesota store can find out where they are in demand and arrange to send them there.

Wal-Mart claims to have the second largest computer system in the world to enable it to function so efficiently. (The Pentagon is said to have the largest. I wonder how efficient it is...) So, no wonder, as Agriculture Commissioner Robert Spear told MOFGA members at the Farmer to Farmer Conference, Wal-Mart is the largest food retailer in the world.

My point is not to glorify Wal-Mart. We all know what we don’t like about these mammoth chains that detract from downtowns, local producers and artisans, and so forth. My point is that the company has an inventory control system that might serve as a model for any bioregion that wants to become more self-sufficient in food. Any such bioregion has the consumers; efforts are being made to help new farmers get started; the third leg of this stool seems to be the marketers and distributors.

How about a new college major: local food marketing systems. A major that would attract organic food munching computer nerds instead of junk food nerds. One that would train students how to understand a bioregion’s needs and preferences for certain foods and its ability to grow many of those foods. These folks would then produce an "inventory control" of the bioregion’s food wants and needs and its resources, and show the most efficient ways to distribute those resources. They would also identify where resources are lacking, thus helping those who are trying to preserve farming and other food producing industries identify places where producers could locate.

We don’t have to shop at Wal-Mart, but we may be able to learn from the company.

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The Rest of Us

Like many of you, I sometimes stop and look at what's happening in the big world around us and wonder whether I make a difference--whether there's really any chance of changing the big trends moving us towards centralization and consolidation. That line of questioning rarely lasts more than 30 minutes before the next idea pops in my head.

At a Legislative hearing in early February, a group of fishermen and lobstermen testified about the need to maintain access to saltwater for commercial boats and related services. While they talked, they also revealed the frustration of feeling insignificant in the big picture. One fisherman said that if your community was seen as attractive by those who had made money elsewhere, there was no chance of retaining what had made it attractive in the first place. His comments reminded me of a statement in Caroline Chute's ***Merry Men***. A farmer asked what happens to the rest of us when the economy has been taken over by the multinationals. That question has yet to be answered by any of our political leaders.

Even though we seem to be heading down that path every day, with mergers in the billions of dollars now seen as commonplace, I sense a countercurrent emerging. The stalled WTO trade talks in Seattle are a piece. So is the preliminary agreement at the Montreal talks on a biosafety protocol that would allow some country-by-country decision making on whether to permit genetically engineered foods.

That countercurrent is the topic of the April 28 conference in Unity, on Maine's New Food System, organized by the Maine Coalition for Food Security. But it's also part of MOFGA’s everyday discussions and conversations.

Just this morning three more dairy farmers indicated an interest in converting to organic production. Yesterday, the Blaine House called, wondering where it could get Maine-produced salad greens for an upcoming dinner. A woman from Portland called, interested in CSA options for herself and five other households. Chefs, retailers--they're all calling.

The challenge for all of us is to build solid enough relationships so that we can survive, and thrive, even in a world where most of what happens is impersonal. It means hard work, in our families, our neighborhoods, and our communities. But it's essentially the only way to respond to that farmer's question in a way that leaves a place for the rest of us who don't see global solutions as the answer.

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Kate Cook, who farms with her husband and five children in Aroostook County, made a great suggestion at MOFGA’s annual meeting in January: How about a farm-to-farm exchange program for our kids? Not that Kate’s kids are fed up with Aroostook and potatoes and are dying to spend a summer week at the ocean... well, not completely. One of her oldest children, Mirada, however, is very interested in farming and would like more farming experiences. She has spent time on a New Zealand farm (she’ll write about that for ***The MOF&G*** soon), but Kate was suggesting shorter stays at a variety of farms: perhaps a week or two. Sounds like a great idea. Russ Libby has suggested that those of us who have children who help on the farm should list them when we complete our certification applications; then they’ll be listed in this paper. That’s one way to make contacts. The other is to go to MOFGA’s annual meeting, Farmer to Farmer Conference, and other meetings, and meet these families. Seems like more kids are at Farmer to Farmer every year, and if you’re going to be sending your child to another grower’s home for a couple of weeks, knowing the farmer beforehand is a strong comfort factor.

--JE

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One of the joys of staying at this job for a long time has been watching small farms grow, prosper, and become acknowledged as viable businesses. The latest example to reach my mailbox is that of Old Stage Farm in Lovell. This year, instead of a seed list reproduced on 8 1/2 x 11-inch paper, John and Susan Belding have come out with a very attractive, small catalog of their 70 or so offerings of seeds that they grow organically at their zone 4 farm. They offer seeds of flowers and some unusual and uncommon plants. What really caught my eye was the cover of the catalog: a striking design made with seed pods; an elegant combination of art and marketing; just the one-of-a-kind, highly individual type of thing you won’t find at Wal-Mart!

--JE

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A potato-of-the-month club is advertised in the Gerritsen’s Woodprairie Farm Catalog, and I’ve seen a bunch-of-roses-of-the-month club advertised in a national magazine. Could the "product-of-the-month" be extended to other commodities or value-added products? Onion of the month? Dry bean? Culinary herb? Grain?

--JE

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Fruit of the month? How about cranberries? John Lasell, editor of ***Maine Cranberry News,*** has handed me a couple of issues of that newsletter at the last couple of MOFGA meetings that we’ve both attended. Aside from the newsletter’s dismal subhead--"The New Red Tide" (which John inherited)--this is a good publication for anyone who is interested in this crop. John, who grows cranberries organically himself, covers the entire industry, organic and the other. (Let’s hope he converts the others!) For more information, contact John at RR 1, Box 64, Franklin ME 04634, jamy@panax.com.

--JE

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Here’s a piece of biology that struck me as profound: In an interview with percussionist and performer Layne Redmond in New Dimensions (July-Aug. 1999), Redmond said, "...all the eggs a woman will ever have form in her ovaries by the time that she is a four-month-old fetus. That means that the egg that became me formed in my mother’s ovary when she was a four-month-old fetus growing in the womb of her mother, my grandmother. In the form of that sacred egg I spent five months in my grandmother’s womb!" Redmond related drumming to being in the womb--"an extension of that first sound that we cellularly formed to"--and to meditating back to that state of "unrestricted consciousness." I think of what I fed those eggs, the eggs of my grandchildren. How will my earlier actions affect their future? Will some part of their cells "remember" the delicious foods we sampled at the Farmer’s Market, the fresh produce from the garden, the warm summer sun during harvest? I hope so. For me, that’s a much more pleasant meditation than thinking of taking my grandchildren (or half of them, anyhow) shopping at the world’s largest food retailer!