Our region used to grow its own food. Why not again?

There was a time, not long ago, when folks in our area relied heavily on locally-produced foods. We may have a short growing season here, but that didn’t stop farmers from producing the food that fed the families of miners or the hungry lumberjacks in their camps.

Look back in history. Embarrass was once famous for its potatoes, and the Cook area was famous for its dairies and small grain production. Over the years, of course, better transportation, refrigeration, and the takeover of food production and processing by giant multinational cartels, all but wiped out local food production in our area.

That not only meant that the wealth that local residents once produced from the soil was lost, it meant that hard-earned dollars earned by local residents from other means were shipped out of the area to pay for food. The need to eat used to generate wealth for our area. Today, it drains our wealth away.

How much wealth? About $280 million a year, just in St. Louis County. That’s more than the combined payroll of the roughly 1,800 workers that Cliffs Natural Resources employed on the Iron Range before their most recent shutdowns.

Now, we’re not going to replace all of that with locally-produced foods. That ship sailed a long time ago and it isn’t likely to return. And some things, like it or not, just can’t be grown here in a cost-effective way.

But what if we, as a region, made a concerted effort to produce 20 percent of the food we buy in our stores or eat in restaurants from local sources? That would generate $56 million annually in direct new wealth for our region, not to mention the spin-off benefits. And we’re talking about a long-term, sustainable source of income. People are always going to need to eat.

How do you facilitate such a transition? First, assess your local resource base. You aren’t going to grow crops on bedrock, or in peat bogs. But throughout even northern St. Louis County, there are productive soils that were once farmed and could be farmed again. We should know where they are so we can connect folks who’d like to pursue such a career with the land base to make it possible.

In some cases, entrepreneurial folks are already taking up the cause. Given the growing interest in locally-produced foods, we’re seeing new producers popping up in our area all the time, on their own. But what if we put money into promoting and educating local residents in the value of local food production? What if we organized supply chains to provide a steady wholesale source of local foods for area grocery stores, restaurants, schools, and other institutional food services?

What if we had people actually working on the issue, who talked to restaurant owners and grocery store managers to identify the foods and food products that they’d like to buy from local producers? Most of them would almost certainly prefer locally-produced foods. Even if they are more expensive, many consumers are willing to pay the premium for the freshness and quality. But where does a grocer or a restaurant owner turn for a reliable supply of such products?

When I see an agency like the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board pouring millions into projects like a coal gasification power plant that will never be built, I think how much more progress we could make if we focused even a fraction of those development funds on building a diverse economy that relies on lots of small victories, rather than the big score.

The IRRRB has lots of folks working there, and I don’t pretend to know what they all really do. But what if they hired a real spark plug who tapped into the expertise that does exist, right here in Minnesota, about the ways to build local food systems?

What if the IRRRB established a CSA loan program to help families or small companies establish and market their produce to consumers? And how about some marketing so folks here know what CSA even stands for?

In case you don’t know, it stands for Community-Supported Agriculture and it typically involves consumers buying shares in a farm’s production. The farm owner, in exchange, provides the shareholders with a portion of the farm’s production on a regular basis. You might get lots of salad greens in the spring, a wider variety of produce come summer, and the mother lode of storage crops come September and October. Some CSAs provide meat and a variety of processed foods as well, depending on the producer and the desires of his or her customers.

While our growing season (think June frosts) leaves something to be desired, most former agricultural land in our area can be purchased for pennies on the dollar compared to land in other farming areas. That means producers can put more of their money into season extending methods, like hoophouses and row covers, or irrigation to keep crops growing when the rains don’t come.

Right now, for most local growers, farming is a supplement to their income, not a mainstay. But there’s so much room for growth in this area that we don’t really know how much impact it could eventually have. While interest in local foods is on the rise, they still represent less than two percent of the food that we all buy.

That means the sky is the limit in terms of the economic impact local food production could eventually have on our region. We grew our own food in the past. Why can’t we begin to do it again?