The main businesses hurt in this process were the traditional competitors of the large packers, small but numerous local butchers, who, unable to offer similar products at comparable prices, took to the political arena where they created a vocal and politically powerful lobby that called for a boycott of the nonlocal meat. The reasons invoked ranged from the unknown health effects of new preservation technologies to worries about the shady unsanitary practices of distant producers. Besides, the unchecked concentration of economic power in the hands of a few large corporations would surely result in “monopolistic profiteering” at the expense of the consuming public.
The public relations campaign launched by small-scale butchers was fierce and quickly relayed by journalists and politicians with a natural proclivity to go after the “big guys.” The protest movement became more organized in 1886 with the formation of the Butchers' National Protective Association in Saint Louis. As the environmental historian William Cronon pointed out in 1991, however, while the stated goal of the movement was to “secure the highest sanitary condition” for consumers, public health was in fact “a convenient way of putting the best face on a deeper and more self-interested economic issue.”
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In fact, health complaints about smaller slaughterhouses and urban dairy operations long predated the rise of the Chicago packers and were common in other countries.
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According to economists Donald Boudreaux and Thomas DiLorenzo, the most plausible explanation for the adoption of the first antitrust legislation in Missouri in 1889 is to view it as an attempt by politically powerful local producer groups, mostly independent retail butchers, to shield themselves from the lower prices and intense competitive pressures of Chicago packers.
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In the meantime, other small-scale attempts to circumvent the packers were set up in locations closer to production sites. One such
initiative was spearheaded by a Frenchman, the Marquis de Mores, who not only built a number of slaughterhouses and cold storage houses in Montana and in what is now North Dakota, but also procured refrigerator cars. The venture, however, failed miserably. As the economic historian Fred A. Shannon observes: “Because the supply of matured beef was not year-round, slaughtering on the Plains proved impractical except for taking care of the local market . . . Furthermore, only medium-grade cattle were offered, and the small slaughterhouses were not equipped to make use of the by-products that furnished so much of the profits for the greater packers.”
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Despite small-scale butchers and some cattlemen's recriminations,
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consumers ultimately voted with their wallets and purchased the offerings of the more efficient large-scale operations. As with many other mature urban industries, however, in time the advent of new technologies (in this case, mostly trucking) and the development of better alternatives to animal by-products (such as petroleum-derived plastics to replace animal bones in the making of countless products) led to their delocalization closer to their sources of supply.
The trend towards the increased concentration of American slaughtering operations has also been pronounced in more recent times, with their number declining from 1,211 in 1992 to 809 in 2008.
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This development has made locavorism a difficult reality for idealistic livestock producers who find themselves forced “to make slaughter appointments before animals are born and to drive hundreds of miles to facilities, adding to their costs and causing stress to livestock.” As a result, many new small-scale operators are reportedly “scaling back on plans to expand their farms because local processors cannot handle any more animals.”
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Not surprisingly, Michael Pollan and others have urged the U.S. government to step in and fill this need at taxpayers' expense,
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but one should at least understand the economic and environmental (and, as we will argue later, food safety) benefits of large-scale operations before denouncing the regional concentration of these activities and the need to subsidize less efficient ones. Small might be beautiful,
but bigger is ultimately often better for consumers who want to stretch their food budget as much as possible. Of course, if there is at some future point in time enough of a price premium associated with the locavores' approach to meat production, small and flexible processing operations might be profitable enough to be worth building.
In the realm of food production, prices factor in (albeit imperfectly, mostly because of subsidies and barriers to trade) the opportunity costs associated with energy consumption, transportation costs, irrigation, growing season, fertilization, and labor costs. As such, they help agricultural producers and corporate buyers determine the most suitable crops and animals for specific locations. Prices also convey important information about alternative land uses. As the economist Steven Landsburg observes, locavores should not only care about the energy signature of a California tomato trucked to New York City, but also about the other potential products that were sacrificed in order to grow the tomatoes; the other kinds of work that the California tomato growers might have done; the longer morning commutes that would be needed if New York greenhouses were to be built in the place of a conveniently located housing development; the alternative employment that hypothetical New York greenhouse workers might find; the other applications to which the inputs required to produce additional fertilizers and farming equipment might have been used for; and so on.
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When looking at the broader economic picture, Landsburg argues, the energy costs that so worry locavores turn out to be “quite small compared to the many other social costs involved with growing a tomato.”
In the context of locavorism, the most basic land use trade-off is whether grounds within or on the margins of rapidly growing cities should be devoted to food production or to something else. Understanding the relevant trade-offs, however, requires a basic understanding of why large urban agglomerations make some individuals and activities
much more productive than if they were located in rural settings. This basic fact of economic life explains why agricultural producers have long been driven out of urban land markets by other lines of work.
Unfortunately, local food activists do not see any value in converting some agricultural land to other uses and favor a number of policies to prevent the process. To quote an important player on this issue, the American Farmland Trust website states that “[s]ustaining local farms and farmland is a sound community investment, as it ensures the public will continue to receive the multiple benefits of agriculture. This involves protecting a strategic land base, providing property tax relief for farmland owners, supporting the business of farming, and investing in agricultural and community economic development.”
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While “running out of land” to feed future generations might sound like a dire prospect and somewhat worth investing much taxpayers' money to prevent, local food activists blow the issue out of proportion. As we will now argue, far from being deplorable, land conversion around thriving urban areas is the most sensible way to use our scarce resources.
One way to better illustrate basic trade-offs in terms of urban land and agricultural production is to look at why “vertical farming” or stacked agricultural production projectsâessentially, high rise buildings devoted to agricultural production, whose basic concept has existed for decades but is now mostly associated with the work of public health professor Dickson Despommier
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ânever materialized in practice. To their proponents, their most distinctive qualities are that they would allow 24 hour a day cultivation (as opposed to being dependent on natural sunlight), eliminate the use of pesticides because their production would take place indoors, and obliterate the need for long distance transportation because of their location. The first two items, however, are untenable because conventional greenhouses can already be operated around the clock if so desired while the claim that a pest-free agricultural environment can be maintained on this planet is simply implausible. After all, insects and plant diseases found their way into the Biosphere 2 project, a self-contained ecosystem built in the middle
of the Arizona desert.
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This leaves the basic economic trade-offs of such proposals, which essentially boil down to the fact that their additional costs (from building these structures to lighting, heating, and powering them) negate any economic benefits attributable to an urban location. In a critique of urban designer Gordon Graff's “SkyFarm” project, a 59-story-high and a half-dozen-story deep tower in which hydroponic plants would be grown year round,
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agricultural economist Dennis Avery argues:
⢠Even if a pilot building was erected, about 500,000 such skyscrapers would be needed to make up the 400 million acres of American farmland;
⢠Using the average price per acre of Iowa cropland, the usable surface of this building in Iowa would cost about $5 million, a sum that would buy about an acre of land in Manhattan on top of which a very costly vertical structure would need to be built;
⢠Each floor of this high-rise building would have to support about 620,000 pounds of either water or water-soaked soil (by comparison, two hundred people and their office furniture weigh about 40,000 pounds);
⢠Replacing sunlight with “grow lights” and heating the structure in winter would require gigawatts of power;
⢠Sky farms would need to rely on outside suppliers to feed their chickens and pigs. Since a few pounds of grain are required to produce one pound of meat (typically a four-to-one ratio in the case of pigs), it makes more sense to transport pork chops rather than animal feed into cities;
⢠As in the past, slaughterhouses would need to be located much closer to downtown centers or else city-reared animals would need to be trucked elsewhere to be processed before being brought back to the city in a usable form;
⢠City taxes and labor costs are always much higher than in the countryside.
No wonder, Avery tells us, that such proposals will always remain “pigs in the sky.”
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Urban land can be much better used for other purposes, which is exactly what urban land prices have long indicated. Of course, additional trade-offs are also present in the case of more modest urban agriculture proposals, from rooftop gardening to the raising of backyard chickens, whose small size and consequent inability to generate economies of scale (try using a tractor on top of a high-rise building or obtaining large-scale discounts on the costs of inputs when farming small backyards) will always confine the practice to the realm of hobby gardeners, or, at best, high-margin luxury producersâeither way, a result that is a far cry from the affordable and abundant food promised by locavores.
“Protecting” the farmland that surrounds large cities from “urban sprawl” (in other words, preventing residential, industrial, and commercial development on agricultural land) through strict zoning is equally problematic. While restricting development might suit the sensibilities of people who already own residential property in thriving cities, it also unavoidably drives up housing prices, thus affecting disproportionately people of more modest means and newcomers (to say nothing of farmers' children who would like to get out of this line of work and cash in on the family property). Evidence also clearly demonstrates that the creation of “green belts” around thriving metropolitan areas in which nothing can be built is also undesirable, for the economic attraction of cities is such that development will in time simply leapfrog these areas. The result will be even greater sprawl and longer commutes for residents.
If agriculture is the most desirable use of a particular piece of land, the market (meaning, ultimately, food consumers) will ensure that it remains so. If, on the other hand, residential and commercial developers are willing to put their own money into new projects, this signals that more people believe that agricultural land should be converted to other uses. (Of course, many individuals argue that markets are too short-sighted and that future agricultural land shortages are looming. Yet, because in advanced economies we now produce much more food on the
same piece of land than in the not so distant past, much more agricultural land is currently reverting to a “wild” state than swallowed by “urban sprawl.”
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) Also, nothing prevents environmentalists from purchasing land they deem worth preserving rather than using political power to declare private farmland part of a “greenbelt” and prevent its owner from selling it to developers or converting it to other uses. Prohibiting the redevelopment of agricultural land might appeal to the sensibilities of well-off or already established urbanites and environmentalists, but it is a selfish policy that ignores the economic benefits of urbanization and the needs of people of lesser means.
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Finally, another point lost on many locavores is that the one thing that money cannot buy is more time, thus making it the scarcest commodity of all. Once this is factored into many proposals to increase the production of “cheap and healthy” food, the end result doesn't look affordable anymore. For instance, the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service recommends that food miles be reduced by having people eat minimally processed, packaged, and marketed food in season; can, dry, and preserve fruits and vegetables by themselves; and plant a garden and grow as much of their own food as possible.
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Add in the inconveniences of shopping at farmers' markets compared to conventional supermarkets and the time devoted to preparing meals increases drastically.