A popular trend, local food also makes good sense. Yes, it tastes better and is healthier for you. But buying from local farmers is also one of the best ways to keep money circulating in your local economy. And producing, selling and distributing local food creates jobs on farms, at grocery stores and at restaurants today. Tomorrow, processing local food could be the kernel of an effort to re-vitalize local manufacturing.
Traditionally, the central Shenandoah Valley, with a mean elevation of 900 feet above sea level, has been blessed with a mild four-season climate and ample supplies of fresh water for drinking and rain-fed agriculture.
Climate change stands to alter our local climate, to be sure. However, since the degree of changes and their impact on our local climate are difficult to predict — will we get wetter or dryer? warmer or cooler? — for the sake of this analysis we will assume a local climate similar to what our area has experienced in the past.
In the past, due to ample rainfall, nearly all crops suitable to our climate could be grown without need for irrigation. Once known as the “breadbasket of the South,” the Shenandoah Valley remains today a highly productive agricultural region. Augusta County ranks second in the state (behind neighboring Rockingham) for dollar value of annual agricultural output.
Before World War II and the advent of industrial agriculture here, the Valley grew a wide variety of truck crops for local consumption.
Factory Farming Takes Over
With the advent of the Green Revolution in the 1950s and the rise of farm machinery and chemicals, one by one Valley farmers were compelled to join the national industrial food system. As a result, today our area produces only a few main agricultural products, nearly all made for export outside our area:
- Beef
- Poultry
- Dairy
Even in the best of times, this system provided a poor living to farmers, as revenues were often inadequate to cover high expenses for machinery and chemical inputs of fertilizers and insecticides. At worst, this system drove Valley farmers into bankruptcy and foreclosure, losing more than a dozen farms a year locally.
Over several decades, industrial agriculture made proud farming families into indentured franchisees, little better than the sharecroppers of the Old South, obligating them to buy their materials from and sell their products to multinational food conglomerates such as Cargill and ADM.
Moving Towards Resilience
The good news is that most farmland in the Valley continues to be owned by the families who farm the land, rather than by agricultural conglomerates or other absentee landlords. As producing meat and dairy using industrial methods has continued to become less profitable year after year, even industrial farmers have started to see that the system is broken.
A minority of farmers, primarily newcomers to the area, have taken the lead in moving towards more sustainable farming, particularly organic and small-scale meat and dairy.
Perhaps the most prominent of these farming innovators is Joel Salatin, known internationally as an advocate for local food.
Truck farms supplying produce (much of it organic) to local buyers have made modest gains in the past decade. Starting in the 1990s, the Staunton Augusta Farmers’ Market gave farmers from up and down the Shenandoah Valley a place to sell local food directly to consumers.
With oil prices rising, the cost of supermarket food has also begun to rise. This trend is sure to continue, making local food relatively less expensive at an increasing rate over time. Health and taste trends aside, we anticipate that rising costs alone will increase demand sufficiently in the coming years to make locally produced meat, dairy, and produce (and ultimately food grains) increasingly more affordable compared to industrial food.
Farmers and Gardeners, Working Together
With a sufficient increase in the cost of industrial food, could Augusta County farmers begin to detach themselves from the increasingly poor economics of factory farming? With high enough energy costs, Valley farmers could start to cash in on a lucrative local market supplying food to their neighbors in Staunton and built-up areas nearby. We hope that family farmers will put their decades of experience and generations of dedication to farming to work in a better system that will pay them more, allow young people to stay on the land, and create a stronger bond with their neighbors in town.
At the same time, Staunton residents can take advantage of the favorable ratio of population-to-arable-land in town to create a robust network of urban farms and Victory Gardens. It is a natural asset that 60% of land inside Staunton city limits is zoned as “Agricultural-Forrestal,” which is basically farmland. The other 40% is covered largely by homes with generous lawns, three major public parks, and a variety of empty lots and other underused open spaces that could easily be put to use growing food.
Staunton’s many gardening buffs, including a significant number of master gardeners, will be able to draw on technical support and material assistance from the City, our leading educational institutions, as well as citizens’ groups including Transition Staunton Augusta to move us towards self-sufficiency in food.
If city gardeners and rural farmers are willing to work together, we have the human and natural resources to give our area more self-sufficiency in food production while producing surpluses for export and trade, just as we did in the past.
