Deadwood was a television show that aired for three seasons on HBO, beginning in 2004.136 The show was set in the 1870s in Deadwood, South Dakota, one of the wildest mining camps in the American West. Today, the town has a population of just over a thousand people.
In the course of the series, we see the town of Deadwood morphing from a primitive gold-panning camp composed of crude tents into a rather substantial town, eventually focused on industrial mining. In the process of this development, rugged individualism and authentic entrepreneurialism are undone, driven out, and replaced by corporate capitalism, bigger government, and inevitable corruption.
The intent of the show, according to its director, David Milch, was to study the way that civilization comes together from chaos—by organizing itself around symbols. In Deadwood, the main symbol, of course, was gold.
What we’re observing in the emergence of a foodshed is something new emerging from chaos by organizing itself around an unlikely symbol: local food. It’s a new gold rush and a new frontier. We find ourselves living in the frontier days, just before the railroads and the big bankers from back East come in, smelling opportunity.
It’s kind of wild and wooly out on the frontier. There’s a great deal of drama, hundreds of amazing stories, and no shortage of great characters—from heroes to rascals, some of them matching archetypes illustrated in Deadwood.
In this gold rush, some people are just seeking a way to make a reliable living, even a subsistence living—like the farmers we know who are working full-time jobs in order to afford to farm and give their families the experience of connection to the land. Others are devoted to creating the infrastructure that could make a local food system work, and others are working on the policy barriers that tend to hold all of this back.
Still others are a bit more ambitious, seeking power and influence and—naturally—wealth. We know of one local food entrepreneur who proudly proclaimed a few years ago that he was building a $100 million distribution company in just a few years. A year and a half later, he announced that he’d revised his thinking and was now creating a $1 billion company. Two years later, he closed his doors—out of business.
One of the characteristics of a gold rush is that demand far outstrips supply. And that is certainly the situation we face with local food. There’s currently almost no way to connect small and midsize producers with larger commercial buyers. The infrastructure for aggregation, processing, and distribution doesn’t exist any more. That infrastructure once existed, but it was wiped out after World War II and replaced by industrial agriculture. So there’s no reliable way to meet the demand for local food, demand that’s continuing to grow dramatically.
Many of our smaller producers have been focused on direct-to-consumer marketing: farmers markets, CSAs, and farm stands. This is where it’s been most profitable for them, where—without a middleman—they can get the highest margins. But it’s an inefficient system. And it won’t last.
The only way many of these farmers can grow their operations significantly is to reach new markets. And that means retailers, schools, and institutions. But they can’t get to these larger commercial markets without infrastructure—and without moving up to a certain level of significantly increased scale and efficiency.