As someone who is outside most of the time and cherishes the beauty of nature that we all share, I care deeply about our collective attitude and relationship as humans toward our earth. Our environment is everything to us, shaping our bodies, minds, spirits, relationships, basically everything about us. Sometimes, to put it quite mildly, it can feel like we are doing nature (and therefore ourselves) a huge disservice. It can feel equally hopeless to be an individual with a simple vegetable garden against huge systems that at best neglect the environment and often actively work to destroy it.
It should come as no surprise, then, that a farmer such as myself thinks that more local food is a tangible, significant way to heal and even build our environment. Below are some good reasons to go out to that farmer’s market or visit a local farm!
Food Miles Matter
The simplest reason eating local can benefit the environment is a reduction in what are called “food miles“. Simply, this is the distance that any food must travel from where it was grown to get to you. Foods with high food miles – think Mexican avocados, coffee from Indonesia, or even a Florida orange – travel a long way to get to your plate. Because transportation is the largest share of fossil fuel emissions in the US, and the large majority of food transportation is fossil fuel-based, those food miles add up to a lot of greenhouse gas pollution.
Even grocery store lettuce and tomatoes right here in PA come all the way from California. Just think, a tomato shipped from California to PA in August, when our own garden tomatoes are producing more than anyone could possibly eat! When you eat local, you’re minimizing those food miles. Instead of shipping truckloads of food across the country, your local farmers are perhaps shipping a small box of seeds or a box of day-old chicks, and growing food right where you are.
Reducing food miles is an obvious way to improve our environment, and at least in places like the US northeast, it’s really possible to grow the huge majority of your diet locally! In fact we continue to be surprised and thrilled by what can be successfully grown here, and we think our produce variety is almost as good as it gets!
Local Farmers Really Care
I would argue that the majority of farmers aren’t in this line of work because it is the easiest job or because it pays well (definitely not because it pays well!). The reality is that farmers almost always have a great passion for what they do, and this passion leads us to think deeply about our impact on our environment. Now, not every farm is going to be stewarding the land well, and many farms pollute the environment mightily, but farmers focused on local food are usually going to have the environment top of mind.
This is foremost because your local farmers live on or near their farm. They can see their impacts first hand, and often are working hard to improve local ecology as a part of building a successful farm. For example, we have a yearly goal to add more native flowers and plants to our farm, both because we love their beauty and the biodiversity they bring, but also because they make our farm better! Pollinators ensure we get good fruits, and beneficial insects and birds that eat our pests use native plants as homes.
Even more than this, local farmers are protecting their own health through good land stewardship. We know that we’ll eat healthier, breathe better air, and drink cleaner water if we’re thoughtful about how we manage our land.
In contrast, an industrial food system has no such needs or desires. The singular goal is high yield and low costs, and often the people making decisions about huge industrial farms live hundreds of miles away. The farmers managing these farms usually have very little say in how those farms are managed.
Thus, eating local is putting power back in the hands of people who genuinely care about your backyard, because they’re your neighbors!
A Strong Community Builds a Strong Environment
The third and perhaps most important reason to eat local is that doing so instantly builds community. To buy a loaf of sourdough at the farmers market requires you to interact with someone else who lives in your community, even just for a simple “hi” and “thank you”. Multiply even that simple interaction tens of thousands of times over, and you start to have an interconnected web of community.
This community creates a virtuous cycle of information, interaction, and resilience. As you learn more about your farmer’s produce at the market, you begin to understand more deeply their needs, challenges, goals, and outlook. As the community interacts with local growers more and more, a shared connection to the natural world strengthens.
There’s strength in numbers when it comes to improving local environments. A strong community may start a compost collection system for a local farm, or integrate local produce into food banks in the area. These actions all further promote a local food system, and the virtuous cycle continues.
What can You Do?
Eating local is a spectrum, and every action you take helps! From occasionally grabbing a bin of fresh berries from your summer farmer’s market to having a full-diet CSA all year, any local eating will help create that virtuous cycle of local land stewardship and ecological health.
We also recommend donating to farms, farmer’s markets, and organizations that promote local food systems, especially during the holiday giving season. Hopefully this has inspired you to eat a little more local in the future!