My Rural Travelogue (Part XLII): Promoting local food, including wild edibles, in Japan

Ad for ice cream at a Teshikaga (Hokkaido) ramen house
features a photo of the farm family (4 children!) who produce the milk--
and, of course, one of the cows.

During my recent trip to Japan, I noticed a lot of promotion and advertising that played up the origin of food--usually its local origin. In this photo-dense post, I'm going to feature some of what I saw.  (All photos are (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2025) 

I first noticed the attention to local food in Kanazawa, on the west coast of Honshu, where the breakfast place mats at our Hyatt Centric hotel noted local milk products and featured the label, "Kanazawa Local Style" (lower left quadrant).  It mentioned local eggs and some other local produce.  

Breakfast placemat Hyatt Centric Kanazawa

Then, in Osaka, which is known as the food capital of the country, the cafe in a private library touted dairy products from Hokkaido, the northernmost island.  When I asked why an establishment in the southern part of the main island, Honshu, was promoting products from the north, I was told that Hokkaido has more space than Honshu--it's less crowded--and thus most of the nation's milk and dairy products are produced there.  Hokkaido seems to be associated with farm-fresh food, especially dairy.

Live chickens outside a restaurant in Osaka; 
now that's local food

The next week, I visited northern Hokkaido and saw for myself many dairy farms.  Near Kushiro and the surrounding marshlands, which are habitat for the iconic Japanese Cranes as well as dairy cows, the two species often share space.  I also saw in that region greenhouses where strawberries were grown.

To the northwest of the Kushiro area, closer to Shire and en route to Shiretoko National Park, I was driven past fields of yams and sugar beets.  My driver pointed out a sugar beet processing facility.  

Crops near Memanbetsu airport, northeastern Hokkaido. 

Then, between Shiretoko and Memanbetsu, I saw apple and cherry orchards.  A wild fox crossed my taxi's path very near there, just a few miles from the Memanbetsu airport.  This seems noteworthy because I'd not seen a fox in the far more wild and remote Shiretoko National Park. 

Fried sweet potato balls are associated with Bihoro Pass, above Lake Kussharo, and are sold at the roadside station there.  I can attest to their deliciousness, but also their greasiness.  

Raised beds for student gardening at a primary school in Wakato, on the shores of Lake Kussharo.

This woman is preparing bracken, a wild, fern-like plant, outside a restaurant at Lake Akan. I noticed a significant focus on wild edibles, including fiddle-head fern, at restaurants in Japan, especially when outside major cities. I had wild edibles as part of tempura meals in Takayama and on Hokkaido. My Hokkaido guide and drivers also pointed out to me places (some at relatively high elevation) where wild edibles were growing. Collecting these foods seemed almost a hobby, especially among older residents, as my Hokkaido guide and drivers were.

Below is a Japanese Crane across the road from the cattle pictured in the lower photo.  These were taken  near Tsurui village, in northeastern Hokkaido.  I found that the iconic cranes frequently occupied the same habitat as cattle in the region's marshes.  In fact, a barely visible crane is behind the cattle in the lower photo.  The third photo below is of a Sapporo Co-op delivery truck in the small town of Utoro, at the entrance to Shiretoko National Park. Sapporo is the largest city and seat of Hokkaido Prefecture, which is co-terminus with the Island of Hokkaido.  The co-op sells food and daily essentials, e.g., detergent, toiletries.

I enjoyed a lovely lunch at Heart 'n Tree guest house and restaurant in Tsurui Village, Hokkaido, where I was served this varied and colorful appetizer plate (above).  I also had a delicious soup curry with shrimp.  Pizza and a pork stew were among the other entrees on offer.  Among the items you can get for breakfast is "fresh squeezed milk."  

I also took a cheese-making class at Heart 'n Tree, where I made string cheese with the owner, Sachiko.  

Photos above from Heart 'n Tree, Tsurui, Hokkaido, Japan. 

The Heart 'n Tree website says it is "a supporter of dairy farmers" and that its "menu lets you enjoy fully the deliciousness of milk and vegetables."  

Here is a placard promoting local dairy products, with Holstein cow stylized art, at a hotel buffet in Utoro, near entrance to Shiretoko National Park.

These Okhotsk Bean Factory products were for sale in Utoro, near Shiretoko National Park, Hokkaido.  (This area is adjacent to the Sea of Okhotsk). I saw the storage tower for this company near the Memanbetsu Airport when I was leaving the region. 

My prior post about my May 2025 trip to Japan is here.

Trump administration flip flops again on immigration enforcement in the agriculture sector

I wrote late last week about Trump's moratorium on immigration enforcement in the agriculture and hospitality sectors, and he has already reversed that position.  The Washington Post reports:  

Officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including its Homeland Security Investigations division, told agency leaders in a call Monday that agents must continue conducting immigration raids at agricultural businesses, hotels and restaurants, according to two people familiar with the call. The new instructions were shared in an 11 a.m. call to representatives from 30 field offices across the country.

Here are some quotes from a story in the Wall Street Journal yesterday re: what's a stake with raids on food producers and related sectors.   The headline is "Trump Struggles to Press Deportations Without Damaging the Economy," and some excerpts related to the agricultural sector follow.  The first is what Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday:  

Severe disruptions to our food supply would harm Americans.  It took us decades to get into this mess and we are prioritizing deportations in a way that will get us out.

The journalists use the illustration of a Sackets Harbor, New York farmer whose diversified farm operation (which includes agri-tourism) was raided in March: 

Ron Robbins, who runs a family farm in Sackets Harbor, N.Y., has been short-handed since March, when he says around 45 immigration agents showed up.

ICE agents searched the 8,000-acre operation that milks 1,500 cows and grows corn, soybeans and some produce, then arrested eight people they said were in the country illegally. One of the detainees was a Guatemalan man who worked as the top assistant to the farm’s tourist business, Robbins said.

Since the raid on his property, Robbins, a 4th-generation farmer, said family members are working 18-hour days to keep the operation going, except for the strawberry patch. “We don’t have enough people to do this work,” he said. “It’s a no-win situation.”

Meanwhile, the WSJ reports that an Omaha meatpacker that was raided a few weeks ago is functioning at just 20% of capacity following the raid.  

Here's some helpful data from the WSJ on the extent to which our workforce is staffed by undocumented immigrants: 

Immigrants living in the U.S. illegally account for about 4.4% of the U.S. workforce, according to a Goldman Sachs analysis of 2023 census data. But their share of the workforce in some industries is much higher, the analysis found: 19% in landscaping services, 17% in crop production, 16% in animal slaughtering and processing and 13% in construction.

Roughly 12 million people immigrated to the U.S. from 2021 to 2024, according to the Congressional Budget Office, many of them either illegally or through an emergency process set up by the Biden administration. Many now have some kind of temporary permission to stay in the country and work, though they could ultimately face removal. Others sneaked into the country or overstayed visas.

The newcomers provided the economy with an infusion of working-age people eager for jobs. Immigration boosted economic growth in recent years and helped cool a job market that was in danger of overheating by “rebalancing the tightest parts of the labor market, where wage and price pressures were most extreme,” Goldman Sachs economists wrote in a note last year.

Trump has recently been given the nickname TACO--"Trump always chickens out"--in relation to trade negotiations.  I can't help think the same applies to his recent quick change of mind on immigration enforcement priorities.  

Postscript.  Politico Magazine published this on the topic yesterday, but I just became aware of it.  A few key excerpts follow:  

For now, Trump appears to be siding with the farmers. He responded last week with a vague Truth Social post acknowledging that his immigration policy was hurting farmers and vowed that “change was coming.” He followed with another post late Sunday, directing immigration officials to “FOCUS on our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities, and those places where Sanctuary Cities play such a big role. You don’t hear about Sanctuary Cities in our Heartland!”

* * *

For months, farmers and ranchers across the United States operated with a cautious understanding that Trump’s deportation spree would not touch their workforce, with some lawmakers saying the White House had promised to spare the industry from aggressive enforcement — until last week.

House Agriculture Chair G.T. Thompson (R-Pa.) said the raids on agriculture producers were “just wrong” and suggested the president agrees — but it “must be somebody a little lower in the food chain that’s making those mistakes.”  

“They need to knock it off,” Thompson told reporters Thursday. “Let’s go after the criminals and give us time to put processes in place so we don’t disrupt the food supply chain.”

Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) said he was told “straight to my face” that the Trump administration was “not going after agriculture.”

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said Trump has “always stood up for our farmers” and will continue to “strengthen the agricultural industry and boost exports” while also enforcing the country’s immigration laws and removing undocumented immigrants.

Trump’s statements on protecting the farm workforce came as a relief to the ag sector. Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau, said in a statement he looks “forward to working with the President on solutions that ensure continuity in the food supply in the short term.” On Saturday, Michael Marsh, president of the National Council of Agriculture Employers, sent a letter expressing his willingness to collaborate with the Trump administration on a solution that “enhances national security and simultaneously recognizes that America’s ability to feed itself is integral to our national security.”

Postscript 2:   NPR's Politics podcast on June 17 is about this issue.   And WSJ has just published a brief story about Chobani Yogurt CEO's statement that the U.S. food system cannot function under current immigration enforcement strategies.  

My Rural Travelogue (XLI): Exploring rural Japan amidst rising rice prices

Truck delivering rice plants in Nagahama, Shiga Prefecture, Japan, May 2025

I traveled to Japan for the first time in late May, which happened to be amidst a spike in rice prices.  As such, this was a topic much in the news during my time there, and I got interested in the matter and talked to many of our guides about why prices have risen so steeply of late.  I'll return to that subject below.  

Nagahama, Shiga Prefecture

Rice farms everywhere.  While on Honshu, the primary island in the Japanese archipelago, I had the opportunity to take many photos of rice fields and rice farming--and even a few rice farmers.  You don't have to get far out of the major cities--and this includes looking out the windows of bullet trains (the Japanese is "shinkansen") as you are whisked through the countryside--to see multitudes of what appear to be small family rice farms.  (All photos are (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2025).

Agricultural activity
Rural Shiga Prefecture, May 2025

We learned that in exurban and rural places, many families have their own little family rice paddy. This seems especially common among elderly folks.  For example, in one village in Shiga prefecture (where I took the photo above of the rice plant delivery truck), we met a Japanese gentleman who came to greet us and take our photo at the local shrine.  He is retired from local government, and when we asked if he is a rice farmer, he said not any more, though he still raises a vegetable garden.   (The man, photo below, wore an Anaheim Angels baseball cap to signify he is a Shohei Ohtani fan, he told us, because that was Ohtani's first team; when he is out of his village, he wears a Dodgers cap to signify his fandom to the wider world).  

One elderly rice farmer we met in his field said he planted his crop on May 9, and we were there less than two weeks after that.  He was weed whacking the grass at the margins of his small paddy, which was adjacent to other small fields being tended by other elderly male farmers.  We also saw both elderly men and women tending vegetable patches.

Elderly Ohtani fan in rural Shiga 
Prefecture

(By the way, my family and I got to these Nagahama villages with Biwako Backroads Tours, an amazing little biking and walking tour company based in nearby Maibara.  The entrepreneur behind this company, Takako Matsui-Leidy, has terrific English language skills.  Her company offers many tours of  this area around the northern part of Lake Biwa, an easy train ride from Kyoto.  See photo below, near a green tea plantation in the area.  Highly recommend these outings.)

Biwako Backroads Tour, Nagahama,
Shiga May 2025

Shirakawa-go Village, May 2025

We also saw a lot of rice farming activity in the village of Shirakawa-go, in Gifu Prefecture, on the Sho River.  It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of the historic structures, gassho-zukuri houses, with thatched roofs.  Farmers still live in the village, and we saw a great deal of rice farming activity while there, much of it involving mechanical equipment farmers seemed to be using to turn the fields or to put the plants in the ground.  We saw the same thing as we took the train from Takayama toward Nagoya a few days later.   

The spike in rice prices.  So why have rice prices doubled in Japan in the past year?  Well, it depends on who you ask.  Many folks indicated that the rice harvest was especially poor last year because of a very hot summer, and I found this New York Times story from October 2024 suggesting that scientists are working to genetically alter Japan's favorite rice to make it more heat resistant in the face of climate change.  Others mentioned that folks no longer want to be rice farmers and that those elderly folks we saw farming their own rice paddies, were a dying breed--literally.  

Vegetable gardens along irrigation canal
Rural Shiga Prefecture 

This New York Times coverage dug a little deeper: 

The shortage has been blamed on decades-old policies, meant to protect small-time farmers, that have blocked newcomers from buying or using agricultural land, leaving thousands of acres uncultivated. Efforts to change the system have been blocked by the national farming cooperative and other rural interests, which are stolid supporters of the governing Liberal Democratic Party.

That has put Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba between a rock and a hard place. Urban voters have chafed at the soaring prices and shortages, which at times have forced rationing by supermarkets.

Here is some late March 2025 New York Times coverage of a farmer protest--partly on tractors(!)--in Tokyo.  

Over the past year, Japan has grappled with a more than 200,000-ton shortage of its staple grain. Rice prices have skyrocketed, and supermarkets have been forced to restrict amounts that shoppers can buy. The situation became so dire that the government had to tap its emergency rice reserves.

Farmer in rice field, Shirakawa-go Village,
 a UNESCO World Heritage Site

The twist is that even as Japan deals with shortages, the government is paying farmers to limit how much they grow. The policy, in place for more than half a century, consumes billions of dollars a year in public spending.

Farmers exasperated with the government regulations protested on Sunday. Under cherry blossoms in a park in central Tokyo, more than 4,000 farmers, wearing straw hats and sun caps, gathered with signs declaring “Rice is life” and “We make rice but can’t make a living.” Thirty of them drove tractors through the skyscraper-lined streets of the capital city.

Politicians' heads rolling:  The "rice minister" resigns.  In the midst of all this, on May 20 (our first  day in Japan), agriculture minister Taku Eto resigned after a significant gaffe:  admitting he'd never purchased rice.  Here's the full quote: 

I have never bought rice myself. Frankly, my supporters give me quite a lot of rice. I have so much rice at home that I could sell it.

Transportation to the garden plot for an elderly resident of
rural Nagahama, Shiga Prefecture 

I'm reminded of Barack Obama's 2007 campaign gaffe: 

Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?  I mean, they’re charging a lot of money for this stuff.

Local rice for sale
Kinomoto Train Station, Shiga

I guess he didn't realize most people in Iowa don't eat arugula--or shop at Whole Foods.  But at least there was a hint of him doing this own grocery shopping.     

The Times further explains Prime Minister Ishiba's response in pushing Eto out, with a July election looming:

Underscoring the political importance of containing the furor, Mr. Ishiba said on Wednesday that he had asked one of the Liberal Democrats’ rising stars, Shinjiro Koizumi, the photogenic son of a former prime minister, to replace Mr. Eto.

Here is May 24 and May 26 coverage of the crisis by Nikkei Asia, in which Koizumi announces sales of government rice stockpiles.  His stated aim was to bring the price down to Y2000 per 5 kilograms by early June.  Don't know if that has happened yet, but this Reuters story says prices in Japanese grocery stores have fallen for the third straight week.  

Rice plants (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2025

My Rural Travelogue (Part XXXIX): Hvar Island, Croatia

Island of Hvar, Croatia
all photos (c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2024

I've been traveling in Slovenia and Croatia the last week or so and, not surprisingly, paying particular attention to rural places.  A few days ago, I visited the Island of Hvar (population 10,678 on an island 42 kilometers long).  Our guide--because it was raining and she was delaying the start of our bicycle tour--drove us over the mountain between Hvar town and Stari Grad (population 2,772), and through the village of Velo Grablje, which featured this sign about the "entity" being protected cultural heritage.  (Going over the mountain as we did was a longer-distance alternative to going through a tunnel).  We saw what appeared to be the only restaurant in the village overflowing with families following first communion at the nearby church.  (We also stopped in the "ghost town" of Malo Grablje, a few kilometers below, along the same "back road").  Among the things we have learned here is that not only music and art, but also recipes and--as we see here--entire villages can be deemed protected cultural heritage.  

As we have found to be the case elsewhere in Croatia--including on Hvar and other islands in Dalmatia, small-scale agriculture is widespread.  Many folks have small garden plots in their front or back yards, and on Hvar many also have plots in the Stari Grad Plain, prime agricultural land that made Stari Grad such a desirable location for settlement.  Many also have small vineyards and/or olive groves, which are also on terraces that stretch up the mountainsides.   

Vineyard near Stari Grad, Hvar Island

Stone wall along ancient Roman road on Stari Grad Plain

Potato plants are as common as vineyards and olive groves on the island.

Little free library in Stari Grad

Our guide, who is viola player as well as a cyclist and librarian, told us about a recent benefit concert she played to raise funds to buy food for donkeys kept by a local woman.  The yield from the event raised a few thousand Euros for the care of the donkeys.  That outdoor concert was held near the restaurant featured in this advertisement, adjacent to the village of Dol, which rises above the Stari Grad Plain.

Public library, Stari Grad.  It is above a coffee shop,
right on the waterfront, next to the city hall.

K-4 school in the village of Dol; older children go to school in Stari Grad 

Artichoke plant next to a stone wall on road between Dol and Vrbnj

Hvar is known for its lavender, which was in early season.

On the future of vertical farms: Conflicting trends from China and the United States

I first took notice of so-called vertical farms about the time I started this blog some decade and a half ago when I saw this story in the New York Times depicting plants growing up the sides of a skyscraper.  Bina Vinkataraman wrote there of an idea that had "captured the imagination of several architects in the United States and Europe in the past several years."  The story's lede follows: 

What if “eating local” in Shanghai or New York meant getting your fresh produce from five blocks away? And what if skyscrapers grew off the grid, as verdant, self-sustaining towers where city slickers cultivated their own food?

Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Dr. Despommier’s pet project is the “vertical farm,” a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact.

The story included this reality check on the economics of these enterprises: 

Armando Carbonell, chairman of the department of planning and urban form at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Mass., called the idea “very provocative.” But it requires a rigorous economic analysis, he added. “Would a tomato in lower Manhattan be able to outbid an investment banker for space in a high-rise? My bet is that the investment banker will pay more.”

Scientific American ran a story in 2009 that also featured Despommier's vision and noted what would be saved in money and carbon in not having to transport food to city consumers:

[A] 30-story building built on one city block and engineered to maximize year-round agricultural yield—thanks largely to artificial lighting and advanced hydroponic and aeroponic growing techniques—could feed tens of thousands of people. Ideally the recipients of the bounty would live in the surrounding area, so as to avoid the transport costs and carbon emissions associated with moving food hundreds if not thousands of miles to consumers.

I was intrigued when I learned about these developments (which was about the time I started this blog), but to be honest, I was also a tiny bit disappointed because vertical farms risked making rural places obsolete.  I was starting to see that one of the things rural places provided to urban places--one of the ways rural places were seen as adding value--was food.  If, somehow, urban places came to be able to supply their own food needs, it would become one more reason for metro folks not to care about rural folks and their livelihoods. 

Thus, for the past 15 years, I've tried to track what's going on with vertical farms.  Are they still a sort of "pie in the sky" aspiration?  or are they becoming a real thing?  

Among the vertical gardens stories since that 2008 report is this 2013 NY Times piece out of Singapore.  It is focused on the island nation's Kranji neighborhood, "home to a farm resort and ever-evolving agritourism circuit where locavore thinking has taken hold," thus reclaiming some of Singapore's early kampong (farm village) spirit.  Here's an excerpt focused on green skyscrapers as tourist attractions 

The most recent [vertical gardens] addition is Sky Greens, a collection of 120 30-foot towers that opened in late 2012 using a method called “A-Go-Gro Vertical Farming,” which resembles a sort of vegetable-stuffed Ferris wheel, and is designed for leafy greens like spinach and bok choy. Sky Greens is Singapore’s first vertical farm, located in Kranji, 14 miles from Singapore’s central business district, with bus service available every 75 minutes.

The Kranji Heritage Trail, instituted in 2011, includes 34 independent farms and agriculture-related businesses. Seventeen of the trail stops are open to the public, including a poultry farm, a goat farm, frog-breeding aquaculture, a community vegetable garden, a cooking school, and the no-frills D’Kranji Farm Resort, with 19 eco-friendly villas and a spa. A day spent exploring Kranji’s farms is a great antidote to Singapore’s crush of street-food hawkers and urban attractions.

A few more recent stories suggest conflicting answers to the question whether these farms can go beyond serving as tourist attractions and make significant dents in the world's food needs--or even a city's food needs.  

First, this February New York Times report by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Claire Fu caught my eye.  It's about a multi-story hog factory in Ezhou, China, on the south bank of the Yangtze River, which will produce 1.2 million pigs a year once its sister facility is completed and at full capacity later in 2023:  

The first sows arrived in late September at the hulking, 26-story high-rise towering above a rural village in central China. The female pigs were whisked away dozens at a time in industrial elevators to the higher floors where the hogs would reside from insemination to maturity.

This is pig farming in China, where agricultural land is scarce, food production is lagging and pork supply is a strategic imperative.

Inside the edifice, which resembles the monolithic housing blocks seen across China and stands as tall as the London tower that houses Big Ben, the pigs are monitored on high-definition cameras by uniformed technicians in a NASA-like command center. Each floor operates like a self-contained farm for the different stages of a young pig’s life: an area for pregnant pigs, a room for farrowing piglets, spots for nursing and space for fattening the hogs.

Feed is carried on a conveyor belt to the top floor, where it’s collected in giant tanks that deliver more than one million pounds of food a day to the floors below through high-tech feeding troughs that automatically dispense the meal to the hogs based on their stage of life, weight, and health. 

* * *  

China has had a long love affair with pigs. For decades, many rural Chinese households raised backyard pigs, considered valuable livestock as a source of not only meat but also manure. Pigs also hold cultural significance as a symbol of prosperity because, historically, pork was served only on special occasions.

And here are some more interesting tidbits about the factory, which was built by a cement manufacturer just diversifying into the hog breeding business:  

The farm is next to the company’s cement factory, in a region known as the “Land of Fish and Rice” for its importance to Chinese cuisine with its fertile farmlands and surrounding bodies of water.

While the journalists refer to the location of the hog factory as a "rural village," Ezhou is a city of more than a million.  Here's more on the factory itself: 

A pig farm in name, the operation is more like a Foxconn factory for pigs with the precision required of an iPhone production line. Even pig feces are measured, collected and repurposed. Roughly one-quarter of the feed will come out as dry excrement that can be repurposed as methane to generate electricity.

A Chinese executive who designs hog farms is quoted as suggesting that "multistory farms will have an impact on the world."  Meanwhile, the U.S. perspective is more skeptical, largely because of concerns about the inability to control contamination in these facilities: 

U.S. hog farmers look at the pictures of those farms in China, and they just scratch their heads and say, ‘We would never dare do that.’ ... It’s just too risky.

Contrast what's happening in China with this recent story out of western Pennsylvania, where a multi-story facility producing lettuces recently shut down.  Adele Peters reports for Fast Company under the headline, "The Vertical Farming Bubble is Finally Popping."  

When workers arrived at Fifth Season, an indoor farm in the former steel town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, on a cloudy Friday morning last October, they expected it would be a normal day.

The farm, which had opened two years earlier, seemed to be running smoothly, growing tens of thousands of pounds of lettuce per year inside a robot-filled 60,000-square-foot warehouse. The brand was selling salad kits—like a taco-themed version with the company’s baby romaine, plus guacamole, tortilla strips, and cheese—in more than 1,200 stores, including Whole Foods and Kroger. Earlier in the year, the company had said that it projected a 600% growth in sales in 2022. The branding was updated in October, and new packages were rolling out in stores. Solar panels and a new microgrid had recently been installed at the building. A larger farm was being planned for Columbus, Ohio.

But the workday never started. ... The managers announced that the company was closing immediately. After shutting down the electrical equipment and draining water lines, the plants were left to die. ... Dozens ... were left scrambling to find new jobs.

Fifth Season’s failure is only the most dramatic signal of a reckoning taking place in what’s known as the vertical farming sector. 

The story goes on to provide other examples of this trend of vertical farm failures in the United States and in Europe.  

So, is the salient distinction between what's happening in China and what's happening in the United States that the former involves meat and the latter involves fruit and veg?  That farmers--really agribusiness--in assess risk differently?  Or are there other reasons for the differing trajectories?  

NPR reports on how rural stores are surviving these days

Stephan Bisaha reports for NPR from Kewanee, Mississippi, on the Alabama state line in Lauderdale County, population 80,000.  Here's an excerpt: 

STEPHAN BISAHA, BYLINE: The Simmons-Wright Company store in Kewanee, Miss., has two floors filled with baskets of cotton, cast-iron skillets and Mississippi-shaped magnets. And with inflation squeezing customer wallets, sales are down for nearly all of it.

* * * 

BISAHA: Even before dollar stores, there was Walmart, and many country stores had to shut down. Those that did survive have been the ones able to adapt with the times. Pickett expanded his restaurant business by delivering burgers to a truck line across the border in Alabama. But even the food side of Pickett's business is feeling the sting of this high inflation that we haven't seen in 40 years.

PICKETT: Well, the beef and the meat has almost doubled in price. And we've gone up just a little bit. We hadn't gone up the percentage we need to go up. I know we're going to have to go up. We just don't want to run everybody off, regular customers.

BISAHA: Other country store owners say the same thing. They're raising prices as little as they can because they're based in poor communities that just can't afford it. Before, Pickett wouldn't mind throwing some extra fries into the meals. But now, to keep prices down, Pickett's team measures everything. Even the hamburger patties get weighed before cooking. Yet concern about a possible recession means long-term survival could require more drastic changes. One idea he's considering is leaning into the store's nostalgia and making the place an event venue.

PICKETT: Like a wedding on the weekend - if you let them rent the cotton gin for a photo shoot and have a wedding up there, it'd be 10,000 bucks, you know, or more.

BISAHA: Country-like nostalgia is already a big part of the business. The old nutcrackers and antique soda bottles might not sell, but they draw in customers like 75-year-old Lewis Hankins (ph). He made the short drive here from Alabama, and he can't stop playing show and tell with the rusted farm equipment he pulls from the shelves.

Other posts about country stores are here and here, and one touching on rural nostalgia linked to farm instruments and other old paraphernalia is here.   Also, don't forget there was a country store in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the subject of this post. 

Rural gentrification impacting Hudson Valley farms

Elizabeth G. Dunn reports for the New York Times today; the headline is "How 'Fairy Tale' Farms are Ruining Hudson Valley Agriculture."  An excerpt follows:  

The Hudson Valley is a prime agricultural region stretching from New York City to Albany, N.Y., home to an eclectic mix of tractor dealerships, twee specialty food shops, dollar stores and high-end furniture boutiques. It has long been a popular destination for second-home buyers in search of a pastoral lifestyle. But since the pandemic, demand for properties there, especially farms, has surged.

The median listing price for farms, ranches and undeveloped land in Columbia County, an agricultural stronghold in the heart of the Hudson Valley, shot up 62 percent between January 2020 and January 2022, according to data from Realtor.com. Rental homes are also pricier, in part because so many of them have become Airbnbs, a mounting crisis for both farmhands and beginning farmers who don’t have places to live. A recent one-bedroom rental unit in Coxsackie, N.Y., in neighboring Greene County, drew over 260 inquiries and 130 applications, said Tracy Boomhower, a local real estate agent.

As a result, farmers are getting squeezed out. Some have tried leasing land from owners new to the area, but those alliances are more challenging than they might appear, farmers said, since many of the new owners don’t know what it takes to run a farm.

* * *

Sophie Ackoff, an executive director of the National Young Farmers Coalition, a nonprofit that supports the interests of beginning farmers, is no stranger to the issue. “We’ve seen a surge in interest from non-farmer buyers in the Hudson Valley,” she said, adding that such bidders often have a buyer’s advantage over farmers just starting out. That includes access to speedier loan options, whereas beginning farmers largely rely on slow-moving loans through the United States Department of Agriculture.

Access to affordable farmland is a major challenge nationally, particularly for people of color, who today make up 2 percent of farmland owners. To address this, the coalition has started the One Million Acres for the Future campaign, which calls for Congress to invest $2.5 billion in the 2023 Farm Bill to facilitate equitable access to land.

According to Holly Rippon-Butler, the land campaign director for the coalition, farmland near cities is especially desirable for small livestock operations and fruit and vegetable growers, because of the greenmarkets and farm-to-table restaurants nearby. Competition is the worst in “places where there’s a lot of money and the agricultural land is high quality and aesthetically attractive.”

My Rural Travelogue (Part XXXI): "Redneck wine" in northern Arizona

As regular readers will realize, I've been traveling through the American Southwest the past few weeks, ending with a few days in Sedona, Arizona, 

population 10,031.  Sedona straddles two counties:  (1) Coconino, a massive county the size of the state of Connecticut with a population of 145,401; it is home to the Grand Canyon and (2) Yavapai County, population 236,209, which more precisely is home to "West Sedona," and whose county seat is Prescott.  

One of the recommended outings from Sedona--recommended by my hotel and Trip Advisor, for example--is Cottonwood, population 11,265, about 20 miles from Sedona.  In particular, Old Town Cottonwood is touted, and I must say the town has done a great job of spiffying up a street and making it attractive to tourists.  One of the things going on in the town and region is grape-growing and wine-making.  Indeed, on my flight home from Phoenix yesterday, I sat next to a man from Phoenix who told me that he'd recently visited the area.  He called the wine from this region "redneck wine" and told me that the best grapes came from near there, in Cornville, also in the Verde Valley, population 3,280.  

Here are some photos, starting with the most interesting to the person who studies the rural lawyer shortage.  I have seen a lot of small-town lawyer offices, but never one with a sign quite like this:  

The lawyer's office below the flashy, diner-type sign 

I happened to catch the farmer's market, held
on Wednesdays from 3 pm til 6 pm

Antique/junk store on the corner 

A gas station turned .... something else

Historic building used as a community center. 

Marketing wine as "rural"

Homepage for Rural Mendocino Wines

I've been traveling this weekend in nonmetropolitan Mendocino County, California, including both inland parts (the Anderson Valley wine region) and the coastal bits (the town of Mendocino and Fort Bragg). 

Tonight, dining at a restaurant south of Mendocino (the town), the red wine by the glass on offer was branded Zosia, a blend of Pinot Noir, Grenache, Carignan and Barbera.  I ordered it and found it slightly effervescent and quite distinctive, so I asked to see the label.  I was delighted to see that the wine is from farther inland Mendocino County than the Anderson Valley--and that is is marketed explicitly as "rural."  Here are the front and back labels:

And this led me to the website for the winery, Rural Mendocino, run by the sons of the Fetzer wine empire.  The text states: 

We grew up in Mendocino County. As kids our days were filled with hiking the beautiful countryside and working in vineyards. Our family started growing winegrapes here in 1958, and later founded Fetzer Vineyards. In the mid 90’s we began building the Masút properties throughout Mendocino County, where we farm vineyards and raise cattle and hay crops on nearly 5000 acres. Our ranches are rural, and we love working with our hands creating something from farming.

Rural Wine Company was founded because we wanted to showcase the incredible fruit across this beautiful county, a place we love and call home.

    Ben and Jake Fetzer, third generation

Kinda' cool to be marketing a product like wine as "rural," though we see many other products marketed that way.  Certainly, throughout California, tons of wine grapes are grown in rural regions, including parts of Amador, Calaveras, El Dorado, Placer, Mendocino, Sonoma, Napa, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Monterey, Santa Clara, and Nevada counties, just to name a smattering.  A great deal of those grapes are also made into wine in the same places.   

Agritourism gets a boost in the digital, pandemic age

 Ellen Barry reported for the New York Times a few days ago out of Peacham, Vermont, population 732.  The headline is, "In a Wistful Age, Farmers Find a New Angle:  Chore TV."  The subhead is: "It's hard for small farmers to earn a living selling their products.  Enter the 'farmer-influencer' who can earn more by streaming farm life, with its comforting monotony, to a growing online audience."

Here's the lede:

The sweet smell of hay rose off the earth on a recent evening, as Morgan Gold strode across his farmyard in heavy boots. He crossed the paddock, scanning for new eggs, water levels, infected peck wounds, rips in the fence line.

But mainly — let’s be honest — he was looking for content.

Though Mr. Gold sells poultry and eggs from his duck farm in Vermont’s northeast corner, most of what he produces as a farmer is, well, entertainment.

* * * 

Then, twice a week, like clockwork, he posts a short video on YouTube about his exploits as a neophyte farmer, often highlighting failures or pratfalls. Keeping a close eye on analytics, he has boosted his YouTube audiences high enough to provide a steady advertising revenue of around $2,500 to $4,000 a month, about eight times what he earns from selling farm products.

Coronavirus in rural America (Part XVII): Who is going to feed us?

A great deal of news coverage about food and how it reaches consumers is on offer during this coronavirus pandemic. 

The first story I want to highlight is this one, by Frank Martin for NPR, suggesting that the supply chain may be "loosening."  The idea is that because folks are stocking up on on food and other necessities, they won't continue to need truckers--at least not for several months--once their need is met.  Here's a key excerpt:

But David Ross, a logistics analyst at Stifel Financial Corp., said that after weeks of consumers stuffing so many groceries into pantries and freezers, the logistics industry might soon have to slam on the brakes. 

Ross comments:

At some point, folks will have all of the ground beef they need until July, all of the toilet paper they will need until November.  And over the coming weeks, the demand for that should drop off significantly.

Martin's story continues:

Then, truckers who have been busting their humps for weeks trying to fill orders could see demand evaporate.

Ross and others predicted a rough year for the trucking and railroad industries this year even before the coronavirus upended the world. Now their prognosis is worse. 

On Monday, Beaver Express Services, an Oklahoma-based trucking firm that had survived 77 years in the logistics business, called it quits. Its owner, Mike Stone, said the coronavirus helped whip up a "perfect storm" that crushed the company. Ross expects more stories like this in the deep recession that the pandemic is expected to trigger. 

"Any time consumer confidence is cracked and people stop buying stuff, you're not going to be moving a lot of goods," Ross said.

That story, now a few weeks old, is not exclusively about food, but it is about one of the ways that food (along with other goods) reaches consumers. 

The second--and equally sobering story--is this NPR report about the Trump administration trying to suppress wages for farm laborers.  An excerpt from the report by Franco Ordonez follows:

New White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is working with Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to see how to reduce wage rates for foreign guest workers on American farms, in order to help U.S. farmers struggling during the coronavirus, according to U.S. officials and sources familiar with the plans. 

Opponents of the plan argue it will hurt vulnerable workers and depress domestic wages.
The measure is the latest effort being pushed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help U.S farmers who say they are struggling amid disruptions in the agricultural supply chain compounded by the outbreak; the industry was already hurting because of President Trump's tariff war with China. 

"The administration is considering all policy options during this unprecedented crisis to ensure our great farmers are protected, and President Trump has done and will do everything he can to support their vital mission," a White House official told NPR. 

The nation's roughly 2.5 million agricultural laborers have been officially declared "essential workers" as the administration seeks to ensure that Americans have food to eat and that U.S. grocery stores remain stocked. Workers on the H-2A seasonal guest-worker program are about 10% of all farmworkers.

The third story I'll highlight is only moderately more uplifting.  It is by Kim Severson of the New York Times about how organic and artisanal farmers are finding ways forward as their typical customers--restaurants and patrons of farmers markets--are lost to them.  Here's an excerpt focusing on California, though the story touches on small-scale farmers in New York and Kentucky, too. 

In the spirit of the sustainable food movement’s roots, some farmers have decided to go hyperlocal. Randy Stannard runs Root 64 Farm with his partner, Sarah McCamman, on an acre of land in Sacramento. They were planning to sell their early crop of radishes and arugula to local restaurants and at a farmers’ market. The virus put an end to that. 

Instead, last Saturday they opened a little drive-through farm stand in front of their house, and are raising money with others in their community to provide 20 boxes of produce a week through December to needy families whose children attended their neighborhood elementary school. 

“We could sell everything to people who are well-off and would drive miles to come here,” he said. “But we want to make sure we get really good, high-quality food to people who need it the most and live nearby.”

A contrast to that story is this Wall Street Journal story from April 9 about farmers dumping milk and eggs that they can no longer sell to restaurant patrons.

And to that WSJ story from April 9, the New York Times responded with this on April 11, by David Yaffe-Bellany and Michael Corkery, for which part of the very depressing headline is "Food Waste in the Pandemic":

After weeks of concern about shortages in grocery stores and mad scrambles to find the last box of pasta or toilet paper roll, many of the nation’s largest farms are struggling with another ghastly effect of the pandemic. They are being forced to destroy tens of millions of pounds of fresh food that they can no longer sell. 

The closing of restaurants, hotels and schools has left some farmers with no buyers for more than half their crops. And even as retailers see spikes in food sales to Americans who are now eating nearly every meal at home, the increases are not enough to absorb all of the perishable food that was planted weeks ago and intended for schools and businesses. 

The amount of waste is staggering. The nation’s largest dairy cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America, estimates that farmers are dumping as many as 3.7 million gallons of milk each day. A single chicken processor is smashing 750,000 unhatched eggs every week.

The Minnesota Star-Tribune's story on the phenomenon is somewhat more optimistic, reporting that Minnesota dairy farmers are not (yet) dumping milk.

At the other end of the food supply chain are grocery stores, and reports are starting to emerge, including stories here and here, about their employees dying from COVID19.

The last story I'll highlight in this post is about the Trump administration backing off new,  tougher eligibility rules for SNAP (formerly food stamps), in light of the severe economic downturn.  That's a relief.  One could debate the wisdom of work requirements in the best of times (as I have done here), but there's surely no doubt that work requirements make no sense when the unemployment rate is as high as it suddenly is.