This Exeter Life: Who's Your Farmer?

I just finished reading Ben Hewitt’s, The Town That Food Saved. If you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you do.

It’s the story of Hardwick, Vermont, a small, rural, once prosperous granite producing town whose blossoming local food economy has caught the attention of the national media. Motivated by the increasing instability of our industrial food system (if you haven’t yet learned about this important topic, let me also recommend that you add The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan to your fall reading list), a number of agricultural entrepreneurs have begun doing wildly innovative things like growing and selling seeds to local farmers, turning local vegetable and animal waste into compost on a community wide scale, and selling that compost back to the farmers who produce vegetables and meat (and jobs) for their neighbors, the local cooperative market, and a local restaurant.

While there are many differences between Hardwick and Exeter, I couldn’t help but think about our own food economy as I read Hewitt’s book. Over the 6 years I’ve lived in town, I’ve watched the farmers market grow from a small collection of mostly vegetable producers, to a bustling market place where eaters can procure nearly everything they need for a week’s cooking—pork, beef, lamb, vegetables, fish, fruit, milk, cheese, bread, wheat, wine, maple syrup and even frozen pizza dough. All produced by our neighbors, sold to us for the true cost of production and without shrink wrap or the diabetic and cancer inducing additives that have become the staple in the industrial alternatives.

According to Hewitt, there were 76 million Americans in 1900 and nearly 30 million farms. A healthy farmer-to-eater ratio, for sure. Today, there are a whopping 307 million people and only 2 million farms. To boot, only 0.7% of us actually live on a farm these days. That’s just shy of 215,000 people in the entire country living on farms growing the rest of us food. To save us the advance calculus, Hewitt tells us that this works out to be about one farmer per 140 American eaters.

I’m willing to bet that no matter how many tomatoes you have piled on your windowsill right now or how many zucchinis you’ve slipped into your neighbors’ mailboxes in a secretive attempt to be rid of this year’s bumper crop, you and I would be hard pressed to feed 140 people, all the time, every day, for an entire year. Next time you see someone who does this for you, be sure to thank them.

Visit somewhere like Tyson’s Corner, Virginia which was built about 5 minutes ago on farmland that used to feed the nation’s capital and now only offers its residents a depressing selection of non-local, chain businesses and you’ll realize what an incredible gift it is that we live in New Hampshire, where it is even possible to still own and operate a small family farm. It’s one thing for the country to come to terms with the fact that what we should be eating are locally grown foods. It’s quite another problem when you realize that that isn’t actually possible for many Americans. When I think about the number of farmers I have come to know personally since moving to Exeter, I feel so fortunate.

And so, not surprisingly over the last few years, I have bought an increasing amount of my food at the Exeter Farmers' Market. I find that when I know where (or rather who) my food comes from, I enjoy it more and waste less.

I also recognize that I vote with my dollar. In the same way that I just joined the membership program at Water Street Books because I value having an independent bookstore in town, so too do I spend my money at Apple Crest, Meadows Mirth, Brookford Farm, Heron Pond, New Roots, Sprouted Acre, Hurd Farm, Barkers, and myriad others because I value having farms and the local food they produce available in my community. I don’t want to ever buy food at Walmart.

So if you haven’t already, I ask you to consider, who’s your farmer? And what are you doing to make sure that they are still here, growing you and I food next year?