MIKE IVEY | The Capital Times
With good jobs hard to come by and rural communities struggling, capitalizing on the love of local food seems like a natural fit — especially in a state like Wisconsin with deep agricultural roots, varied topography and plenty of water.
Marathon County entrepreneur Tony Schultz is bubbling over with thoughts on growing Wisconsin's economy.
"Honestly, I've got about got 10 micro-food enterprise ideas in my mind right now," says Schultz, a third-generation farmer who, with partner Kat Becker, runs Stoney Acres Farm near Athens, about 30 miles northwest of Wausau.
Schultz and Becker grow a variety of vegetables and fruits, along with raising pasture-fed beef and pork. They also run a successful community-supported agriculture business, or CSA, where customers pay in advance for boxes of fresh produce during the growing season.
Their latest brainstorm involves making wood-fired pizzas featuring garden produce. They're remodeling an old barn into a commercial kitchen to test out different combinations, with plans to rent space to other farmers.
"The way I see it, every little business we can create is something Dean Foods or Kraft or Monsanto doesn't have," says Schultz, 32, who fired up the crowd with a local food speech at a progressive political rally, Fighting Bob Fest North, in May.
From Fifth Season Cooperative in Westby to Will Allen's Growing Power urban agriculture initiative in Milwaukee, there is unprecedented interest these days in local food.
It's hard to find a community without a regular farmers' market. Dozens of restaurants boast of their commitment to using local ingredients. Businesses like Chicago-based City Provisions offer farm tours and dinners to committed "locavores," which was named the best new word of the year in 2007 by the Oxford American Dictionary.
With good jobs hard to come by and rural communities struggling, capitalizing on the love of local food seems like a natural fit — especially in a state like Wisconsin with deep agricultural roots, varied topography and plenty of water. Local food devotees envision the state as part of a regional "food shed" running from Minneapolis to Chicago. Some 35 million people live in the area, offering the ideal combination of urban and rural landscapes to support local food production and "value-added" products that come from it: turning strawberries into jam, for example, or making milk into cheese or converting grains into liquor.
There's no need to convince Dane County economic development specialist Olivia Parry of the growth potential.
Parry is heading efforts here to develop the Southern Wisconsin Fresh Mart Packinghouse, a large-scale processing facility for local food items. Plans call for a 15,000-square-foot refrigerated operation where produce can be delivered, sorted, washed and prepared for distribution on a wider scale to large institutional buyers or retailers.
Dane County is currently seeking proposals for the facility, which would be located somewhere in the Madison area and could eventually provide 30 or more jobs.
Parry notes that some $1 billion is spent on food each year in Dane County alone.
"If we can capture just 10 percent, you're talking $100 million," says Parry. "That's a lot of ka-ching."
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That kind of percentage for local food sales is optimistic if you look at national figures, but the number is growing. The U.S. Department of Agriculture just released a report showing that sales of local food — whether sold directly to consumers at farmers' markets or through secondary markets like grocers, restaurants or farm-to-school programs — amounted to $4.8 billion in 2008. The USDA predicts the figure will hit $7 billion this year.
While that is just a sliver of the $497 billion Americans spent in grocery stores last year, there is clearly momentum for selling food grown close to home. By almost every measure, the demand for local food today outstrips supply, with "local" taking the place of "organic" in the minds of many consumers. Organic foods fall under a strict set of federal regulations regarding their production, but distance from consumers isn't one of them.
"We all have to eat," says Stan Gruszynski, a former state legislator who in 2009 was appointed by the Obama administration as Wisconsin state director of USDA Rural Development. "We just need to do a better job helping people make the connection with where their food comes from."
Scores of Madison area businesses have embraced the local food movement.
Metcalfe's grocery stores at Madison's Hilldale Shopping Center and in Wauwatosa feature "Wisconsin Food Miles" signs showing how far a product traveled to reach the shelves. Anything produced in Wisconsin or within 150 miles of the state Capitol qualifies. That is slightly different from the official U.S. Food, Conservation and Energy Act definition, which describes "local" as within 400 miles from its origin.
Metcalfe's local food liaison Leah Caplan, who has deep roots in the local food movement, believes Wisconsin is on the cusp of something big.
"We're absolutely a leader, along with Vermont and California," says Caplan, whose background includes co-founding Death's Door Spirits, working as executive chef at the University Club and starting the Madison chapter of Slow Food, a national grass-roots movement that embraces food produced locally using methods that protect plants and animals.
There is mixed evidence about whether the local food movement will lead to a boom in new jobs. Metcalfe's appears to be enjoying the ride, although it declined to release sales figures. The grocery employs 275 full- and part-timers in Madison and is hiring another 100 for a new location in the former Cub Foods near West Towne Mall.
On the production side, one of the most successful CSA operations in southern Wisconsin has also become an employer of some note. Tipi Produce of Evansville counts more than 20 workers, paid from $9.50 to $18 an hour, with an annual payroll approaching $300,000.
"People think farm jobs and they immediately think low pay," says Tipi co-owner Steve Pincus. "I'm glad to say we pay more than minimum wage."
Pincus notes that about half of Tipi's sales come from supplying two large grocery cooperatives: Willy St. Co-op in Madison and Outpost Natural Foods in Milwaukee.
"We're lucky to have great customers," says Pincus, whose 45-acre operation dates to 1975.
Still, some question if local food production can become a major job creator or keep young people from leaving rural areas after high school. Among dairy farmers alone, Wisconsin has stunningly gone from 143,000 farms in 1950 to just over 11,000 today, according to the state agriculture department.
Steve Deller, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at UW-Madison, agrees there are areas in southwestern Wisconsin enjoying the benefits of the local food trend, but adds that there is little research proving it's an economic driver.
"Twenty years ago, all the research said local foods was such a small market it wasn't worth worrying about," he says. "But over the past five or more years, there has been a 'push back' on large-scale commercial agriculture."
One study attempted to predict how many jobs might be created if all the fruits and vegetables consumed in Iowa's largest cities came from Iowa farms — no small feat considering the current figure is about 5 percent. The study from Iowa State University researcher Dave Swenson estimated that only about 350 net jobs would be created, with some jobs actually lost because of the shift away from corn and soybean production.
"Much more research needs to be conducted concerning the industrial relationships between production and retail activity to determine if more jobs truly are required to handle, transport and distribute those goods than would otherwise exist to move the same volume of goods," says the report.
Given those realities, Deller says the benefits for Wisconsin may come in less visible ways than hundreds of new jobs picking vegetables or butchering free-range chickens.
"I think local foods are great from a nutrition and community development standpoint," says Deller. "From an economic perspective, maybe not so much."
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It may take quite a bit of new infrastructure for local food producers to even think about creating new jobs by the dozens. While there's money to be made if downtown Madison diners will pay $14 for a salad made from locally grown beets, getting those beets to the restaurant can be a long haul. For starters, many producers simply lack the facilities to package and prepare items for sale to a grocery or other institution.
Take Scott Alsum, for example, who grows sweet corn at a family operation near Randolph and enjoys a loyal customer base at the Dane County Farmers' Market.
Alsum was looking for a way to keep sales going during the off-season so he decided to experiment with selling frozen corn. The process involves renting kitchen space at a café after hours in Randolph, near Beaver Dam, to cook the raw corn and using 10 basement freezers to store it.
"It's not ideal but it works," says Alsum, who was offering hot samples of his small-kernel corn to Metcalfe's customers last week.
The new USDA report specifically identifies those sorts of challenges, noting the barriers to local food expansion include lack of distribution systems for moving it into mainstream markets; limited research, education and training for marketing it and uncertainties related to regulations that may affect its production.
Dane County's economic development expert Parry is hoping a new packinghouse in the area could address those issues.
"Wisconsin is in a place where it can capture that local foods mantle for the entire U.S." she says. "Anything we can to do to protect and promote that is a plus."
The packinghouse idea was first discussed by the Dane County Institutional Food Market Coalition, which was founded in 2006 to connect local fruit and vegetable growers with institutional buyers such as hotels, school districts, hospitals or conference centers.
Parry says some 85 institutional buyers such as hospitals or school districts representing $40 million worth of food purchases have already expressed interest in the project. A 2012 or 2103 opening date is possible depending on who gets involved and what sites become available, she says. The Fifth Season Cooperative in Westby has just gotten off the ground with a similar operation serving seven counties in southwest Wisconsin.
Meanwhile, Madison's Northside Planning Council is developing plans for the Food Enterprise & Economic Development (FEED) Kitchens near the Dane County Regional Airport. The $1.2 million, 5,400-square-foot facility would include four commercial kitchens and serve as an incubator for businesses like food carts, caterers or bakers. The kitchens would be open 24-7, with space rented by the hour. Construction is scheduled to begin in March with a planned September opening.
Outside Madison, there are more than a dozen other incubator kitchens where farmers and aspiring chefs can test their ideas with minimal investment or overhead. UW-Extension is helping to coordinate the effort, which includes a kitchen in the former Whistle Stop Café in Mazomanie.
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Wisconsin lawmakers are not embracing the local food movement like some other states are, at least judging by action at the Capitol.
Consider that funding for the Buy Local, Buy Wisconsin grant program has not been reauthorized.
Run through the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, the program has awarded about $220,000 annually in development grants over the past three years. Recipients in 2010 were the Bayfield Apple Co., Perfect Pasture in Ashland, the Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition and Green & Green Distribution in Mineral Point.
But DATCP's Buy Local coordinator, Theresa Feiner, says losing funding doesn't mean the state has turned its back on the concept. She noted there are other programs available to help smaller farmers, like Producers First, which provides technical assistance to local producers.
Wisconsin Sen. Julie Lassa, D-Stevens Point, helped push the Buy Local, Buy Wisconsin grants and is frustrated with the lack of interest from the current administration. She noted that the program leveraged $2.7 million in local food sales and created 38 new jobs, according to a DATCP report.
"It's been a great investment,' says Lassa. "There are so many consumers interested in local foods it seems like we're missing a real opportunity."
Others are even more critical.
"At a time when the state economy is struggling, local foods are one bright spot," says Bridget Holcomb of the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute in East Troy. "It doesn't make much sense to be cutting what wasn't a big program to begin with."
A dozen other states have passed legislation aimed specifically at local food production and purchasing, according to a database maintained by the National Conference of State Legislators.
Massachusetts, for example, in 2008 provided $30 million to develop programs aimed at addressing agricultural economic and environmental sustainability while helping create new markets.
Michigan has set a Buy Fresh, Buy Local, Select Michigan Day that encourages all Michigan citizens "to support and preserve" Michigan's agricultural heritage.
California, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Oregon, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Washington have all passed measures under the National Conference of State Legislators' broad category of "Agriculture/Local Foods." Those efforts range from direct marketing campaigns to establishing rules for local purchasing.
Much of the support for Wisconsin's local food industry has actually come from the USDA, which is headed by Obama appointee and former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack.
"Tom Vilsack's vision for rural America is not just about selling more commodities, it's about processing and distributing that food," says the USDA's Gruszynski, noting that its Rural Development programs support everything from senior housing to business consulting.
One guy with boots on the ground is Larry Ward, executive director of the Southwestern Wisconsin Regional Planning Association in Platteville. A farmer's son, Ward has watched the industry evolve into larger and larger operations where most of what's produced is shipped out.
"We've got all this land and water here but what we're doing now is growing corn and soybeans that go on a barge down to St. Louis where it gets made into plastic or turned into ethanol," he says.
But Ward notes the tremendous economic potential in a region where 35 million people living from the Twin Cities to Chicago spend $105 billion each year fueling their bodies and satisfying their cravings.
"If we can get 1 percent of that, that is $1 billion," he notes. "Let's say we are wildly successful and you get 5 percent. Suddenly you're talking about some big numbers."