Keeping it Local

Find out more information about the Illinois Product campaign at the Illinois Department of Agriculture website at http://www.agr.state.il.us/marketing/ilprodlogo/

I was in Cub’s this weekend doing some grocery shopping, and I found some pretty neat signs up among certain products. These Illinois Product signs are a promotion by the Illinois Department of Agriculture. They are used to promote agricultural and food products that are produced in the state of Illinois.

The intention of this marketing campaign is to promote Illinois products, as a part of the growing trend of buying locally grown foods. While I think it’s great to support farmers in our area, I don’t wholeheartedly support the local foods movement. For starters, we are in Illinois. While Illinois has some of the most fertile soil in the world, it is not home to the ideal growing conditions for many types of foods. The vast majority of our fruit and vegetables come from California, coffee from central and South America, and wheat from the Great Plains. If we were to shift entirely to only consuming foods grown locally, we could forget about eating citrus and bananas, drinking coffee, baking with cane sugar, and would be spending an awful lot of time during the summer preserving fruits and vegetables.

Farmers would have to convert from growing corn and soybeans (a profitable crop) to growing the foods such as wheat and vegetables, and would also expand into raising cows, pigs, and chickens. This conversion would take time and lots of money. Raising these crops and livestock are also more time and labor consuming, so farmers would be forced to choose between downsizing and hiring on labor. Foods that these farmers would be producing yield much less than the corn and soybeans that are currently grown. Weather would also need to be factored in. As a result, consumers would see higher food prices and more food scarcity.

Just as some people make better teachers or find that their talents fit better in the business industry, some places are just more well-suited to grow certain plants or are better for raising livestock than other areas. California grows the majority of our fresh fruits and vegetables because there are some areas of the state that have a very mild winter, the ideal temperatures during the growing season, and just the right amount of rain (or access to irrigation) to raise these types of crops. If you were to travel into the West, you’ll find more cattle ranches than corn and soybean fields, simply because the climate is not as optimal for crop growth as it is in the Midwest. Illinois primarily grows corn and soybeans because we receive the right amount of rainfall (most years), maintain the ideal temperature during the growing season, and also have the transportation available to get these crops to market.

So while I encourage you to support your local farmers through farmers markets and the Illinois Product campaign, producing all of our food locally is not the answer for sustaining our agricultural industry into the future, especially as the global demand for food continues to increase.