As kids, we’d walk with our dad to bring the cows in from the pasture, and watch as they gave milk that became dairy products for other families. Each spring, he’d plant crops that by fall seemed plentiful enough to feed and fuel all the world.
Imagine my surprise years later to learn food deserts were right down the road. Somehow, we’ve allowed food deserts—places with poor access to affordable, healthy food—to spread even to regions with plenty of fertile land to solve the very crisis.
In fact, food deserts are most common in rural states, representing a problem I’d come to learn can unite rural and urban America. Nearly 54 million Americans—about one in six—live in food deserts, where poor access to grocery stores and low income drive a growing crisis, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
In Midwestern states like Wisconsin, that includes parts of Sauk County near where I grew up, and neighboring farm counties. The Annie E. Casey Foundation found the ag-heavy South is the most common home to food deserts. And yet, early food deserts were urban areas where the wealthy fled to the suburbs, drawing grocery stores out of inner cities, according to the National Library of Medicine.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The central issue is how we’ve wiped out our family farms, at the rate of 45,000 per year on average for the past century. This is due to a combination of economic crises impacting farms from the Depression to today, government policy under both parties, and technology needlessly leaving many family farms behind.
In rural areas, vanishing farms drove population loss and economic decline. In both rural and urban areas, the loss contributed to a vulnerable supply chain. As industries taking food from the farm gate to the dinner table consolidate, we face spiking food prices when a large distribution center or other link in the chain goes down amid disaster (i.e. Covid-19, or bird flu).
Losing farms also drives our growing rural-urban divide, with declining rural areas resenting urban areas, and many urban residents not understanding the nuances of rural life (from diversity of thought to the diversity of its people).
This means policymakers, divided along similar lines, can’t see solutions, even though they’re amazingly close at hand.
In the town nearest our farm, we lost our grocery store, and a farm supply store carries foodstuffs to fill the gap while a fierce debate has unfolded over a dollar store coming in. This makes rural food deserts insulting: people producing America’s milk, or growing other crops, don’t like feeling they can’t provide for themselves.
And yet, so many farmers grow something other than food because of the complex economic, political, and technological issues wiping out farms. Many are left with markets only for certain crops, often heavily subsidized for animal feed, offering a certain level of stability but little economic growth to advance.
These farmers have places to sell commodity grain, not fresh vegetables. Meanwhile, those farmers with access to food markets usually must sell into our national supply chain, where so much food is highly processed, and large companies reducing costs through economic scale are favored (even though supply chain disruptions increasingly jolt consumers’ prices back up).
I saw half of the solution growing up on our family farm, and half splitting time between there and northern California, near my wife’s family. There, the local food movement is strong with plenty of affluent, food-conscious people, but family farms are facing some of their biggest challenges.
The solution could be shifting our food supply to combine the best of both places, creating farmland opportunity and consumer choice. A three-pronged approach would include focusing government and private R&D around technology to help farms of all sizes innovate; ensuring government policy guards fair markets, and diversifying subsidies to stabilize a well-rounded food supply, instead of playing favorites; and calling on consumers to shift how they shop.
We can’t all find everything locally, but everyone can take small steps, patronizing the growing number of farmers markets, grocery stores carrying local goods, local butcher shops, community-supported agriculture, or online marketplaces.
These changes go beyond one-off programs toward real, local market infrastructure. It’s a lot of change, but I know we can do it. After all, for so many suffering in food deserts, a farm that can help is just down the road.
Brian Reisinger is an award-winning author and rural policy expert who grew up on a family farm in Sauk County, Wisconsin. His book “Land Rich, Cash Poor,” was named Book of the Year by the nonpartisan Farm Foundation. He serves as senior writer for Midwestern-based Platform Communications. You can learn more or contact him at www.brian-reisinger.com
This story was first published in the Daily Yonder. Read the originalhere.
