A Map of our Food System
So you want to transition to regenerative food systems? What does our food system look like in the first place?
In February of 2018, Dan Barber, renowned chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, came to Berkeley Haas to speak. He talked about how chefs decide what they want on their menu, and then go to the market to look for it. Farmers, knowing this, try to grow what chefs and others want to buy. However, what people want to buy isn’t always what’s best for the land. Even if farmers do want to grow what’s best for the land, they may not be able to find anyone to buy it, especially not in their local area, and especially not if everyone around them is growing the same thing — corn, wheat, or soy for commodity markets. Dan was saying that chefs have an opportunity and a responsibility to think about creating demand for the kind of food and the kind of eating that is good for the soil, good for the ecosystem. He is emphatic that food which is good for the soil and comes from healthy soil is also more nutritious and more delicious.
AMAZING.
While he spoke about what chefs could do, I was caught by the idea that regenerative farmers needed markets and infrastructure for their non-commodity products. I was in the process of taking a class on the US farm bill and learning all about how the US agricultural system was basically divided into two worlds:
- Commodity crops, which are supported by a vast array of public and private infrastructure like commodity markets, international trade policy, crop insurance, and research and education services. Only the following crops are commodity crops supported by USDA programs: wheat, corn, grain sorghum, barley, oats, upland cotton, rice, peanuts, soybeans, other oilseeds, dry peas, lentils, chickpeas.
- Specialty crops, which have much less support and infrastructure. The USDA defines specialty crops as “fruits and vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, horticulture, and nursery crops (including floriculture).”
More on policy here.
With my background in supply chain management, I started thinking about the opportunities we had to create more demand and infrastructure for these “secondary” crops that support regenerative agriculture. Chief among these were nitrogen-fixing legumes, like lentils and chickpeas, that could replace petroleum-based nitrogen fertilizers. I applied to a Haas course called Food Innovation Studio, which was basically a forum for us to test and build a business idea. My team and I quickly built the following visual:
It’s a classic business school value chain. Not all food will go through all steps of the chain, but it was a useful framework for us to start thinking about the problem.
- Inputs — it starts with inputs, things like seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, equipment
- Growers — farmers grow all of this into food
- Processors — a lot of food needs to be processed, even if it’s not what we think of as processed foods. For example, lentils need to be cleaned, de-husked and packaged.
- Distributors — they take the food and sell and/or transport it to buyers. Buyers could be retailers, restaurants, or consumer packaged goods companies
- Consumer Packaged Goods companies — they turn food into things people buy on the shelf, like rice, pasta, canned soup, chips etc.
- Retailers/Restaurants — sell food directly to eaters
- Eaters — buy and eat food
That’s the value chain and it does a decent job of representing the physical flow of goods, but it’s far from a complete picture of our food system. As we set out trying to identify all the organizations working on regenerative across this value chain, it quickly became obvious that many of them were not part of this chain:
- Government bodies — this includes federal, state, and local agencies and well as international organizations like the UN. Government policy has a huge amount of influence over what we grow and eat — farmers often decide what to grow based on farm bill policies, and policy also decides what can or cannot be grown and sold under different categories like organic or USDA certified meat.
- Researchers — Research from both universities and private companies also influence farming inputs, techniques, technology, and policy. If research funded by private companies is largely focused on industrial agriculture, then there will be very little evidence or support for regenerative/agroecological approaches.
- Non-profits — Non-profits have been hugely influential in the development and spread of sustainable agriculture. More on this here.
- Service companies — There are also several sets of companies that provides services to those throughout the food system. These range from software companies providing technological tools for better management, to consulting companies providing specific expertise, to financial services companies like banks or crowdfunding platforms which provide critical funding.
Here’s what we found from our few hours of research on organizations focused on regenerative food (in September 2018):
We found that there are certainly growers interested in growing this way and CPGs who are also expressing interest in regenerative, but there seem to be important gaps:
- Inputs — very few organizations selling seeds, tools etc designed for regenerative agriculture. More on tools here.
- Service companies — there are a good number of companies that providing consulting for regenerative agriculture, but the options for software tools and financing are limited. More on financing here.
- Processors — having local processors or, at a minimum, buyers that aggregate to ship elsewhere is critical for farmers to be able to sell their regeneratively grown crops. There is a limited number of local processors set up for a diversity of crops. Furthermore, if there’s a market premium from regenerative or organic products, then they need separate processing runs, even if processing facilities do exist (e.g. for organic wheat). More on processing here.
- Eaters/retailers/restaurants — there’s also limited communication to eaters and from the retailers and restaurants that have the closest connections to eaters. More on eaters here.
There is a huge need to reimagine government policy and research, which many non-profits are working on, but there’s still a lot more to do.
Additional Reading:
- The Third Plate by Dan Barber
- Lentil Underground by Liz Carlisle
This is part 2 of a series, written in January 2019
1. Introduction: The Magic of Regenerative Agriculture
3. Defining Regenerative and who’s doing it
5. Farm-level transitions (local learning and infrastructure)
6. Financing Regenerative Agricultural Transitions
