You know it’s hot when you can see it. Standing alongside a field just off Route 2 in Massachusetts, I was mesmerized by the heat rising off the road, blurring the horizon far in the distance. The bright midday sun beat down on the top of my head. The thermometer in my rental, a midsize whose air-conditioning made more noise than cold air, read 103.
I was driving to meet Josh, a first-generation dairy farmer on his thousand-plus acres of land. We almost had to cancel because of the heat. Not because Josh was cowed by the triple-digit weather but because one of his giant barn fans—a lifesaver on hot days—needed immediate attention. He managed to get the fan fixed in short order, telling me something about how it needed a new belt. Fortunately, he had plenty in reserve.
I wanted to connect with Josh because his enterprise is an anomaly compared with others in the state. He’s in his early forties—a young pup in a profession with an average age approaching sixty. And when we talked, he had roughly five years of experience under his belt. The percentage of farms in the United States operated by individuals who have been in the profession less than a decade has been in decline for decades. The figure is now around 20 percent, down from close to 40 percent in 1982.
Josh remarked at one point during our interview, with a tone that sounded both incredulous and profoundly sad, “Within another ten years the average farmer is going to be eligible for Medicare—Medicare.” Josh mentioned land prices repeatedly as he tried to explain why he’s the exception and not the rule. In Massachusetts, farmland sells for an average of $10,400 per acre. In its push to support new farmers, the U.S. Department of Agriculture lends them up to $300,000 to get started, sufficient for a couple dozen acres of land or a new tractor. “It’s not nearly enough,” Josh flatly told me.
Josh was lucky, by his own admission, and grateful. While he was telling me how he “made it,” his face lit up with an ear-to-ear grin, bright even in the blazing sun. Josh doesn’t own his land, his seeds, or even all of his equipment. And the cows: not his, either. His business model rests on a mix of sharing and cooperative arrangements. “Property’s a burden,” he explained, adding, “Through sharing, I have more control over my life and business.” This remarkable statement, which stands opposed to principles that lie at the core of American democracy, got me thinking.
Thomas Jefferson must be turning in his grave. Perhaps he is making room for his vision of agrarian democracy. This ideal, which takes as sacrosanct the role of individual landownership in ensuring a republic of free and prosperous citizens, has since expanded, romanticizing sole ownership throughout foodscapes. Business ownership comes with privileges, to quote the title of a recent Forbes article.1 Except when it doesn’t, especially for those entrepreneurs without an angel investor looking over their shoulder.
As food becomes a corporate enterprise, two things are happening to the Jeffersonian ideal. First, individual ownership is becoming further out of reach for many. Gone are the days of the government giving away land to settlers—160 acres, thanks to the Homestead Act of 1862—in exchange for five years of continuous residence. Today, land is expensive, just like everything about farming—equipment, refrigeration trucks, semitrucks and trailers, inputs, even seed. Farmland inflation rates have increased by roughly 150 percent in the past fifteen years, propelling the price of ground in some states north of $13,000 per acre.2 In the meantime, U.S. farmers saw a 45 percent drop in net farm income between 2013 and 2016, with the USDA expecting incomes to drop by another 8.7 percent in 2017.3 If you do an Internet search for “U.S. farm incomes,” you might read that farm household incomes rose between 2015 and 2016—cue in on “household,” as those figures include off-farm income. I expect farm household incomes to rise as family members are forced to find jobs elsewhere, though I’m not sure that is something we ought to be celebrating.
Small businesses are not finding things any easier, as most struggle even to get off the ground. Roughly 60 percent of all restaurants fail within the first year, with nearly 80 percent shuttering before celebrating their five-year anniversary.4 Restaurants with twenty or fewer employees fare even worse.5
Food safety laws assume restaurants either are chains or are bankrolled like them. Want to start a business and cook out of your home? If that is even legal—it isn’t in many instances—you are looking at a major kitchen upgrade: stainless steel countertops, triple-compartment sinks, adequate mechanical ventilation to the outside (in your bathroom too, in many states), proper signage (e.g., No Smoking), and on and on. Good luck financing those upgrades with interest rates in the double, in some cases triple, digits. You know things are bad when credit cards become the source of capital for many aspiring food entrepreneurs.
The second change concerns those who have done it, who can declare, “It’s mine.” For them, the ideal can feel more like a nightmare. Buying seed no longer guarantees ownership. Patents and contracts with seed companies prevent farmers from reselling seed or even saving some for a future season. Farmers can’t even fix their own tractors—their own tractors. They are still allowed to change tires and fix belts; no problem. Yet the moment this tinkering involves the tractor’s computer “brain,” which, let’s face it, is a bridge too far for most anyway, owners enter murky legal waters.
Why are farmers getting the short end of the stick? For the same reason most food entrepreneurs are, and eaters too. We lack a meaningful say in how the entire system is organized. The Jeffersonian ideal: an ideological weapon of mass distraction. It operates by focusing our attention on the individual ownership of stuff—tractors, seed, land, health inspector approved kitchen space, and so on—while ownership of the foodscape is systematically being taken from us, becoming concentrated in the hands of a few. Even when farmers own their land and buildings, they have lost control of most everything else. For that, we can thank such things as contract farming and market concentration in those sectors farmers buy from (e.g., seed companies) and sell to (e.g., meat processors).
These barriers and pitfalls to ownership mean that large corporations thoroughly dominate the foodscape. And though family farms continue to exist, the demographics of the sector look nothing like the general population, even though there are countless want-to-be farmers—of practically every race, creed, and color—waiting on the sidelines. Our having been seduced by the idea of individual ownership means we need to accept our own culpability for what comes next: low wages, obesity, antibiotic resistance, food waste, hunger, and other delights of an industrialized system. Is it time to consider a different model?
The sharing economy, which also goes by such names as collaborative consumption and platform cooperativism, offers a real alternative. You have probably heard of Uber and Airbnb—the former term is now used as a verb. Such platforms have captured our attention and imagination because they facilitate sharing among networks broader than our grandparents could ever have imagined. While previous generations of farmers shared seed, they did so largely with neighbors or acquaintances. Smartphones, algorithms, GPS data, and cloud computing—in a word, technology—have changed things considerably. To quote liberally from the Economist:
Technology has reduced transaction costs, making sharing assets cheaper and easier than ever—and therefore possible on a much larger scale. The big change is the availability of more data about people and things, which allows physical assets to be disaggregated and consumed as services. Before the internet, renting a surfboard, a power tool or a parking space from someone else was feasible, but was usually more trouble than it was worth. Now websites such as Airbnb, RelayRides and SnapGoods match up owners and renters; smartphones with GPS let people see where the nearest rentable car is parked; social networks provide a way to check up on people and build trust; and online payment systems handle the billing.6
In short, technology has made sharing easier, allowing collaborative arrangements to challenge the dominant industrial system. Which is not to say that technology holds all the answers—there’s a value to face-to-face encounters that gets lost in the sea of digital communication. In this book, I’ll explore both old-fashioned and high-tech models of sharing, looking at the costs and benefits. My primary interest in sharing technologies is that they have prompted a conversation about the way our food economy functions, opening up space for more equitable and humane relationships.
By the halfway mark through our interview, Josh had shown me the dairy parlor and machine shed. We had just taken refuge under a grand red maple, resting our hind ends on upturned paint pails that had been repurposed to haul feed. The teenage son of a co-owner was mowing lawn in the distance on a John Deere riding tractor. Barn swallows feasted on insects that had taken flight, their cool bunker disturbed by a forty-eight-inch blade traveling at some three thousand rotations per minute. For a good minute, our attention was captivated by countless swallows diving, climbing, and crossing between the wires of a nearby clothesline—nature’s Blue Angels minus the noise and contrails.
Josh’s farm is cooperatively owned. “Cooperatively owned, cooperatively managed, cooperatively profited from,” was how Josh put it, which nicely summed up its legal status. This was not an enterprise consisting of multiple independent farm businesses working on shared land.
“We’re better farmers because we farm together. This is a model that can feed the world.” During our brief time together, I had come to know Josh as a modest person. He was quick to deflect praise, for instance, to his partners and wife. So the statement caught me off guard. There was an intensity in his eyes, burning like brown topaz, that I had not seen before. He is serious, I remember thinking.
After turning slightly on his pail to face me, and wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, he explained himself. I had heard many of the story’s elements before. There was the bit about how “the world needs more food,” followed by a shout-out to “economies of scale.” Was I being fed the standard line about the necessity of industrial farming?
Not quite.
Josh and his collaborators own collectively more than one thousand acres, about half in pasture. It would be a difficult farm to manage by yourself, in light of the sustainable techniques used: rotational grazing (i.e., systematically moving cows from one fenced pen, called a paddock, to another based on “the look of the grass”); integrated pest management techniques (i.e., using good insects to eat the bad ones); and USDA certified organic methods. Each requires a deep knowledge of agroecology. To make his point, Josh began ticking off names of native plants that his cows especially like; each paddock, roughly fifty acres, has a unique mix. “It’s a lot of ground to keep track of,” he told me, just before explaining how he literally gets down on his hands and knees to measure grass length and soil compaction levels.
While Josh talked about economies of scale, he was also quick to mention diseconomies of scale—the idea that you really can have too much of a good thing. He explained repeatedly that farms have gotten “too big,” pointing out that “when you’re farming in excess of a thousand acres, by yourself, you can’t possibly implement the management practices that we do here.”
With the mower approaching, we shared a look, stood, and walked toward the house. When we’d moved an additional twenty feet away from the John Deere, Josh stopped and faced me. “Imagine a scenario where we didn’t share. We each would need to have our own equipment, our own buildings, our own grain bins, trucks, four-wheelers, milking parlors. It wouldn’t be economically feasible. We’d have to get bigger to afford it all, which means we’d have to be at each other’s throats trying to buy each other out.”
It wasn’t just about the economic benefits that came with sharing stuff. Josh talked about how he and his collaborators had gained leverage as sellers. While most farmers have to take the price they are offered because of market concentration in the processing and retail sectors, Josh can actually negotiate the price of his milk and meat.
As for that comment about how sharing animals, land, and equipment can feed the world: it was aspirational, but the reality is not beyond our grasp.
“Think of it. If our neighbors did this, and their neighbors, and their neighbors’ neighbors, this model would be scalable.” There were those dancing brown topaz eyes again. “This is about scaling out, not up.” “Scaling up” has come to mean independent farm businesses getting bigger while pushing out competitors. “Scaling out” can mean something profoundly different—farmers actually collaborating. If by scaling out farmers can also reclaim their lost negotiating power in a marketplace that has become thoroughly dominated by corporate agriculture, then sign me up for this vision.
Cooperatives such as Josh’s are just one example of the food sharing economy in action. Sharing can occur at any point in the process of growing, processing, cooking, selling, and eating food, and it may or may not involve new technology. This book describes a number of web based sharing platforms designed to facilitate exchanges. Some allow chefs to cook in their homes by coordinating orders and deliveries; one allows farmers to share—though, if you ask me, “rent” is a more apt descriptor—their tractors; another connects aspiring food entrepreneurs with idle kitchen space; a few even facilitate peer-to-peer loans.
Then there’s the case of FoodCloud, a platform designed to recover food that would otherwise go to waste. The nonprofit company, which goes by the same name as its platform, is based in Ireland. With its software, retailers upload details about food that is nearing its sell-by date or is deemed too ugly to spend good money on. (The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations calculates that cosmetic standards in the retail industry exclude up to 40 percent of fresh produce from the market—that’s 800–900 million tons of food annually, or the equivalent of 9,000 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers.)7 At the other end, local charities receive automatic alerts asking if they wish to collect the food and distribute it to those in need. Tesco Ireland uses the platform in all of its 140 stores. In May 2016, Aldi announced its national partnership with FoodCloud. By November of that year, the retailer’s 79 participating stores reported donating over 500,000 meals (234 metric tons of food) thanks to this relationship.8
In this book, you will also learn about seed libraries, which are reminiscent of the wildly successful free seed program implemented by the U.S. federal government from 1819 to 1924. By 1900, 1 billion free packages of seed were being mailed to farmers annually. Today, seed libraries are illegal in some states. In one egregious case, a Pennsylvania county commissioner managed to drop the t-bomb—agro-terrorism— when describing why she was against them. Fortunately, a seed library movement is under way. I tell about some of its successes and why more of these libraries are needed so future generations can reclaim ownership of their foodscapes through seeds and the communities that sustain them.
Approximately 45 percent of all U.S. farmland (that’s close to 400 million acres) is rented. Nearly all goes to supporting the status quo: large-scale, which typically means conventional, agriculture. One landlord explained it to me this way: “If I’m going to make the same whether I lease my land”—he rents out more than a thousand acres of prime Iowa farmland—“to a dozen small-scale beginning farmers or to one established large grower, I’m going to take that one lease. It’s just easier for me.” Fair enough. But if growers interested in supporting alternative foodscapes do not have access to land, we have a real problem. Collaborative based alternatives to renting are beginning to flourish, giving individuals from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds an opportunity to acquire ownership of their farms without individually owning (or renting) them. The stories told here involve land cooperatives, crowdfunding platforms that give eaters and farmers a shared stake in their foodscape, and inventive community based trusts.
Speaking of crowdfunding: the total volume of loans held by community banks peaked in 2008, only to drop precipitously with the Great Recession, bottoming out in 2011. Enter peer-to-peer lending platforms, especially those focused on connecting peers from within the same community. More than just providing access to low interest financing for aspiring entrepreneurs, community based lending encourages a moral economy. Such platforms represent a departure from the dog-eat-dog—or, in the case of food companies, eaters-get-diabetes-shareholders-get-rich—business model common throughout conventional foodscapes. Here, you will read accounts of borrowers and lenders being matched up within the same community; of lenders who frequent the business their loan is supporting and who rally family and friends to do the same; of borrowers who have met, repeatedly, the person or persons at the other end of the loan; and of onetime borrowers who later choose to become lenders themselves. In other words, you will encounter stories in which peer-to-peer lending has made communities and foodscapes stronger by bringing people together.
That’s just a taste of what lies ahead.
While the sharing economy holds real promise for making our foodscape more sustainable and just, slapping the label “sharing” on an enterprise does not necessarily mean that it is equitable. While many sharing platforms claim to be fighting for the little guy, at every turn projecting an image of David taking on the Goliath monopolists, the reality can be far different. Take what many consider to be the archetypal sharing model: Uber.
Chances are good that you are familiar with Uber, even if you haven’t used it to get to the airport or home from a bar. For those living under a rock: Uber facilitates peer-to-peer ride sharing for a fee—the company keeps 20–30 percent of each fare. Launched in 2010, Uber reached its first billion rides in 2015, a total it saw doubled just six months later. In the summer of 2017, another milestone was announced: 5 billion trips worldwide.
One study found that the average Uber driver makes $364 per month, among the highest incomes among the sharing platforms surveyed.9 Another study tried to calculate the average hourly wage for Uber drivers. Researchers arrived at $15.68 per hour before factoring in expenses such as gas, maintenance, and depreciation.10 Other analyses, meanwhile, paint a far less optimistic financial picture after calculating for taxes that an employer would otherwise pay, namely Social Security and Medicare, which drivers owe under the Self-Employment Contributions Act of 1954.11
While some of these findings may appear heartening, others should dampen our enthusiasm. The people who provide services through many of these sharing platforms tend to be highly educated, and many even report having well paying full-time jobs.12 For them, driving for Uber is supplemental income. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, except that they are crowding out workers who depend on the income of service jobs. These are tasks traditionally performed by people who have not gone to college and who come from lower socioeconomic households. Generally, people with PhDs who make more than $100,000 per year do not drive taxis on the side. But some of them may drive for Uber. In some cases, sharing platforms might be pushing out those whom the sole ownership economy has already placed in a precarious position, perhaps even making them more vulnerable.
Then there is the corporation itself. Uber’s business tactics are legend. In many ways, the business is the closest embodiment of Nietzschean will to power since the days of the robber barons, when Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller’s style of unrestrained capitalism crushed anything daring to stand in its way. It has been reported, for example, that Uber has assigned its internet protocol to the tax haven of Bermuda, leaving less than 2 percent of its net revenue taxable by the U.S. government.13 So with one hand it takes jobs away from the already vulnerable while with the other it hides its money overseas, robbing government programs of their tax base.
A few years back, Casey Newton reported on Uber’s questionable business practices in the Verge, uncovering a special project with the code name Operation SLOG—Supplying Long-term Operations Growth.14 Employees, or “sloggers,” equipped with burner phones, credit cards, and recruitment kits, were instructed to take rides with Lyft drivers and try to convince them to switch to Uber. If sloggers learned that they had already tried to recruit the driver, they immediately canceled the ride. There were more than five thousand cancellations during the initial months of this poaching campaign. Couple this street-thug capitalist mentality with a bankroll north of a billion dollars and you should begin to understand why I am reluctant to hand my and my children’s future over to Uber.
What happens when this brand of creative annihilation crushes its competition, local taxi companies, Lyft, Grab (in Southeast Asia), Ola (in India), all of them, the world over? Über Uber. A company with that cultural DNA is not going to let its workers unionize. With its drivers having nowhere else to go, Uber would be well positioned to start taking an even bigger commission. (In the past few years, its original 20 percent commission rate has crept up to, in some markets, 30 percent.)15 Just wait until there are self-driving cars, when today’s well paid drivers become tomorrow’s latest Uber roadkill—industry insiders are expecting this fatality to take place around 2030.16 At the other end of the transaction, there will be little to stop the company from charging surge rates at every opportunity: “Oh, it’s sprinkling; factor in a surge at 2.5x!”
Squeeze workers. Squeeze consumers. It is what monopolists have always done. Every one of them.
The media, talking heads, and our youth are continually touting the “sharing economy” as the next big thing.17 (Those aged eighteen to twenty-four are nearly twice as likely as those twenty-five and older to say that access is the new ownership.) So how do we ensure it is a gentle giant, not the 800-pound gorilla of capitalism, that empowers successful farmers like Josh rather than putting taxi drivers out of work? How can we use it to retool and reboot the Jeffersonian ideal, creating a more equitable and sustainable foodscape?
We need to differentiate between types of sharing. Uber and the cooperative partnership that Josh is part of are different. That much is obvious. But how do we talk about those distinctions?
My goal has been to learn from those actively engaged in the food sharing economy. I conducted more than two hundred face-to-face interviews with people doing precisely that, plus a few dozen more interviews with people getting the short end of the individual ownership stick.18 By around interview one hundred, it had become clear that all these various practices could be placed into one of three buckets. Some practices involved creating access to material things. Others focused on creating and exchanging knowledge. Still others were centered on building community. And some did all these things to various degrees.
The remaining chapters are organized around these three themes. After the next two chapters, which discuss why the Jeffersonian dream has turned out to be a nightmare, chapters are organized by what the platforms explicitly purport to share: chapters 3 and 4 discuss those promising to facilitate access to stuff; chapters 5 and 6 are about those exchanging knowledge; and chapters 7 and 8 illustrate examples of building community.
As you will also quickly learn, these buckets are porous. Luckily for us, most of the platforms examined shared in more ways than one, though some did prove to be little more than one-shot wonders, delivering exactly what they advertised. This book is not about Uber. But for illustration purposes, I would place the platform in the one-shot wonder category. You get what you pay for—a ride—and not much else.
Collaborative exchanges that incorporate all three elements have the most potential to afford food sovereignty. The term, popularized in 1996 at the World Food Summit in Rome by the international peasants’ movement La Vía Campesina, a movement some two hundred million strong, emphasizes the importance of personal agency, social justice, and cooperation.19 La Vía Campesina’s full definition of “food sovereignty” is “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.”20 At heart, this is a deeply democratic vision of how to feed the world. This vision stands opposed to the status quo, in which the monopolists work to hold, well, a monopoly on what, how, and with whom we eat.21
The final chapter discusses in detail what it means to practice sharing that affords individuals and communities food sovereignty. Examples, however, are scattered throughout the book. That’s good news—food sovereignty can take many forms. Sovereignty can bloom a thousand times, in different forms, fields, and environments.
To highlight one example that fits into each of the three buckets, take the Food Corridor. Discussed further in chapter 3, the Food Corridor is a business headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado. (It sounds weird saying “headquartered” when you’re talking about a company with three employees, one communications person, and three cofounders.) The company matches idle commercial kitchens with aspiring entrepreneurs through software, charging users a monthly membership fee. As of September 2017, the Food Corridor had customers in twenty-six states.
The cost of a commercial kitchen, as you might guess, is prohibitive. Colorado has the Cottage Foods Act, a law that first came into effect in 2012. Similar to laws found in other states, the act allows very small scale operations to test the commercial waters by producing things like apple sauce or cookies in their homes for direct-to-consumer sales within the state without licensing or inspection. But because the act applies only to “non—potentially hazardous” foods—basically those that do not require refrigeration—and has a cap of $5,000 in net sales per product, most start-ups have to play by the same rules and face the same hurdles as chains do. And above all, they need M-O-N-E-Y—a lot of it. Being able to rent otherwise idle commercial kitchen space is thus a potential game changer.
To say the Food Corridor offers access only to stuff misses a great deal. According to CEO Ashley Colpaart, “the long-term goal is to be a [decentralized] incubator, for start-ups, for communities, even. More than providing access to space, we want to create resilient food systems.”22 The goal is more vision than reality at the moment. But it isn’t all talk. The Food Corridor launched the Network for Incubator and Commissary Kitchens in March 2016 as a Facebook group, which currently hosts approximately nine hundred members. This network of food activists, entrepreneurs, and practitioners shares data, best practices, and technical assistance to build vibrant communities through successful shared-use kitchen businesses. These exchanges include support for what is called in the biz “ecosystem services,” such as food liability insurance, label printing, and food safety tools. Which is exactly what has to take place if we want to dislodge old ways of thinking and habits rooted in an individual ownership ethos. If you have questions about, say, shared-use kitchen businesses, but the people with “answers” know only the status quo, why would we expect anything to change?
As a company, the Food Corridor accomplished much in identifying and legitimizing the shared-use kitchen sector in its first two years of existence. But “success” has multiple meanings among those looking to shake things up. I would expect those involved to continue to innovate, in ways that create cost efficiencies for users and social synergies among those inhabiting this shared ecosystem. Food sovereignty is not about one-size-fits-all solutions. That thinking is what got us into this mess: the belief that there is one pathway to prosperity. The Green Revolution. Tax cuts. “Get big or get out!” Here is a piece of advice: a solution that can fit on a bumper sticker probably isn’t much of one. Sovereignty is about supporting diverse individuals and enterprises; it’s about building networks based on the idea that we are stronger together—where independence is born of interdependence.
As opposed to the Uber monoculture, those behind the Food Corridor let discrepancies across foodscapes bloom. Ashley reaffirmed repeatedly the company’s commitment to social enterprises and nonprofits, though Food Corridor customers include for-profit entities as well. That commitment is evidenced in how the company works closely with individual users to learn about their “pain points”—those costs that the software platform might ease. This conversation has on a number of occasions resulted in the Food Corridor customizing its software. A one-size-fits-all platform might work for the Olive Gardens of the world, and it has certainly worked wonders for Uber. Small-scale food entrepreneurs, meanwhile, especially those working within underserved communities or with underserved populations, have unique needs and challenges. Exchanges supported by Food Corridor—enabled ecosystems allow these entrepreneurial polycultures to survive and in some cases thrive. This is significant for businesses trying to make their way in a world that privileges individual ownership and rewards cutthroat—or, as Josh put it, “at each other’s throats”—behavior.
When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.23 But also, by changing that environment you will discover mutations and varieties that wouldn’t have sprouted under the prior conditions. The Food Corridor is helping to change the environment, and in the process, it is redefining “business as usual.”
By highlighting efforts such as the Food Corridor and Josh’s cooperative, I set out to examine what constitutes true ownership. In these pages, we will explore what it will take to have real choice about the products we make and eat, the kinds of lives we lead, and the direction of our communities. Can we work collaboratively to create healthy and prosperous foodscapes? Is there a new path to the American dream?