What's so Great About Buying Local?
I looked at what the internet is saying about buying local and found that Michigan State University has done a paper on the subject. Here is the link to that paper: https://ced.msu.edu/upload/reports/why%20buy%20local.pdf
There are a whole bunch of reasons the paper gives as reasons to buy local. Many of them don’t fit our situation at North Pasture Farms very well, though many do fit.
The paper gives the following reasons to buy local: Buying local gives jobs to local people. Buying local keeps money in the local community. Local businesses contribute more to local charities and fundraisers than national companies. They keep the community unique. They give more choices to the buying public. They have less environmental impact. Non-local businesses siphon money out of the community. Local businesses generally provide better customer service. Locals use less public infrastructure. Buying local also promotes entrepreneurship locally.
Those are all great reasons to buy local. Those reasons mostly pertain to brick and mortar stores or businesses. Places like the plumber down the street, the mom and pop grocery store, the print shop down the street, that sort of thing.
While I agree with all of the above, the purpose of this article is to get into the agricultural side of things a bit. Explore the differences there and why it is just as important to buy from small local farmers. Meat farmers in particular since we are meat farmers after all.
The main reasons I can think of why someone would want to buy from a local meat farmer are the same reasons people DO want to buy from us.
These reasons include:
No junk. This is the main reason people want meat from a small farmer. Another way of saying this is: no hormones, no antibiotics, no nitrates in the bacon, no sugar. Meat the way that grandpa used to do it.
Humanely raised. The local farmer will probably treat his animals humanely. This may be because of altruistic beliefs that the farmer holds themselves. It can also be that his customers want him to do things this way and since they know the farmer they can check up.
Straight up want to support / buy from a small farmer. The customer has learned somehow that buying local is a good thing and they want to do it. This is probably a lumping together of all of the reasons for buying local.
Know the farmer. This comes down to the customer wanting to know where their food comes from. They want to have a connection with where their food comes from. They buy from a farmer they know and develop a relationship.
All of the above stem from the fact that the customer has a much closer connection to the farmer when he buys directly from the farmer. The person can have an effect on his farmer. A customer can’t make much difference in a large grocery store by going in and talking to the man behind the meat counter. The customer CAN make a difference by talking to the farmer they know as a person and who they can talk to or at least email or text and expect a personal response. They can get a feel for who the farmer really is and build up some trust.
There are some other reasons that come up less often, but they do come up.
Delivery location is close. This applies only to small farmers who do neighborhood or door to door deliveries themselves. Some small local farmers ship their meat through FedEx or UPS and these are valid methods but they take some of the localness out of it all.
A Neighbor/Friend/Relative gets their food from the local farmer so I do too. This could be called pure peer pressure. In truth it is probably more like an Opinion Leader in action. Absolutely everybody gets at least some of their opinions from someone else. Most of what you learned as a kid was from your parents and they were your first opinion leaders. When someone you look up to or someone you know thinks a certain way, you are likely to think the same way or at least be influenced by them. This is a natural thing and in many situations it is a good thing. In my case, I am VERY glad to know and feed lots of Opinion Leaders and thus get at least some access to people who know them!
Food system resiliency. This one is not thought of very much but it is actually one of the more important reasons.
Ability to bend and absorb shock in the food system (resiliency) comes about when there are a lot of small farmers. Also small butcher shops, small delivery services, etc. One bad thing about single big farmers and meat processing shops became very apparent when Covid happened. The large meat packing houses employ lots of people in a fairly small space. This is what happens in a factory, pretty much nothing they can do about it. A factory is a bunch of people working close together to get a lot of work done. When a disease such as Covid gets into their factory, it knocks down the whole factory. That in turn knocks down the entire meat delivery system. When there are only a few factories supplying meat to a many cities, the entire meat supply can shut down. We delivered WAY more meat while Covid was going on than we did before or since.
If there are many small meat packing facilities, one or two or even half of them can go offline and meat is still available. There will be bottlenecks but the overall situation is not harmed nearly as much.
Resiliency in anything is usually thought about only when something breaks down. Only someone with a lot of foresight thinks about it beforehand. I know I didn’t think about it before it happened. We live out in the country and have our own sources of food, water and pretty much everything we needed so we didn’t have too much trouble.
If you have ever gone though a power outage for several days in summer and didn’t have a generator you have some real understanding of this, especially if you have a freezer full of meat! We have a big enough generator to run all of our freezers and enough gas to keep it going for three days so we are good up to that point.
One other thing that should be known is that most farmers are not totally local. A farmer doesn’t live next door to most people. The farmer by definition uses a fairly large piece of land and that land is probably some distance from the city or the suburbs where most people live. Land costs in the country are much less than in the city, so the farmer can afford to own the land out there. If they own land close to the city, they are probably going to sell it for big bucks, take that money and move further out in the country where he can buy a bigger chunk of land.
The bottom line of all of this is: Yes, buying local is definitely a good thing to do!
If you are interested in finding out more about North Pasture Farms, our website is: www.NorthPastureFarms.com
Please share this with any family or friends who may be interested in buying local or just eating more healthy than they do right now.
No worries.
SV