On April 8, I attended the 8^th Annual Farmers Expo at St. Pius X High School. This event featured purveyors of natural and organic produce, heirloom and organic seedlings, and humanely-raised meat, eggs, dairy and honey, plus information and entertainment. As in the past, this event whetted my appetite for wholesome, locally-produced foods. By the end of April, the Parkville farmers market will be underway once again. With that kickoff, we'll once again have available the satisfying feeling we get from buying it at the farmers market. The farmers market is a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables, honey, baked goods, chicken, eggs, elk, jams, plants, flowers, etc. But it is more. The supermarket isn't quite the same, to put it mildly.

Really, the farmers market is about more than efficiency. It is about community. The chance to see and speak to friends and neighbors. The chance to spend a morning (or an afternoon later in the growing season) in the fresh air, smelling the smells and hearing the sounds, feeling the cool or warm air on your face. The chance to get really fresh goods. The chance to support local producers who are committed to bringing to us the fruits of their labor. And the chance to support the local economy by keeping our buying dollars in our community. Those are things that you either cannot get in the supermarket, or you can't get them in the same way, with the same intensity, that you do with the farmers market.

Our current model of industrial agriculture and food distribution has many midwest farmers producing grain and selling their grain on the open market. Grain harvested on mostly large farms given to production specialization (in other words, hundreds or thousands of acres producing only one or two crops) is transported to more or less local grain elevators and other consolidators. Marketers (cooperatives and middlemen) move the grain to more distant locations. It is then sold to end-users. Among these are other farmers and ranchers raising livestock, as well as food producers, such as commercial bakeries and other food conglomerates. Employing this model, a midwest livestock operator might buy grain on the open market which was produced on the neighboring farm, but which traveled thousands of miles to reach him or her.

In much the same way, the same dynamic applies to the food we purchase from the supermarket. Lettuce from California, beef from Brazil, apples from New Zealand, and grapes from Chile fill the aisles, without regard to season or distance from farm to market. This is not a sustainable model.

The output of farm labor can be measured in calories, which is a unit of energy. It is an odd development of this era of cheap and abundant energy derived from fossil fuels (that's right, I said cheap and abundant, because, relative to historical standards, it is, for now) that the energy (in calories) used to produce and transport food often far exceeds energy (in calories) the food itself embodies. According to the organization Food Routes ( www.foodroutes.org ), on average, food in the U.S. travels 1,300 miles from field to plate. I saw one portrayal of this absurdity: a 5-calorie strawberry takes 450 calories to produce and transport coast-to-coast.

Another way of looking at moving food is this: besides the energy our food represents, it also represents water - the water that fell as rain or was pumped from (ever-depleting) underground aquifers and used for irrigation. Fruits and vegetables have high water contents. It makes perhaps even less sense to ship water thousands of miles than it does ship the energy contained in our food thousands of miles. And local food - as opposed to industrial food, which is produced to maximize appearance and transportability - wins hands down in terms of taste, freshness, nutrition and wholesomeness.

For reasons that are beyond the scope of this article, our global civilization is facing a situation wherein the rules of the game are going to shift rather abruptly (for future reference, remember the term "peak oil" - see www.peakoil.org , www.hubbertpeak.com , www.energybulletin.net for abundant additional information on the imminent onset and consequences of reaching what appears to be an ominous milestone). The availability of anything we want (produced anywhere in the world), any time we want is going to become less and less practical due to rising transport and production costs.

It makes a lot of sense, in terms of practicality and in terms of sustainability, to rethink the agricultural model. Farms in the midwest can produce much of what we as "consumers" (a detestable term that reduces us to our least common denominator, but one I'll employ here for the sake of convenience) purchase and eat. Focusing on using locally-produced foods is logical on a number of fronts. As I've pointed out above, less transport of our food is desirable if we want to reduce the embodied energy of our food. And one way to maximize the benefit of buying local is buying directly from the producer. By cutting out the middleman, we get a cost break. The farmers gets an economic boost too. That is, the full purchase price goes directly to the farmer/producer, as opposed to the small fraction they get under the supermarket model. Another factor in this equation is that, when we know who's producing our food, we know what goes into the food. We can choose to support farmers who decline to employ the gross chemical inputs which characterize typical modern American (industrial) agriculture. The farmer benefits economically, we benefit by getting more wholesome food. And everyone benefits if local producers can remain in business, because the result of peak oil (when the cost of buying those New Zealand apples becomes unbearable, and when even large-scale farmers decide they cannot go on feeding grain that has traveled thousands of miles to livestock who evolved to graze in fields) will mean we'll need them more than ever.

Real people win on the local scale. The agribusiness mega-corporations ("corporate persons") lose, but all they're doing is strip-mining the wealth from the local community (and the land) and re-allocating it to their executives and shareholders.

I think we can do better. This year, I commit to getting an even greater share of my food locally, whether from the backyard garden or from local producers. My desire for a sustainable community demands it.

*****

Bill acknowledges and thanks John Kurmann for his assistance and input in the development of this article.

The Kansas City Food Circle is a local organization which promotes local family farms and sustainable agriculture, and helps connect local growers with people who want to buy local; they are part of a network of organizations which does the same on national scale. Their local hotline is 816-374-5899. To see their most recent directory, go to

www.kcfoodcircle.org/docs/KCFC-Directory.pdf .