Walmart’s Landscape Changing Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food Campaign

The Atlantic Magazine published an article by Corby Kummer in their March 2010 issue about the ongoing controversy over the impacts of Walmart moving into the organic, locally-grown food retail space. The article’s opening line reads, “BUY MY FOOD at Walmart? No thanks.” But as the writer discovers during his research, many of his preconceived notions about Walmart may no longer be justified.

The article goes on to discuss Walmart’s recent efforts to compete with high end grocers such as Whole Foods.

“I started looking into how and why Walmart could be plausibly competing with Whole Foods, and found that its produce-buying had evolved beyond organics, to a virtually unknown program—one that could do more to encourage small and medium-size American farms than any number of well-meaning nonprofits, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign,” says Kummer in the article.

The Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food Campaign
(as excerpted from The Atlantic)

The program, which Walmart calls Heritage Agriculture, will encourage farms within a day’s drive of one of its warehouses to grow crops that now take days to arrive in trucks from states like Florida and California. In many cases the crops once flourished in the places where Walmart is encouraging their revival, but vanished because of Big Agriculture competition…

As with most Walmart programs, the clear impetus is to claim a share of consumer spending: first for organics, now for locally grown food. But buying local food is often harder than buying organic. The obstacles for both small farm and big store are many: how much a relatively small farmer can grow and how reliably, given short growing seasons; how to charge a competitive price when the farmer’s expenses are so much higher than those of industrial farms; and how to get produce from farm to warehouse.

Walmart knows all this, and knows that various nonprofit agricultural and university networks are trying to solve the same problems. In considering how to build on existing programs (and investments), Walmart talked with the local branch of the Environmental Defense Fund, which opened near the company’s Arkansas headquarters when Walmart started to look serious about green efforts, and with the Applied Sustainability Center at the University of Arkansas. The center (of which the Walmart Foundation is a chief funder) is part of a national partnership called Agile Agriculture, which includes universities such as Drake and the University of New Hampshire and nonprofits like the American Farmland Trust.* To get more locally grown produce into grocery stores and restaurants, the partnership is centralizing and streamlining distribution for farms with limited growing seasons, limited production, and limited transportation resources.

Walmart says it wants to revive local economies and communities that lost out when agriculture became centralized in large states.

The article concludes that in an ideal world people would have a direct relationship with the farmers that produce their food. But for those people that can’t or choose not to, Walmarts have developed a model where they can offer affordable, healthy whole foods in a way that is friendly to the surrounding local economy. “I’m not sure I’m convinced that the world’s largest retailer is set on rebuilding local economies it had a hand in destroying, if not literally, then in effect,” says Kumer. “But I’m convinced that if it wants to, a ruthlessly well-run mechanism can bring fruits and vegetables back to land where they once flourished, and deliver them to the people who need them most.”

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