One Does Not Simply “Grow Vegetables”

If Americans ate more vegetables, we’d be healthier people.

Hell, if I ate more vegetables, I’d be healthier.

Unfortunately, I do not like green beans as much as I like lava cakes. Green beans can be very tasty, don’t get me wrong, and I definitely wouldn’t want to eat lava cakes everyday for the rest of my life. But I feel like it bears saying– vegetables are like, fine. But against chocolate, sugar, and cream– how could they compete?

Because vegetables are healthy, there has long been this interesting and very reductive argument that all we really need to do to fix our food system is to grow fewer grains and oil seeds, and replace them with vegetables. That way, the price of lava cakes (made with wheat flour, corn syrup, and canola oil) will go up, and the price of vegetables will go down. And then because “The Free Market,” everyone will start craving late night stir fries, instead of lava cakes.

I know this is a very reductive version of the argument (though I swear, I’ve heard it made this way before). Thoughtful people make a more nuanced argument about increasing supply to make fresh produce more accessible to more people, who will then be more able to explore healthy food and cooking and fall in love (and see the value) in food that not only can taste good but that makes them feel good too. Maybe I’ll sum it up as one ag guy often does. “People think they can’t afford healthy food. But I say you can’t afford food that makes you sick. Diabetes’ll cost you way more in the end.” That, in short, is what people say.

Setting aside the taste, health, access, and affordability issues, I just want to address the agricultural part of this argument. I’ve heard a lot of people over my career make blanket statements about growing certain crops in certain places, and why it is or isn’t possible, in terms of climate or geography, to do so. Hell, I’ve made these blanket statements before (one of my biggest weaknesses, as a thinker, writer, and speaker, is an impulse to generalize). So I want to take a minute here to elucidate why– despite all the demand and desire, all the activism and intention, all the farmers markets and documentaries– corn and soybean acres in the U.S. have remained largely unchanged over the last decade.

But I can sum it up for you right now, if you need a TL;DR. Growing vegetables is hard.

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If you’ve never been to California’s Central Valley, I recommend it. It is a wild place. My first job out of college had me driving it from Chico to Fresno about once a week. How many hours I spent driving alone on the 5 or the 99, I cannot say, but it was a lot. And the amount and diversity of agriculture I saw along those miles was incredible.

It wasn’t until I came back later though, doing research for my second book, that I went to a tomato processing facility for the first time. I’d been in many farm fields before, but I’d never followed the semis that left them, tracking them from the dusty, plastic-covered rows to the complex where they would be turned from mountains of fresh fruit into palette-sized totes of tomato paste.

A tomato processing facility is an amazing feat of industrial engineering. The top of the facility, where the tomatoes are dumped out the bottom of the trucks into what is essentially the top of a water slide, is many stories above the main entrance. Trucks drive up the hill, are weighed, empty their payload, and head back to the field for another filling. The tomatoes immediately enter the gravity-powered system, flowing down over an intricate system of water baths, cleaning steps, and human and mechanical sorting stations. Damaged and degraded fruit are sorted out, dirt and debris are washed away, and by the time the fruit has fallen all those stories onto the factory floor, they are a uniform, safe, and high-quality batch containing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of fruits. Now comes the much trickier part, the heating, skin removal, blending, and packaging, maintaining the highest levels of food safety all the time. It is a carefully managed dance of humans and machines that turns out tens of thousands of gallons of tomato paste every day.

The infrastructure of this facility alone cost tens of millions of dollars to build, and millions more to operate every year. It takes thousands of skilled employees to run it. And perhaps most importantly, it requires tens of thousands of acres of canning tomato production to keep this facility (and ones like it) fed with enough tomatoes to keep it profitable. Without tomatoes coming in, the economics of the place simply don’t pencil.

When people talk about growing fruit and vegetables in new geographies (i.e. the Delta, Iowa), this is one of the key barriers that they don’t understand. In the modern food system, small, bespoke food processing facilities are not, outside fancy, high-dollar markets, competitive. If you want to sell tomato sauce, tomato paste, even just canned tomatoes profitably, you need a processing facility of a certain scale, and this is the kind of scale we’re talking about. No farmer, or even group of farmers, can afford to stand up a $30+ million facility in a new geography without the guarantee of tens of thousands of acres of production behind it.

And the production itself is not enough either. The production also has to be relatively proximate to the facility, or otherwise the farmers (or the processor) won’t be able to afford the freight. The roads between the farms and the facility must be well-maintained, to reliably hold fully loaded semis. The farms must be efficient and productive enough to work with a buyer at this scale, and the facility itself must have established relationships in the food manufacturing industry, to reliably move the scale of product they’ll be creating. The farms and the facility will need thousands of workers with various and diverse talents— and places to live. Those workers will also need other work during the off-season when the facility won’t have the hours. These are just some of the direct economic costs at play.

And there’s the intangibles too. If you ever go to a tomato processing facility (or any kind of food processing facility) you’ll notice that the cooking and blending of millions of tomatoes every day results in a very distinctive smell. It’s not necessarily bad, but it is very strong (sniff a freshly opened can of tomatoes, then multiply that by a million). If you’re building a food processing facility, it better be in a place where the neighbors understand what you’re doing, where you have social license to operate (or at least enough clout to ignore it). Your neighbors will also have to be okay with the ridiculous number of semis roaring down their quiet country roads during peak season, and the countless other changes your new industry will bring to their community.

In short— production of fruits and vegetables is not the simple question of one farmer’s decision. An industry, especially an industry involving a perishable product, requires an ecosystem, and a finely tuned one at that. To establish one would take decades, and would require an incredible amount of investment and regional transformation.

I’m not the first person (and certainly not the smartest person) to point out that fruit and vegetable production is an infrastructure-intensive activity, and that you can’t just do it anywhere a given farmer might want. I also know that there’s people reading this thinking, “we don’t want them to grow tomatoes for paste or processing– we want them to grow and sell fresh produce!”

Well, there’s two problems with that. The first problem is for consumers. Fresh produce is expensive, it’s perishable, and we require it to be very high quality. If growers only sold fresh produce, they won’t sell like 40-70% of the food they grow, because it’s damaged, deformed, too large or too small (USDA grade A is a high standard!). Plus, we’d be way more seasonally confined in terms of food availability, which might sound fine and dandy to folks who preach seasonal eating, but if what you really care about is health, getting rid of frozen, canned, and otherwise processed options is not good– it’s making fruits and vegetables even less accessible. Fresh produce is also the most expensive way to access these products, which is in itself exclusionary.

The second problem is for the farmers. Being unable to sell the large swath of their crop that currently goes to processing would rob them of critical income streams, and lead to significantly more waste. They might get a higher premium for what they can sell fresh, but selling processing produce is how they move a higher volume of product, and how they do it much more consistently. The processing market also smooths out the market for produce overall– if farmers had to dump all of their crop into the market immediately after harvest, the result in terms of price would be devastating. Everyone would be selling huge quantities of fresh stuff at the same time, and then they’d sell nothing most of the rest of the year. The reality is, for commercial produce growers, the processing market is often the difference between making a profit and going under.

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I say all this, not because I don’t think we should grow a more diverse crop mix in the U.S. (I do!). I say this because I think “grow more fruits/veg/speciality crops” gets thrown around as a cure-all as if farmers are nefariously choosing to grow grain because they hate Americans and want us to be unhealthy. It is simply not accurate to say that any given farmer could grow whatever they want and just figure it out in a season or two, if they were willing to put in the work.

It would take hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure investment, and a huge local/regional movement to start, say, a commercial tomato industry in the Delta, or in Iowa. And that’s aside from the fact that current commercial tomato varieties have been fine-tuned to places like California, and so add to that significant price tag a few tens of millions more dollars (and decades) for plant breeding, pest protection, and field management research to get crops growing profitably in these geographies.

The tomato industry, like most in the Central Valley, was a century in the making. Consider one of the newest and most profitable crops in the region, pistachios, which was first planted in earnest in the 1960s and ‘70s. It’s worth noting that one of the priorities of that industry is to geographically condense production as much as possible, in an effort to avoid the need to build additional processing facilities. That’s how expensive specialty crop processing facilities are. Even when you sell a fancy, globally in-demand nut, you’re still trying to avoid building infrastructure, because building and running facilities messes with the delicate economics for everyone from farmers to consumers.

I’m sure there are some who have made it this far and think– “well, the scale is the problem. Our food system should operate at a smaller scale than this.” Sure. That’s a critique that resonates with me. But reducing the scale of the system is not something that individuals or groups can do on their own. Regulation could do it (maybe?– the global nature of these markets makes this a tricky proposition too). Other than that, it would take a much more invasive changes to business, finance, and employment, maybe to our fundamental economic system. Either way, these change would have to go well beyond food and farming to disrupt cropping decisions in any serious way.

There’s others of you thinking, “well, this is why I shop at the farmers market, because that’s me, voting for a smaller scale.” I mean this in the gentlest way possible (I too like to go to the farmer’s market!), but the amount of food moved, and money earned, at all the farmers markets in America is equivalent to the annual revenue of a few dozen Walmart stores (farmers markets: ~$3 billion, U.S. Walmarts: ~$442 billion, all U.S. grocery: ~$846 billion). Farmers markets cannot, do not, and will not any time soon be able to influence any large-scale land use change or farmer decision-making related to crop choice. Not when there’s a system that’s 300 times larger, more powerful, and more persuasive operating in the same space. While the vast majority of Americans continue to buy the vast majority of their food at grocery stores, fruit and vegetable production will remain a question of low prices, massive scale, regional concentration, and high productivity.

Simply saying that farmers should “grow less grain and more vegetables” does not seem like a viable strategy to me. It is a nice idea, but it’s wildly over-simplified, and it belies a lack of awareness of the realities of the farm and food systems. It’s a nice mantra or slogan, but it’s reductive to the extent that it doesn’t really make any sense. If we want to invest in growing vegetables in more regions of the country, we should do that. But the first step is not swapping what seeds are put in the ground. The first step is figuring out a massive financing challenge, changing the hearts and minds of a region’s worth of farmers and their communities, and securing future customers who are willing to manage through price and supply disruptions as the region gets on its feet. In other words, if you really want American farmers to grow more fruits and vegetables, there’s a path to doing so, but it is not a simple one. There is a road to that goal, but it is a long, exhausting, and perhaps impossible one.

And if we make it to the end, we’ll face the next challenge— actually convincing Americans to put down their lava cakes, and try a green bean instead.