Aroostook County still grows more potatoes than any other county in the United States. Somerset County looks like the state’s “bread basket” with its burgeoning grain production. The Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association is the oldest and largest state organic organization in the country.
There’s good, local food here — and people who want to toil to grow it.
But even though local food keeps community land in production and money close to home, it still makes up a small portion of Mainers’ diets. This is the case even though we could probably grow most of the food we eat.
New research shows that up to 90 percent of Americans could be fed entirely with food grown or raised within 100 miles of their homes. The farmland mapping study by researchers at the University of California, Merced, was recently published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
“Very few farms in the U.S. are currently used for local food and instead are contributing to very long supply chains,” Elliott Campbell, a professor at U.C. Merced who co-authored the study, said, according to NPR. “If we wanted to earmark some of our croplands for our local needs it would be absolutely no problem to be 100 percent self-sufficient [in many places].”
To measure the capacity for community-supported agriculture, Campbell and his students examined how many calories farms within a certain radius of every U.S. city could produce. They then compared the potential calorie production with the needs of the nearby population.
Not everyone is on board with what the study’s conclusions infer, however. Steven Sexton with the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University pointed out that people don’t just consume calories. They consume food products that would be difficult to make everywhere.
Also, people don’t want to alter their diets depending on the season. Mainers would probably want fresh blueberries in the winter, for instance.
Campbell acknowledged the barriers, but said his aim was simply to show the potential for local farming. There’s plenty of room to grow.
