I’m riding shotgun in Kevin’s Honda Element, cruising down the road with about $900 worth of produce behind my seat. We’re taking tomatoes, flowers, strawberries, microgreens, beets, parsley, and lettuce upon lettuce to Kevin’s restaurant clients. It’s quite chaotic—receipts and papers fly about, an empty smoothie container rolls on the floorboards, and boxes tip over and slide around in back. The Element, being box-shaped itself, is the perfect delivery truck/office/command center: roomy enough to haul a day’s worth of deliveries, but not too big to be unwieldy on the road. Also, it’s Valentine’s Day, the busiest day of the year in the restaurant business. No pressure to get these deliveries done or anything.
We head east on a paved road, toward the beach. As we drive, Kevin tells me about the chefs we’ll visit. He’s known many of them for years; he can tell me what states they’ve worked and lived in, about one chef’s wife whose cancer was cured by eating organic food, and who he used to be surfing buddies with or still is. Some are lifelong friends. The commitment between farmer and chef, then, is there. He has to look each chef in the eye—and by extension, all of their customers—and vouch for the produce he delivers. “We could be best friends, better than we are now, but if I didn’t have the quality I wouldn’t be here,” he says. “Knowing these people, it might have got me into these places, but it doesn’t keep me in them. My produce does.”
It’s useless for chefs to source food locally or include organic menu items if customers don’t care or can’t afford the price difference. Luckily for Kevin, the people dining in Vero’s nicest restaurants are willing and able to pay for local and organic. Because their customers will pay more, the chefs will, too. Kevin’s spring mix is hours out of the field, while Sysco’s or Cheney Brothers’ is almost a week out, a fact he doesn’t hesitate to use when justifying the price. And of all people, chefs realize that fresh is better. “They love our stuff, and they pay us top dollar for it,” Kevin says. “We don’t gouge them but we go with what the market will bear, what they will bear. A lot of times the chefs have set the prices themselves and I’m like, ‘Okay, that’s fine with me!’” These chefs aren’t afraid to be demanding in return, however. At one restaurant, a chef specified that the lettuce should be no more than five inches long because the salad bowls are five inches across. Kevin thought his employees were cutting the greens close enough—but the chef, annoyed, pulled out a ruler one day and the lettuce was eight inches long. His salad preppers had to trim it, a waste of valuable time. Kevin encourages chefs to be honest so he can improve. He would rather be humbled by a chef who gets the ruler out than be known around town as the guy who can’t deliver five-inch lettuce.
One of these chefs is Executive Chef John Farnsworth, founder of the massive John’s Island Club. He’s the one who criticizes Kevin most soundly—and Kevin says he can’t thank him enough for it. Kevin says John has “schooled” him about what kind of products work in fine dining; he’s the chef who convinced Kevin to start growing microgreens, for example. Even though John manages five kitchens and a staff of 127, he personally checks Kevin’s produce boxes and catches any and all substitutions, and demands an explanation. Once Kevin substituted organic tomatoes from another local farm because he thought his own had too many blemishes. John ordered Kevin to get his rear end (another word was used in the actual moment) back in the field and bring the Osceola Organic Farm tomatoes instead. I’ll cut off the spots, John told Kevin. I’d rather have your tomatoes because they taste fresher, and the customers will be able to tell the difference.
A big part of why Osceola Organic Farm has survived and thrived, then, is that it services a niche market like the one in Vero Beach. Identifying and taking advantage of niche markets, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), is a creative way for farmers to survive in a world in which agricultural employment is expected to decline by 19 percent by 2022. As the BLS notes, “An increasing number of small-scale farmers have developed successful market niches that involve personalized, direct contact with their customers. Many are finding opportunities in horticulture and organic food production, which are among the fastest growing segments of agriculture. Others use farmers’ markets that cater directly to urban and suburban consumers, allowing the farmers to capture a greater share of consumers’ food dollars.”1
Kevin is doing all of this, and it’s working. “We sell out every time,” he says about the farmers’ market. “We are the only certified organic producer in our county. The market will be dead and we’ll have a line.” The model works—for now. When and if the area becomes saturated with small organic farmers, they’ll have to diversify to compete. All of them can’t focus on lettuce like Kevin does. That would be falling victim to the fallacy of composition. For farmers raising commodity crops, the same idea applies: we can’t all grow the same crop organically, or prices will fall. Regenerative farmers should diversify, with some growing wheat, others barley, others millet, others oats, and so on. Same with livestock. We need not only regenerative beef, but also poultry, pork, buffalo, lamb, and so forth. All of one’s eggs, in other words, should not be placed in a single basket.
There is one unsettling thing about the niche market Kevin has created: it revolves around the upper class. “I’m a farmer, but my job is to service the rich,” he says. “That’s what I’m doing, whether it’s at the farmers’ market or delivering to these places. I am a farmer, but it’s servicing the rich.”
Lots of businesses target the wealthy. But there’s a moral difference between food and, say, a Porsche. No offense to Porsche, but no person needs one of their cars to survive. It’s becoming more evident, however, that people do need wholesome, regeneratively grown food to live healthy lives. In terms of price, organic and local foods are expensive for most households, and access to those foods is also easier in wealthy urban areas than in poor urban or rural areas. The higher cost and limited availability has led some critics to accuse the organic food movement of being elitist and classist.
I understand that criticism—certainly poor families are at a disadvantage because they can’t exercise choice as easily as well-off families, plus they may lack the education that study after study shows is linked to the decision to eat organic. As a 2009 report from the USDA Economic Research Service confirms, “Consumers of all ages, races, and ethnic groups who have higher levels of education are more likely to buy organic products than less-educated consumers.”2 The role of income in that decision, though, is less clear:
For studies that include income as an explanatory variable, the findings are contradictory. Smaller, higher income households are the most likely purchasers of organic produce (Govindasamy and Italia, 1990) and organic apples (Loureiro et al., 2001). One study found that income is unrelated to a household’s likelihood of buying organic food (Durham, 2007). A different study found that higher income households are more likely to buy organic vegetables, but once the decision to buy organic has been made, they devote a smaller share of their vegetable expenditures toward organic vegetables (Dettmann and Dimitri, 2010). And yet another study found that income is negatively associated with being an occasional consumer of organic products and has no impact on whether an individual is a frequent consumer of organic products (Zepeda and Li, 2007).3
The ERS report finds similar contradictions in the data surrounding the presence of children in the household and notes with a certain level of frustration that “there are no definitive answers about how many consumers buy organic food, how much organic food the typical consumer of organic products purchases, or the demographic profile of the ‘typical’ consumer of organic products.”4 It seems that higher income does not always correlate with buying organic, but more education usually does.
I understand what it’s like to be uneducated about the benefits of organic and too financially strapped to buy it anyway. Fortunately my husband and I can eat organically now, but that was not the case in college or into our twenties. Even if we’d had the money, though, we probably wouldn’t have spent it on organic or sustainably grown food because we didn’t know we should until I started writing this book. Our childhood communities rejected that kind of food, seeing it as a threat to the livelihoods of local farmers. We didn’t learn about its benefits in school or from friends and family. While that’s no excuse for our ignorance, I understand how it’s possible to know little or nothing about regenerative agriculture (or agriculture in general) and organic food, even in this connected world. Our parents have improved their diets in recent years, but cheap, processed foods were the norm when we were kids. Money was tight, awareness was low, and availability was limited, even for conventional produce. Aside from potatoes and sweet corn, the vegetables we did eat were usually frozen or canned. A testament to this: I bought some fresh portabellas on my way home from the airport a few years ago, purchased from the metropolis of Bismarck, North Dakota, and my mother said with lifted eyebrows, “Are those safe to eat?” She had never encountered a mushroom outside of a glass jar. My husband and I were luckier than many kids, though—we always had enough to eat. When families struggle financially, they tend to grab the cheapest food on the shelf, which is usually highly processed and conventional.
It’s easy to criticize the cost of organic food, but that criticism won’t hold forever. Organic and regenerative food is not inherently expensive. As Mark Smallwood, executive director of the Rodale Institute, has argued, there aren’t enough organic farms right now, which partly explains the price difference between organic and conventional food. “It’s because demand is higher than supply,” he says. “It’s simple economics.”5 Once the organic supply goes up, the price will come down. If we remove the government subsidies that push down the price of conventional food, organic will be even more competitive. And the price gap is already closing rapidly. Organic produce is usually more expensive than conventional, but that’s not always the case with processed and packaged foods, which make up most of the American diet. A homemade lunch with organic bread, hummus, cheddar cheese, apples, carrots, and raisins costs less than a conventional Kraft Lunchable, which usually contains crackers, Oscar Meyer ham, American cheese, applesauce, a cookie or candy, and a juice box. Organic yogurt from Butterworks Farm, made with milk from grass-fed cows and sweetened with maple syrup, costs less than Yoplait’s Go-Gurt in a tube. On a price-per-ounce basis, packaged conventional food is often more expensive than its organic equivalent that might require a bit more peeling and slicing. Sometimes there’s no difference in packaging and the organic option is still cheaper. Conventional Kashi cereal costs more than Nature’s Path organic cereal. Uncle Matt’s organic orange juice costs less than conventional Odwalla orange juice, a brand owned by Coca-Cola. Upscale conventional pasta sauces cost more than the organic Whole Foods brand sauce.6
These comparisons aside, organic food will probably never be quite as cheap, in the limited price-tag sense of the word, as conventional food because conventional food is artificially cheap. As a nation, we’ve become accustomed to paying relatively little for this food. In 1950 Americans spent 20 percent of their income on food. Today we spend less than 10 percent on food, but that number doesn’t take environmental, social, and healthcare costs into consideration.7 In truth, this industrial food is extremely expensive. If we want to save ourselves from climate change and sickness, then we will have to pay a little more for regenerative food up front, knowing that we are saving soil and water behind the scenes. Though organic agriculture requires fewer inputs, it often requires more labor and management—and people, not machines, must do this labor and be paid for it.8 And why shouldn’t they? Is it so wrong for a farmer and his or her employees, the people who feed us, to make a decent living? We pay professional football coaches, hedge fund managers, and cell phone developers exorbitant amounts of money to do work that isn’t as intimate or necessary for human survival as the production of food. If farmers or ranchers can produce healthy, nutritious food, then why not reward them for doing so and thereby incentivize them to continue, instead of punishing them for not cutting corners to make it ever cheaper? And how can farmers and ranchers be expected to feed us if they can barely afford to feed their own families?
Even if society eventually accepts that food should carry a slightly higher price tag, we still need to ensure that middle- and lower-class families can purchase it. The Vero Beach Oceanside Farmers’ Market, which started more than five years ago, is one way Kevin reaches middle- and lower-class customers. His organic produce is cheaper or the same price as similar organic produce found in grocery stores. “That’s how we get to the regular consumer who doesn’t go to these restaurants or these places that we sell to,” Kevin says. “We can reach them by going there. That’s very ideal to me because when we first started out, I thought, ‘I’m going to grow good food for local people.’ We started out with that in mind, but we ended up growing good food for the restaurant instead of the people. Now we have the farmers’ market. I see rich people there, I see poor people there. We’ve got a good mix. Even though it’s close to the beach, I’d have to say at least half the people come over from the mainland to shop there because that’s where the local farms sell and produce companies offer a really good deal there and stuff like that. That’s how we reach the whole pie of different types of people.”
But not every farmers’ market is successful for Kevin. Four weeks in a row he tried a farmers’ market in the neighboring city of Fort Pierce and found that customers would not buy his product. The people, he tells me, were not aware of or did not believe in the benefits of organic, so they were unwilling to pay for it. It should be noted that Fort Pierce is an economic and social world away from Vero Beach’s barrier island—in the Fort Pierce zip code where the market is held, the median income is $24,071, with just 10 percent of residents holding college degrees.9 By comparison, the median household income is $102,500 for Vero’s 32963, the barrier island zip code where that market is held, and 61 percent of residents there hold college degrees. In both categories, the Vero zip code roughly doubles the nationwide average. Kevin returned from Fort Pierce with coolers of unsold vegetables each week, and finally he gave up on the venture. “If I had landed in Fort Pierce, this couldn’t have happened,” he says, gesturing across the field. If life hadn’t led him to Vero or somewhere just as wealthy, he wouldn’t be the type of farmer he is.
Which is sad, because it seems to show that organic farmers and ranchers who don’t happen to live near a wealthy urban area will struggle to make it. Or is that just a problem we’re facing now, while the agricultural system is still devoted to conventional producers? Perhaps we should look at Fred Kirschenmann’s argument for an agriculture of the middle.10 By this he means an agricultural model that isn’t top-heavy, like it is now, but middle-heavy, made up mostly of midsize farms. Farms of this size, he writes, are best equipped to lead the way in replacing conventional agriculture because they are large enough to produce food in real quantities to satisfy food processors and distributors, but small enough to respond to local environments and consumers. They’re also small enough to produce unique, highly differentiated products instead of the standardized products we find in grocery stores. Midsize farms also fuel economic activity in rural communities and support families, not corporations.
There’s just one problem right now: midsize farms are too big to retail products at most farmers’ markets, but too small to compete in the highly consolidated commodity markets. They don’t produce enough grain, for example, to sell directly to a mill, but they produce too much to grind and sell at the farmers’ market. Kevin’s lettuce venture works in the direct market because it is small, but a midsize operation likely wouldn’t. That’s because food processors and distributors buy from big farms, not midsize farms, for the same reason chefs buy from Sysco and not individual farmers—it’s too much of a hassle. We need to reorient our food system so that regenerative midsize farmers can market their products locally and regionally, rather than participating in national or world commodity markets. If we do this, then responsible farmers, no matter where they are, will be able to enjoy the economic benefits of regenerative production.
But we don’t need a complete transition to an agriculture of the middle. Our ideal should be diversity, just as nature’s ideal is diversity. The goal isn’t to create a nation filled with one size or type of farmer, but a nation of diverse farms that includes many more midsize farms than we have now, as well as large operations like Phil’s and small ones like Kevin’s when the environment and market conditions dictate. Phil’s big ranch works because it fits with his goal of restoring as much native prairie as possible. Likewise, Kevin’s farm serves a small, but not unimportant, market, which is his community. While it’s nice to market directly to consumers, that’s not possible—and not desirable—for every type of operation. There is no one-size-fits-all model for marketing, just like there is no one-size-fits-all model for what crops and livestock should be grown where or who should do the farming.
Our next stop is Osceola Bistro. Again, we enter via the back door, right into the kitchen. Employees in white uniforms season bright red racks of ribs in stainless-steel roasting pans. I’ve never smelled a room so delicious, though I don’t know what exactly I’m smelling. Kevin knows everyone—he gives high-fives, shakes hands, folds people into hugs, chats with them. He’s like a celebrity. We take a few moments to chat with chef-owner Christopher Bireley, who praises the freshness and taste of Kevin’s produce as well as the personal service. After we leave, Kevin tells me that he refuses to sacrifice that kind of personal service for the sake of opening more restaurant accounts. “I turn down so many people every year because we can only do so much with ten acres and the time we have,” he says.
This is curious to me—Kevin knows there are customers waiting for his product, but he has not expanded. Capitalist thinking suggests that more acreage would allow him to capture more profit. Why haven’t you gone down that road? I ask. Part of the reason is that expansion would mean handing more responsibility to others, and he hasn’t found the right person for that. Expansion also does not guarantee more money or market share, and he’s skeptical of partnerships and debt. “We’ve done everything out of pocket,” he says. “I don’t go to a bank every year and borrow money to get my farm going and stuff like that. I guess it’s sort of old-fashioned, not really wanting to go borrow money to get bigger. Expanding is bigger, but that doesn’t mean better.”
But the major reason Kevin hasn’t expanded is that money is not what drives him to farm. “I feel like I work enough, and I always want to have time for my family and to go surfing and fishing a little bit. That’s very, very important to me,” he says. “I don’t know if making more money would change my life. I feel like I make enough money that we’re happy. That’s the bottom line, to be honest with you. You see people that got a lot of money and all they do is worry about their money. I worry about if I have time to go surfing or be on the beach for a little while this week or something like that. There’s a balance. We all have to have money and be fiscally responsible and all that stuff. But being rich isn’t a goal of mine. I’ve never had that ego to push me to get bigger to make more money. I’ve just never been that way.”
Agribusiness supporters would likely scoff at Kevin’s admission. They would say that one farmer loading a car full of produce a few times a week is neither success nor progress. What Kevin does, they might argue, represents a step backward, a return to the “old days.” He hasn’t specialized, mechanized, or corporatized. He uses little technology and oil. He doesn’t participate in the farm program. He owns one small tractor and ten measly acres. He employs local workers, like retired nurses who live up the road, and pays them a living wage instead of hiring cheap migrant labor to reduce his cost of production. Under the “get big or get out” mindset, Kevin’s farm is too small and too unproductive. There’s no place for him in modern agriculture except as an outlier.
Yet Osceola Organic Farm’s very existence proves that thinking wrong. Kevin doesn’t need to be big to be profitable, produce quality food, and enjoy his work. He’s making more money with less labor and debt-induced stress than a lot of industrial farmers are with their one-thousand-acre-plus farms and fancy machinery. He is living proof that human beings don’t have to degrade the land to eat. Between him and the average conventional farmer, I can see who is better off in the long run.
This is what’s coolest to me, though: Kevin isn’t doing something that the average American couldn’t also do with a little start-up capital, research, perseverance, and a real desire to produce healthy food and preserve the soil. He doesn’t have generations of farmers in his family tree, nor did he start farming as a young man. He had never grown food for anyone but his family before buying those ten acres. He switched careers in the middle of his life. Kevin’s story shows that almost anyone can be a farmer if he or she truly wants to. Given his example, maybe we should offer farming as a respectable, desirable career option for young people, just like we offer nursing, banking, or engineering. What would happen if college or high school graduates could enter educational programs to become regenerative farmers or ranchers? What if young people saw farming as socially acceptable, as acceptable as it is to enroll in a university? Right now, we have a few farmer-training programs scattered across the country, sponsored by small local organizations and state governments. What if these programs were more common and served more people? What if they drew young people from crowded urban areas to rural places to revitalize those communities?
What if these programs welcomed existing farmers, too? We’re almost one hundred years out from the days when regenerative farming lessons were taught on the farm. Only conventional farming is passed down now. Even in our internet age, learning how to grow crops and livestock organically and regeneratively in specific environments isn’t easy—and as any good farmer knows, every environment is specific and challenging, as nature intended it to be. Replacing generations of industrial lessons will take training, in part through hands-on learning programs, classroom courses, and mentorships. This training can’t be based on one-size-fits-all thinking—we’ve seen the danger of that mentality—but should be designed for specific environments, markets, and social conditions. We have a decent start already, with more universities offering classes in organic agriculture, more organizations popping up that are dedicated to assisting organic farmers, and more information on sustainable agriculture appearing on bookstore shelves. But much more can be done.
Some might argue that it’s not fair to ask farmers and ranchers to trust off-farm knowledge. That’s one reason conventional farming took root: farmers let agribusiness “experts” dictate their practices. I agree that we shouldn’t ask farmers to forsake their autonomy in the transition from conventional to regenerative. But who says this knowledge has to come strictly from off-farm sources? We could empower farmers like Phil and Kevin to educate their communities. A neighbor-to-neighbor approach seems better than a top-down, prescriptive approach, anyway. Some farmers and ranchers will find structured training helpful, but others will want more independence. And not all farmers are going to want to make the transition—and they shouldn’t be forced to. But they could be encouraged in the same way they were encouraged to grow more corn, adopt industrial practices, and “get big or get out.” If society is going to ask for a transition, then society must also provide resources to help make the transition happen.
We drive by Kevin’s house on the island. Two blocks from his front door, the Atlantic Ocean that he loves so much laps at the sand. “I feel really blessed,” he says, looking out the window. “I love what I’m doing. There are some days that are tougher than others, some days that don’t work like they should, some days go perfect. We have a lot more good days than bad days.”
“I’m very lucky to be where I am,” he tells me later. “I’m in a unique position. I grow food that keeps me healthy, keeps me young. I’m doing that work, and it’s good exercise in fresh air. I couldn’t be more blessed.”