The Food Chain

Ep. 1372 A Big Food Merger of Convenience

Michael Olson hosts Scott Moses, Partner, Solomon Partners Head of Grocery, Pharmacy and Restaurnts, for a conversation about the consolidation of the nation’s grocery stores.

Should Kroger and Albertsons be allowed to merge?

For the moment, you and I live in the small town of Anywhere, USA.  There are two grocers in town, Deluxe Food on North Main and Star Market on South Main.   Deluxe and Star have been competing for our grocery dollars by offering their best prices on food.  Sometimes Deluxe has the best prices and wins our dollars, other times Star wins. 

All goes well, in our small town world, until one day a big box store pops up in the neighboring small town of Somewhere with really cheap prices! Deluxe and Star are now unable to compete for our grocery dollars with their prices.  To survive, Deluxe and Star must do something.  But what can they do?

We see this small town dilemma being played out on a national scale with the proposed $20 billion merger of two of the nation’s largest supermarket chains, Kroger and Albertsons.

With about 5,000 stores between them, Kroger and Albertsons would seem to be big enough to compete for the nation’s grocery dollars.   And they were big enough, until others with different business models appeared on the scene and grew to be much larger.  You know the names:  Walmart, Costco, Amazon. 

Kroger and Albertsons, though with many stores between them, now find themselves becoming the little fish in the sea, and their business is gradually being eaten up by bigger fish.

What can Kroger and Albertsons do to survive?

Contact:  www.metrofarm.com

Radio Host:  www.santacruzvoice.com

 

Ep. 1371 Just In-Time Food

Michael Olson hosts Robert Wolcott & Kaihan Krippendorff, Co-Authors, Proximity: How Coming Breakthroughs in Just-In-Time Transform Business, Society and Daily Life.

 

It is said that food now travels an average of 1200 miles from where it was grown to where it is eaten.

If one were to look forward a hundred years into the future, from a hundred years in the past – when people lived on farms and ate food they grew those farms – one would think that 1200-mile food chain of the future to be an impossibility.  And yet, here we are, eating food that traveled 1200 miles to get to our dinner plate.

This 1200-mile food is very convenient for us city people:  Just open the plastic container and eat.  No spending hours out in the fields and gardens with shovels, rakes and hoes.  Just open and eat, and move on to the more important things we conjure up to do with our time.

But wait!  According to Michael Olson’s Second Law of the Food Chain, “The farther we go from the source of our food, the less control we have over what’s in our food.”

It is a fact: those of us who eat 1200-mile food have very little control over what is, or is not, in that food.  We can only trust the businesses that grow, process, package, ship, store and sell that food to deliver us real nutrition.  However, we also know that the businesses that sell the least amount of essential nutritients for the highest price are the businesses that tend to stay in business.  And so we wonder:

Can the technology and innovation that delivers 1200-mile food, deliver 1-mile food?

Contact:  www.metrofarm.com

Radio Host:  www.santacruzvoice.om

 

 

Ep. 1370 Winning The Fight for the Right to Garden

Michael Olson hosts Nicole Virgil, Gardener and Practitioner of Christian Science, for a conversation about winning the right to garden.

Topics include how municipal governments prohibit residents from establishing gardens in their yards, why Nicole Virgil refused to accept that prohibition; and how Nicole’s fight for the right to garden resulted in Illinois becoming the second state in the U.S. to guarantee residents the right to garden.

 

One thing we learned from the Covid years is that our food chain has some very weak links, and that is a cause for concern for all of us who eat food for a living.

Consequent to that concern, many of the hungry have turned to growing their own food.  Only a very few can grow all of their own food, but many can grow some of their own food in a garden.

Those who do garden enjoy the physical benefits of eating food they have grown, but also the spiritual benefits of growing the food.

But wait!  What if City Hall prohibits the growing of food within its City limits?  Sounds perfectly crazy, don’t you think.  Not so, say most cities.  In fact, only six states in the United States have passed legislation guaranteeing citizens the right to garden within the limits of cities.

Florida was the first state to grant such a right in 2019.  Illinois became the second state in 2021.  Those that won the right to garden in the city, lead us to ask…

How can one fight City Hall and win?

Contact:  www.metrofarm.com

Radio Host:  www.santacruzvoice.com

 

 

Ep. 1369 Giving a Damn Food

Michael Olson hosts Will Harris, Farmer, Rancher and Author of Giving a Damn: A Bold Return to Giving A Damn for a conversation about giving a damn farming and ranching.

Topics include why conventional farming and ranching were industrialized into commodity agriculture; why some farmers and ranchers are returning to conventional agriculture; and what it means to be “give a damn” farmers and ranchers. 

 

I spent many of my early summers growing up on the Grandparents’ farm near Belfry, Montana.  

The farm was a 360-acre boy wonderland, as it contained most all of the traditional farm animals, an orchard filled with fruit trees, a huge kitchen-garden, pastures for grazing animals, crop lands for growing plants and the Big Red Barn.  

Everywhere this boy looked, there was an adventure in living to be had, and food to eat ­– real, whole food fresh from the soil in which it was raised.

Then, somewhere along the way, farmers and ranchers learned to grow crops with money instead of time.  With money borrowed against the equity in their land, they could buy equipment and chemicals that reduced the time required for them to work in the field. 

Today the farm that sits where the Grandparents’ farm sat grows government-subsidized sugar beets fence post to fence post.  The big red barn is gone, and so are all the people.

As a citified adult, I am always keeping an eye open for that farm of my youth.   I hunger for the farm’s adventures in living, and most especially, for its food.  Those farms and ranches are not easy to find.   Indeed, the great majority of the nation’s farmers and ranchers now grow commodity crops that are processed, wrapped in plastic, and shipped over a thousand miles to where we eat. 

In commodity farming and ranching, whoever grows the most for the least wins, and least is what most of us eat in the confined animal feeding operations we call “the city.”   

When I do find that farm of my youth – with real farmers growing real food in real soil –I like to call attention to it, in the hope that attention will engender more farms of my youth.  One of the best ways to call attention to something, is to ask questions. And so today I pause ask:

Have you ever tasted “Giving a Damn” food?

 

Contact:  www.metrofarm.com

Radio Host:  www.santacruzvoice.com

 

Ep. 1368: Healed by Horse

Charlie Jenks, Founder, Connecting Vets with Horses

(Animals as Emotional and Cognitive Therapists for humans)

To heal one’s broken body, frazzled nerves or confused mind, one could take the drugs, as many do…  or one could hop into the saddle and ride the horse.  And so we ask…

How can one be healed by horse? 

To heal our broken bodies, frazzled nerves and confused minds, we Americans take drugs, and we take lots of them.  But what if… What if we could be healed by horse?

 

Now, had it not been for the fact that I was once healed by horse, I might have trouble taking the notion seriously…

But I was once healed by horse….  Way back then I was an inner-city, rabble-rousing community-organizer, things got out of hand and just quit making sense.  There were a lot of confusion cures available on the streets in those days, as there are today, but none of them appealed, and so I went home to Montana and took a job as a hired-hand on a ranch.

That ranch filled my days with hard physical and mental labor.  I ate hungrily of the ranch meals and slept the deep sleep of work done well.  The big reward, however, came at the end of my work day.  After the evening meal, I would saddle up a favorite quarter-horse gelding for a ride out into the lingering twilight of those great big prairie skies.

Though the horse and I never talked much, something must have been communicated because things began making sense again.  After the season was over, I returned to my big city life, healed by horse.

Equine therapy is now claimed to be an effective therapy for physical, cognitive, emotional and spiritual affilictions, including attention-deficit, autism, conduct and dissociative disorders, dementia, post traumatic stress and many other related disorders.  And so we ask:

Can one be healed by horse?

 

Connect:  www.metrofarm.com

 

Ep. 1367: Thanatology - What Animals Think of Death

Susana Monso, Author, Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death

Every person thinks about where we all will eventually go, but no person knows for certain where we will go.  This leads some people to think about the animals for which we have taken dominion, and wonder:

What do animals think about dying?

Up and down the food chain, it is eat and be eaten.  This elemental fact gives rise among people to thanatology, which is the study of death. 

Today we begin our Food Chain discussion with some concluding thoughts about thanatology from Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death, by Susana Monso. 

“Scientists have been trying for a long time to find a characteristic that will definitively separate us from the other species.  So far, all candidates have failed.  Neither the use of tools, nor culture, morality, or rationality are exclusive to human beings.  Nor is a concept of death.  We’re not a unique species.  We’re just another animal.  And as such, we’re bodies that work until a certain point, but end up irreparably broken.  Perhaps if we come to terms with the fact that we’re animals we may also reconcile with our own mortality.”

But before we can come to terms with the fact that we are just another animal, we must first find a way to step outside of our anthropocentric way of seeing life and death.  And so we ask: 

What do animals think about dying?

 

Connect:  www.metrofarm.com

 

Ep.1366: Wild Horses? Let Em Run!

Lacy J Dalton, President, Let Em Run Foundation & Internationally acclaimed Country and Western Music Recording Star

(Wild Horse Management, Policies and Procedures)

83,000 horses and burros roam wild and free throughout the empty spaces of the great American West.   Though some very serious voices say they should not be allowed to run free, other serious voices say, “Let em run!”   And so we ask: 

Should we let wild horses run free?

Out here in the great American West, there is still a lot of wide open spaces. But as Aristotle once said, “Nature abhors a vacuum,” and so did the horses and burros that moved right in to those wide open spaces.

Horses and burros were brought to the West by Spanish Conquistadors, from which they made their escape into the void, where they became wild and free.

Over the course of time, the animals that preyed on wild horses and domestic livestock were, for the most, wiped out, leaving the horses to roam freer than ever before.    

Today an estimated 83,000 wild horses and burros roam free in what’s left of wide open spaces of the American West.  But they are not really free.  In 1971 Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, and now the wild and free are wards of the state.

The Bureau of Land Management is required by this law to manage wild horse and burro populations so as to maintain a healthy balance with the environment.  It is in the management of these populations of wild horses and burros that we find our story. 

And who better to tell that story, then Country Western Music recording star, Lacy J Dalton

Connect:  www.metrofarm.com

 

Ep.1365: California's Certified Farmers Markets

Jennifer Leidolf, CDFA Direct Marketing Program Supervisor &Joshua W. Bingham, Public Information Officer II, Division of Inspection Services

(Farmers Market Certification, Governance and Marketing)

When it comes to which farms get the most help from the government, the answer is most always the biggest farms.  This leads us to ask:

Can there be a government program that helps small farms more than big farms?

Our federal government hands out a lot of money to farmers.  How much is a lot?  In 2021 it was about $14.5 billion. 

Which farms get the government money?  Data from USDA’s Economic Research tells us…

About 75% of large farms with gross incomes of over $350,000 get an average of $66,000 per year; about 31% of intermediate farms with gross incomes of less than $350,000 get an average $12,800; and 29% of small farms received an average of $8,300.

From this thumbnail sketch is easy to see that the more money a farm makes, the more help it gets from the government.  And conversely, the less money a farm makes, the less help it gets from the government.  This observation led us to seek out a government program that helps small farms more than big farms.

We found such a program, in California, and its called the California Certified Farmers market program.  

Connect: www.metrofarm.com