Farm-to-Table Baloney

“This is a story we are all being fed. A story about overalls, rich soil and John Deere tractors scattering broods of busy chickens. A story about healthy animals living happy lives, heirloom tomatoes hanging heavy and earnest artisans rolling wheels of cheese into aging caves nearby.

More often than not, those things are fairy tales. A long list of Tampa Bay restaurants are willing to capitalize on our hunger for the story.”

That's from a story by Laura Reiley in the Tampa Bay Times.  After some investigation, she finds most farm-to-table restaurant claims are anything but.  The whole article is worth a read - the ubiquity of the lies is truly astounding.  

It goes to show that show much of what we taste comes from what happens in our heads and not what happens on our tongues.  It also goes to show that whatever restaurateurs say they want to sell, they too recognize that if you want affordable, high quality, consistent products all year round, it makes sense to trade with others who aren't necessarily living 100 miles from you. 

Where do we like to shop?

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this paper by Rebecca Taylor and Sofia Villas-Boas, which was just published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.  The research makes use of a new data set - the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS) - initiated by the USDA to study where people of different income levels prefer to shop for food.  This question is relevant to the debate on so-called food deserts.  Are poorer households eating less healthily because of the lack of "good" food outlets in their area, or are there no "good" food outlets in an area because people there don't want that kind of food?  To sort this out, you need to know where people of different incomes prefer to shop, and that's precisely what Taylor and Villas-Boas estimate.

Their data suggest that, if anything, lower income households tend to have more stores near them, and at least one store closer to them, than higher income households.  For example, in a 1 mile radius, low income households have, on average, 1 superstore near them, whereas higher income households have, on average, only 0.58.  Using the USDA's definition of a food desert, the authors calculate that only 5%, 8%, and 3% of low, medium, and high income households live in a so-called food desert.  Whereas low income households live, on average, closer to the nearest farmers market than high income households (10.7 miles vs 11.93 miles), high income households are more likely to actually visit a farmers market.  

The authors go on to estimate a consumer demand model.  Where do consumers prefer to shop given the distances they have to travel?  When economists say "prefer" - they don't mean how one feels about a location or the images it conjures up, but rather what is actually chosen.  The authors find that people prefer going to locations that are closer to home.  That is, people don't like to travel too far to shop.  This estimate, then, lets them calculate how far one is willing to travel to shop at one type of store vs. another.  The authors consider 9 types of stores (including restaurants and fast food outlets), and find farmers markets are the least preferable shopping outlet in that people are willing to travel the least distance to get to a farmers market.  

Using the authors estimates, I calculated how much people would be willing to pay ($/week) to shop at each of the 8 other types of food outlets instead of the (least preferable) farmers market.

Both low and high income households would be willing to pay around $25/week to shop at a superstore instead of a farmer's market.  The data also suggests that higher income households prefer farmers markets more than do lower income households.  Across all the outlet types, low income household are willing to pay $18.67 to shops somewhere other than a farmers market, but for higher income households, the figure is only $13.95.  The figure also shows that higher income households are more willing to pay to eat at restaurants than are low income households.  This suggests that farmers markets and restaurants are normal goods - the more income you get the more you want to shop in these kinds of outlets. 

The authors write in the conclusions:

“the households in this sample have low WTP for Farmers Markets to be closer to home, and high WTP to pay for Fast Food to be closer to home. This implies that simply building Farmers Markets will not induce households to shop there. ”

The authors interpret this finding to mean, "low-income households may need to be compensated to shop at Farmers Markets."  But, why?  Why would we use tax payer dollars to encourage shopping in food outlets people least prefer?  Perhaps some would say that farmers market sell healthier food.  Maybe, but the highly desirable superstores sell healthy food too.  And, if the problem is healthy eating, where is the market failure, and why would farmers markets be the most efficient solution to solve that failure?  

In any event, I look forward to seeing the authors' follow up work on the subject, which they discuss at the end of this paper.  

Who moved my corn?

I have the great pleasure of giving a talk this week at the annual meeting of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society (AARES).  Tonight they held their awards ceremony, and I happened to be sitting next to Phil Pardey from the University of Minnesota who won (along with Jason Beddow) one of the research awards for a paper they published in the Journal of Economic History titled "Moving Matters".  

This is a fascinating paper that documents the movement of corn production over time in the US.  The paper illustrates the impact of hybrid and then genetically modified corn influencing what can be grown and where.  Changes in genetics and management practices allowed the corn plant to move  to soils that best suited the production of the crop.  As a result, they calculate that upwards of 21% of the growth in corn production can be explained by the geographic movement of the crop.   The results have implications for assumptions about impacts of climate change (i.e., that farmers can adapt by moving which crops, and which genetics, are planted where in response to changing temperatures) and for arguments about local foods (i.e., the sustainable production of crops depends on location of production, and allowing farmers to specialize in the geographic production of a crop can dramatically increase production).  

Here's the abstract:

“U.S corn output increased from 1.8 billion bushels in 1879 to 12.7 billion bushels in 2007. Concurrently, the footprint of production changed substantially. Failure to take proper account of movements means that productivity assessments likely misattribute sources of growth and climate change studies likely overestimate impacts. Our new spatial output indexes show that 16 to 21 percent of the increase in U.S. corn output over the 128 years beginning in 1879 was attributable to spatial movement in production. This long-run perspective provides historical precedent for how much agriculture might adjust to future changes in climate and technology.”

And, an interesting graph:

Farmers markets and food safety

Last spring, I noted that Marc Bellemare from he University of Minnesota gave a provocative seminar in our department on the relationship between farmers markets and foodborne illness.  This weekend, the Marc discuss the research in a piece for the New York Times. 

Here is the main finding:

“As we will report in an updated version of an unpublished working paper released last summer, we found correlations that, in statistical parlance, are too robust to ignore. First, we found a positive correlation between the number of farmers markets per capita in a given state and in a given year and the number of reported outbreaks, regardless of type, of food-borne illness per capita in that state that year. Then, we found a similar positive correlation between farmers markets per capita and reported individual cases of food-borne illness per capita.”

And,

“And even if our results did identify a causal relationship between farmers markets and food-borne illness, it would not be possible to identify the precise mechanisms through which this happens, and it would be a critical mistake to conclude that the foods sold at farmers markets are themselves to blame. That is because most cases of illness are caused by consumers who undercook or fail to wash their food. Indeed, our results may suggest that many people erroneously believe that food bought at farmers markets needn’t be washed because it is “natural.””

Local foods good for the environment?

A couple months ago the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment published a paper by Andrew Zumkehr and Elliott Campbell.  The paper was widely reported in the press.  For example the Washington Post the headline: As much as 90 percent of Americans could eat food grown within 100 miles of their home.  Another outlet: Most Americans could eat locally.  

I promptly wrote a blog post asking: even if Americans could eat locally, should they?  Shortly thereafter, I exchanged several emails with Pierre Desrochers, the author of the excellent book The Locavore's Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet.  We decided a more formal reply was warranted.  

I'm pleased to report that a couple days ago Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment published a letter by Pierre and me.

We write:

“In a recent paper, Andrew Zumkehr and Elliott Campbell (2015; Front Ecol Environ 13[5]: 244–248) present a simulation study that assesses the technological feasibility of providing enough local calories to feed every American. In so doing, they suggest turning back the clock on one of Homo sapiens sapiens’ greatest evolutionary achievements: the ability to trade physical goods over increasingly longer distances, producing an attending ever-widening division of labor (Horan et al. 2005). The main benefit of this process is that one hundred people who specialize and engage in trade end up producing and consuming far more than one hundred times what any one individual would achieve on his or her own. By spontaneously relocating food production to regions with higher biotic potential for specific types of crops and livestock in order to optimize the overall use of resources, trade and the division of labor have delivered more output at lower costs.

Zumkehr and Campbell largely sidestep these benefits. They cite a few studies suggesting that (re)localized food systems would deliver environmental, economic, food security, and social benefits, but neglect to mention critiques of those claims”

We offer these specific critiques of their model:

“We also take issue with the authors’ use of yield data from each county to infer the agricultural potential of each location. This approach suffers from selectivity bias; the effect of increasing local food production onto more marginal local lands will likely deliver less-productive results than current average yields. In a competitive market economy, observed crop yields near urban locations are likely to represent an upper bound for the overall level of productivity in the area because only lands productive enough to outcompete other uses are currently devoted to agricultural production. The authors are also silent on the environmental consequences of removing wildlife from current idle lands to make room for domesticated plants and animals.

Moreover, the authors exclude cost considerations and conclude that the “current foodshed potential of most US cities is not limited by current agronomic capacity or demographics to any great extent”, but rather by “social and economic” considerations. However, an economic barrier is just as real and restrictive as an agronomic one. Resource and budget constraints simply will not allow all wants and desires to be realized. It is all very well telling people with limited means to eat local cake, but they should also be told of its price tag.”