Make the Road by Walking

Recently I came across this famous line by Spanish poet Antonio Machado.

Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.

My translation:
Traveller, there is no road,
one makes the road by walking.

We are pioneering local eating, walking where there is no road, making the road by walking it. When we look for, ask for, and buy local food, we are sending a powerful message. If enough of us do it, the message goes out to existing farmers sick to death of losing money in commodity agriculture; the message goes out to young people who want to farm but can't see how to make a living at it.

It's a collaboration. More demand for local food makes for more local suppliers. More local suppliers makes it easier for customers to find local food. It's a virtuous circle, unwinding the vicious circle of no demand for local food, so farmers must sell into the commodity market, often making pennies on the dollar, going into debt, then selling out to corporations or developers.

Let's not wait until we are in an emergency situation. As Ursula of Cresset Community Farm told me recently, "We need to grow farmers."

With Peak Oil having ever greater effects on the cost of everything related to petroleum, we will NEED more local suppliers of food if we want to eat. About 20% of the cost of supermarket food is the transportation from field to factory to warehouse to store. That does not even count the fuel for the tractors, the petrochemicals in the fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides.
The time is coming when "conventional" agriculture will be more expensive than organic farming.

Corporate megafarms are far less efficient in food produced per acre in crop, not even counting the environmental or petroleum costs, though megafarms are far more efficient in labor costs. The most efficient food-growing technique in the world in terms of product per acre is the home garden, closely followed by small intensively-farmed plots. The most efficient way to produce meat is pastured; feedlots are an antiquated dinosaur method of producing meat, based on the incredible cheapness of fossil fuel in the 20th century. They require huge amounts of corn and soybeans, and huge amounts of petroleum to produce them and bring them to the cattle, and producing huge amounts of animal waste which becomes a pollutant rather than a fertilizer. I will go into this subject more in a future post.

Jim and I are walking the road we want to make. By using our existing stock, it gives us time to research and find suppliers of the things we will need. After using up all of our perishable foods, our meals are more than half local food, sometimes nearly all, except for salt.

Please join us on this road that we are making by walking.