Variety is the spice of life in the food industry.
To paraphrase Rogers and Hammerstein, the farmer and the foodie should be friends. Yet, the way the relationship has been allowed to evolve in Australia, and particularly Tasmania, the commercial farmer is too often painted as the villain in the relationship.
Let’s call a spade a spade – without farmers, there are no foodies. Farms come in all shapes and sizes – small and large, commercial and hobby. Without all of these farms, and farmers, you don’t have a food industry. You can huff and puff and try to blow this theory down, but it’s true.
Recently, the local tourism or hospitality industry (the names seem to be interchangeable) was bemoaning the advent of amateurs into their business – people opening up their homes for paying overnight guests, without the strictures imposed on licensed B&Bs. Unfair, they shouted. We have to abide by the rules and these amateurs fling open the front door, take in travelers, charge the going rate and pocket the proceeds.
Yet many of the same people complaining about ‘amateurs’ in the B&B sector are actually promoting a similar situation in the agriculture sector.
There are farmers’ markets popping up all over the place in Tasmania. They offer preserves and jams, eggs, dairy and meat products, all manner of fruit and veg – in all varieties of free range, chemical-free, organic, you name it.
Most of the farmers supplying these markets are small, and often they’re not ‘commercial’ in the sense that the farmer could make a living from their activities.
This doesn’t worry their customers. No-one checks the veracity of what they claim; no-one checks that they comply with the myriad of rules and regulations imposed on conventional farmers.
However, rather than attack the legitimacy of these small farmers, conventional farmers welcome them with open arms. They know that variety is truly the spice of life – and that these small producers meet demand from a particular market segment that has particular and specific expectations.
In our world, the aim is to grow the metaphorical pie – and make sure that every consumer can find the exact produce that they want.
Yet we hear a lot from the foodies who seem to despise anything that is mass produced. They regularly denigrate the products of conventional agriculture and the farmers who produce these products.
What we have here is clearly a communications breakdown.
Farmers are intent on feeding people. This holds true whether they be small or large producers, whether they supply the supermarket giants or dedicated aficionados at the local farmers’ markets. It is all about providing choice in a population where there are more and more distinct consumer demographics.
In the US, there’s a farming website called the Daily Yonder (www.dailyonder.com).
Recently, it brought together Missouri farmer Richard Oswald, and urban food enthusiast, Erin Fairbanks of Brooklyn, NY. They discussed the gulf between family farmers and foodies.
The foodies often paint conventional mid-sized farmers as “the enemy,” rather than as potential allies in the food-reform movement, people caught in the middle between corporate agriculture and the local food enthusiasts.
“Right in the middle (of these two agricultural systems) are people like me who are multi-generational family farmers,” Oswald said.
“We are the people who have the accumulated knowledge that’s passed down from one generation to the next about how to grow food.”
“When the local food movement has conversations … they tend to lump us all in with the industrial food folks,” Oswald said.
“It makes it very difficult for people like me who have to fight to stay on the farm at all. It makes it frustrating for me to be lumped in with what’s considered to be an undesirable life. … We’re not industrial food producers, we’re family farmers.”
Fairbanks, for her part, admits she’s on the back foot when trying to tell a farmer like Oswald where he is going wrong because she is not a farmer herself and has learnt largely by reading books and trial and error on a very small scale.
Perhaps the problem we have is that the foodies live in the city and farmers live in the country; and, these days, seldom the twain shall meet.
The common ground between farmers and foodies in Tasmania should be the end product – no matter what the type of farm it comes from. We should all be supporting the fabulous food, wine, ciders, wool and more that is produced in this unique environment; and working together to ensure that all our family farms survive and thrive. Only then will we be able to continue to offer the diversity and quality of food and fibre products that have made Tasmania such a great place to live.
TFGA chief executive Jan Davis
