Making Local Food Work: The Challenges and Opportunities of Today’s Small Farmers by Brandi Janssen (review)

Given the recent and continued growth of local, organic, and non-GMO foods, Brandi Janssen’s Making Local Food Work is an especially timely publication. She illustrates the complexities and challenges of small farms producing local foods in a commodity-driven state where farms are typically huge and associated with corporations. Based on Janssen’s qualitative research conducted from 2008 to 2012 in Iowa, the book provides case studies of the difficulties in balancing small farm profitability and social impacts experienced by people involved with community-supported agriculture (CSA), farmers’ markets, and farm-to-school produce, among others. She challenges the view that local foods and commodity production have a necessarily oppositional relationship.

The first chapter explores the market growth and popular interest in local foods. Janssen introduces various sorts of local food production like CSA. Popular assumptions about local food, including the notion that buying food directly from farmers incentivizes consumers to become informed advocates for sustainable agriculture, are shown as oversimplifications. Instead, the author reveals that there is considerable overlap between commercial farms and local ones. Her treatment of this topic is even-handed, as she suggests that both production methods frequently deal with similar issues, people, and trends. By describing, in the second chapter, how Americans have come to view farms and farmers, she introduces the topic of marketing. Janssen notes that while CSA and farmers’ markets receive most media attention, those are but two pieces of local food production. She asks important questions about who feels welcome at such markets, their locations, and if they are cost-prohibitive to some with lower incomes.

Much of the remainder of the book introduces people involved in various types of local farming. Interviews with those engaging in CSA and farmers’ markets are included, but the difficulties of meat and dairy producers may be the most interesting examples. Janssen explains how much more they must fit their operations into the same agricultural structure as conventional producers. Not relying solely on interviews, she participates with local farms as well. Her work with a farm-to-school initiative details the complicated regulations, tight budgets, and strict product packaging rules with which local farmers must contend—much like conventional farmers. Janssen’s work on a local farm producing microgreens and wheatgrass suggests that marketing and distribution are critical to small-scale producers. She provides other evidence, like cross-pollinations with GMO crops and errant crop-dusting, that demonstrates local and conventional are not parallel but intertwined. However, when labor is discussed, Janssen highlights the benefits of local farming and the problems that often plague the conventional. While lauding the flexibility and community impact of the local farms, she does not shy away from the problems of economics or the lack of benefits (e.g., health care) that exist. These issues are brought together in a strong concluding chapter offering realistic suggestions.

Making Local Food Work is a most readable and informative work on a growing agricultural movement. It succeeds in showing that local and conventional agriculture in a commodity-driven state cannot be entirely separated from each other. Janssen demonstrates that much can be learned by local food producers from large-scale farms. Written in a mostly nonacademic style, readers will find the book quite accessible. At the same time, it could be a useful addition to a college course reading list for human geography, regional studies, and agricultural sciences. Those with Great Plains interests may find the chapter on Iowa’s agricultural system especially relevant, as it examines issues like dealing with extensions, land availability, and prices and farm implements, all of which are applicable to other areas of the Great Plains and Midwest.