On March 10, 2015 I sent the following commentary ( and the link to the Dan Barry article) to a number of Rhode Islanders with whom I’ve had professional association:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/25/sports/baseball/through-years-of-change-pawtucket-ri-always-had-mccoy-stadium.html?_r=0
To all,
I’m an old baseball kid…grew up playing sand lot, little league, municipal ball in Louisville, Kentucky.
I know and understand round ball kids.
This morning I listened to two guys in their 50s standing in the Newman YMCA discussing high school basketball (about their children) as a mother would lovingly discuss the attributes of their newborn.
When I heard the Pawtucket Red Sox organization was sold to a group of investors that ‘wanted’ to move the team to Providence from Pawtucket – and saw subsequent articles where the Governor of Rhode Island and Mayor of Providence make studied ‘politically calculated’ statements – I knew….
Rhode Island was, to me, culturally tone deaf.
As Thomas Merton said ‘ if you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell’….I guess that goes for cities and states also.
Dan Barry has written a lovely article (See Above) that captures the cultural meaning of McCoy Stadium, the community value of the place, and the ‘business’ that is baseball.
Moving the PawSox’s organization from Pawtucket is economically insane. I live in a state – in a nation – where many, many communities struggle for their economic existence.
I have no doubt that our economy ‘robs Peter to pay Paul’ in a manner that has destroyed much in America. That same modern American economy also concentrates wealth in a manner that shocks mindful people.
…Back to being that old round ball kid – I’m always looking for the bright spot. I also wonder if I’ve just grown old and cranky.
In this case, I don’t think I’m overreacting. The PawSox sale is a BIG deal!
I am sad about this ‘deal’. I am sad for Pawtucket. I am sad for little children who saw a wonderful game with their family for a reasonable price. I am sad for the Governor and the Mayor of Providence that they do not see and defend our State’s cultural values. I am sad for a group of wealthy buyers (some of whom are Rhode Islanders) who do not seem to respect local communities.
I received perhaps ten responses. Several were very supportive (two were highly complementary, both from senior executives in substantial Rhode Island institutions). One was harshly critical and requested I remove them from my distribution list (which I did…by the way she was my former companion).
I want to tie this letter to comments on the state of agriculture in Rhode Island.
Wendell Berry in The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture in America (1977), states:
… we and our country create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land; that as we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so cannot possibly flourish alone; that, therefore, our culture must be our response to our place, our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other, and so neither can be better than the other.
Mr. Berry is telling us the state of our land is a cultural statement – and how we use land reflects the current state of our culture. My point with the PawSox commentary was to explain, in my opinion, that a land use decision to move the PawSox to Providence was culturally thoughtless land use – for the reasons I (and Dan Barry in the New York Times) described.
The Rhode Island Food Economy
98% of our food comes from ‘somewhere else’.
Rhode Island farmers – even the few that have cash flows above $1M (a few vegetable operations and a few nursery/sod operations) – have very low profit margins. The smaller ones (the majority) work very hard for little money.
In my opinion, state and local governments have responded to the increasing demand for high quality local food with only marginal economic improvement programs. The State, with some private foundation support, provides $200,000 each year for competitive grants to small farmers. Good hearted as it is, it is a trivial amount of money if our communities are serious about improving the agricultural economy.
A large part of the problem is a national problem. The food economy is large – and concentrated – in many and complicated ways. Large growers of grain, livestock, and specialty crops; large food processors; and large aggregators, distributors, and brokers dominate the market.
98% of the State’s food, therefore, has nothing to do with our local economy, other than some local retailers and processors have businesses that resell out-of-state food. Even the local retail, processing, and distribution are dominated by non-local companies (Whole Foods Market, Stop and Shop, Shaw’s).
Also, much of that large scale national farming and food processing industry makes use of poorly paid ‘illegal’ immigrant labor.
As a final economic thought, it is my intuition that numerous Rhode Islanders hold equity stocks or bonds (through personal portfolios or pension/annuity accounts) in some of those ‘somewhere else’ food corporations.
What agriculture is appropriate in Rhode Island?
Rhode Island is a glacial landscape full of rocks and soil deposited by a past ice age. The soils vary broadly – and much of the soil is rocky with qualities that make it inappropriate for agriculture. The weather can be harsh, so the growing season is narrow in comparison to more temperate places.
There are, however, areas with important agricultural soils.
It appears, from my work with a number of local farmers, that those important soils make very good ground for specialty vegetable crops.
Other areas of the State provide good pasture for livestock and good land for orchards and other fruit production.
Rhode Island is not the ‘fertile delta’, but it is hospitable to very good production of vegetables, livestock, and certain kinds of fruit.
From our research, it appears there are several thousand additional acres of land that could provide a good home to farmers and their diverse crops.
Developing a Culture that Supports Expanded Local Agriculture
My own experience over the past twenty years indicates, to a very large extent, the barriers to significant expansion of local agriculture are primarily cultural.
Let me first list some economic and agro-economic principles I believe critical to an expanded agriculture:
- The environment is not a minor factor of production – but rather is ‘an envelope containing, provisioning, and sustaining the entire economy’ (Paul Hawkin).
- The limiting factor to farm economic development is the availability and functionality of life-supporting natural services that have no substitutes (many also have no market value –‘public goods’ – air quality, etc.).
- Misconceived or unintelligently designed business systems, historically poor population settlement patterns (mostly as a result of a lack of knowledge), and wasteful patterns of consumption are the primary causes of the loss of life-supporting natural services.
- Farm and food economies can be best managed in democratic, market-based systems of production and distribution in which human work, manufactured goods, finance, and life-supporting natural services are all fully and adequately valued.
- A key result of knowledgeable, effective and empathetic employment of people, money, and life-supporting natural services is a significant increase in resource productivity – farm methods emphasizing practices that promote enhanced resource productivity utilizing new agro-ecological knowledge and practice experiences from the past twenty (20) years with organic, biodynamic, permaculture, and traditional agriculture.
- Community welfare is best served by improving the quality and flow of desired natural services delivered – plainly, we best serve the community by improving the environmental qualities and agricultural productivity of the State’s farms.
Basic agro-ecological economic principles:
The innovations occurring in the ‘sustainability sector’ of agriculture take three interwoven and complimentary paths:
- Increase the resource and ecological effectiveness of all forms of farming, seeking new ways to enhance production utilizing fewer resources – both through direct increases in productivity and through biomimicry and closed loop non-toxic practices.
- Design agricultural practices so that the farm restores, sustains, and expands life-giving natural services with only limited, no-harm external inputs.
- Regenerate the farm’s economy by utilizing innovative customer/financing arrangements such as community-supported agriculture and collaborative farm/value- added food business relationships to leverage increased productivity – providing additional asset and enterprise growth.
These principles are the work of many practitioners of sustainable agriculture. They are based upon traditional ‘settled’ agriculture, the work of indigenous farmers, and the work of modern agro-ecologists.
If the people of the State want to implement these practice principles, Rhode Island is perhaps fortunate that it is not dominated by commodity crop farmers and concentrated animal feeding operations. We, therefore, do not have the direct friction of those agricultural lobbies.
We are, however, dominated by financial industries and financial industry lobbies – as is the rest of the country. The access to any significant capital for the development of a robust local food economy is not available through traditional banks. Farm Credit East helps as it can, but they also have standard credit protocols and collateral requirements that make any start-up farmer ineligible.
The result is little capital for food economic development.
Now I need to return to the PawSox for a moment.
The other HUGE problem is that our State’s monetary economy is also largely ‘somewhere else’. It appears that a large number of our citizens are either satisfied with that economy or resigned to its workings.
The great ‘satisfier’ for the larger population appears to be the pension plan or annuity….and the hope of retirement. The great ‘satisfier’ for many wealthy individuals appears to be they have won, and others have lost – somehow the economy becomes a contest for domination and bragging rights.
Pension plans and annuities would be helpful if they were the result of healthy economic practices. Unfortunately, they have become an abstraction of real honest money management. Large investment pools like pension funds also have allowed financial brokers and ‘just clever’ executives to concentrate wealth through very large fee and compensation packages.
This is a cultural problem and leads to deals like the PawSox sale – where a group of ‘winners’ do not truly consider the losers. It also leads to enormous problems for those economic ‘losers’ – in this case Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
That same cultural problem is also the primary constraint to a more robust local food economy. In essence, there is no real ‘monied’ interest in creating that larger local food economy because the lack of an aggregated existing local food economy does not provide a means for the financial industry to extract a portion of a large cash flow through profit sharing agreements, large fees or compensation packages.
Thus little money for local farm, food, and nutrition businesses…and a pricing structure dominated by large national companies using poorly paid ‘illegal’ workers.
Are there practical and feasible ways to encourage significant change in the agricultural economy?
Solving the problems of the national/international economy are complicated, difficult, and impossible to conceive.
Creating just, intelligent, and productive farms and food businesses seems more sensible and feasible. It also only requires the cooperation of a small number of like-minded local investors, farmers, food companies…cooperation is the key.
Richard Pace 