Abstract
This paper addresses the question of how local can be defined in practice. It contributes to the growing literature on local food systems and particularly our understanding of what counts as local and the elements that influence those contours. While most of our conceptions of local food tend to rely on an articulation of either proximity traveled or relationship between entities, I argue that a more nuanced and complete understanding must take account of both of these aspects. I draw on a dataset of locally oriented farm and food-related establishments in southern New England to identify how far local food travels in this region and how interconnected local food establishments are with one another and use these and other measures to tease out the tension between proximity and relationship as measures of local. I find that these two aspects (how far food travels and the number of connections with other local food entities) not only are connected to each other in a complex dynamic, but also are bound up with other structural factors as well (such as size, type of operation, and proximity to an urban center).
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Notes
Fonte (2008) describes this in contrast to the origin-of-food perspective, in which local is about the valorization of a product’s origins in distant markets. Simply put, I am focused on local food for local consumers (reconnection perspective) as opposed to local food for distant consumers (origin-of-food perspective).
Fehrenbach and Wharton (2013) also find that producers and consumers may still be looking for slightly different things, at least in terms of the information available about their food; for example, consumers are used to seeing nutrition labels, which often are not available at farmers markets.
Other related research I have conducted indicates the answer, generally, is yes.
Of course, I am speculating on an entity’s motivation for participating in local food in the first place, and it is still possible (and likely) that many entities with few ties are highly involved in other aspects of local food. Accounting for industrial/global connection would go a long way toward expanding our understanding of the mechanism between number of local food ties and the dynamics of local food boundary creation.
Another important factor relates to the economics of the food system. Questions about the cost of inputs (whether for a farm or a retailer), economies of scale, transaction and transportation costs, and the like are just a few of the economic concerns local food participants (indeed, all food participants) must consider. These questions, of course, are also shaped by the dynamics of the dominant food system in which these local exchanges exist. Agrifood policies, such as farm subsidies, food handling and processing requirements, and the presence or absence of different types of infrastructure, all contribute to the economic realities surrounding local food exchanges.
Whether or not participants include less quantifiable things such as a trading partner’s business ethics or even simply an intuitive sense of what “feels” local, my data show the actual outcome of those decisions.
Southern New England includes Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. A handful of entities from bordering states (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York) are also included in the database.
There are four organizations that make up the FarmFresh coalition: Farm Fresh Rhode Island (FFRI, which operates the www.farmfresh.org website), Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture, Southeastern Massachusetts Agricultural Partnership, and Buy Fresh Buy Local Cape Cod. FFRI is the default curator of information for areas in the region not covered by one of these groups.
The organizations that compile and maintain the information are non-profits working to build connections between farmers and the community; though their website is a component of that, information on their website is updated approximately once per year, and many of those updates rely on farms and retailers to self-report current information. Further, places go out of business, expand to form branch locations, etc.; these changes may not be properly represented in the data. While the organizations do everything they can to ensure accurate information, and separate interview work I conducted found the quantitative data to be relatively accurate, what I have is still but one snapshot in time. Yet, I argue that this snapshot allows me to get a handle on the organization of local food in this region, even as I recognize the dynamic nature of these processes.
Relational data were coded using a union rule, meaning that a tie exists if indicated by either a buyer or a seller (both parties do not have to indicate it). This method was used because seller and buyer information is not always consistent across entities; this is a common problem in self-reported relational (or social network) data, and the union rule is one of several possible methods for dealing with these discrepancies. Even using it, I suspect the ties present in the database are an undercount of actual ties that exist between these entities. Based on additional qualitative research I have conducted, I was able to identify missing links between some of the actors in the network, such as farm-restaurant linkages that I know exist, but which were not indicated on the website. With no simple way to rectify such errors, information was coded exactly as found without correcting such missing instances. I found no instances of over-counting; that is, I found no ties in the network that do not exist in reality. This suggests that my analysis is a conservative estimate of the prevalence of actual connections formed within locally based agriculture circles, because I believe any inaccuracies undercount rather than overcount ties. Even with these limitations, however, based on my knowledge of the food system in question, I believe the information assembled to be reasonably accurate and likely the most accurate such database that exists.
I likewise do not have any information regarding how much of a farm’s sales go to (or a retailer's food comes from) the industrial food supply.
Approximately one-third of the entities have only one network tie, so their “range” is simply the distance of that tie, since to subtract their minimum distance from their maximum distance would result in a distance of zero.
While the website indicated other possible types, they have been excluded from specific analysis due primarily to their small numbers. In many cases, such entities were also listed as one of the three primary types discussed; for example, nearly all inns were also listed as a restaurant, and several distributors also had grocery-type components.
Note that size of farm could be measured in a variety of ways: physical size (e.g., acreage), financial size (e.g., value of products sold annually), production size (e.g., pounds of food produced), or labor size (e.g., number of workers).
Unfortunately, I have no access to data on the economic dynamics of the local food system in question. The FarmFresh website only indicates whether an economic exchange exists, but has nothing regarding the dollar value of that exchange. Similarly, while I asked interview participants questions about their economic situations (such as annual revenue), a few were forthcoming while others were quite reticent to share information.
The website also includes whether or not a farm operates a pick-your-own operation or “fun-on-the-farm” activities.
I have included Worcester County in Eastern Massachusetts, though there is some debate as to whether it is actually a part of Western Massachusetts. For the purposes of this project (as explained in the main body in the following paragraph), I believe I am justified in this decision.
This also matches well with qualitative results from another portion of this project. While interviewees defined local food in a variety of ways, the most common definition was geographically based and typically included a two-or three-county zone (though these counties did not always line up with the entirety of the Pioneer Valley). Respondents noted that though state boundaries were the easiest for most people to understand, they are still artificial boundaries and therefore restrict what can or should be considered “local,” even when that state is as small as Massachusetts; at the same time, many still implicitly relied on state boundaries in determining what they could and could not include. Though they were not uniform from person to person, the reliance on a geographic boundary to articulate what was and was not local indicates the role that perception plays in this process.
Minus the far reaches of Cape Cod (which, due to it being a curved peninsula, is not as readily accessible as other parts of this region) and the coastal islands (which are only reachable by boat or plane), the diagonals across this region measure just over 200 miles. Of course, the layout of roads means there are, in practice, few straight lines between any two points, but I include this to give the reader some context of the region under study.
There is similar variation among interview respondents who gave distance-based definitions of local: One retailer defined local as within 10-15 miles, while another defined it as within 100–200 miles.
The only exception to this is when including population density and the presence of a farmstand; in this situation, the farmstand variable is significant at p < 0.05.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful for Ryan Acton’s indispensible work in helping to compile the network data for this project. I am also grateful to Joya Misra, Jennifer Lundquist, Leslie King, Mark Pachucki, Kate Clancy, and three anonymous reviewers for insightful feedback and comments in preparing this manuscript, as well as to my dissertation writing support group for always (gently) pushing me to do better. Thanks also go to Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture and all the farm and retailer participants in Western Massachusetts who participated in this research. The Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society provided encouragement with Honorable Mention in the 2012 Graduate Student Paper Award.
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Trivette, S.A. How local is local? Determining the boundaries of local food in practice. Agric Hum Values 32, 475–490 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-014-9566-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-014-9566-7