Back-of-the-envelope calculations have always intrigued me and do have a storied history. I can’t actually recall doing this during an animated and passionate conversation in a restaurant—as in the movies—but I do love doing such ballpark calculations. Described as something between a guess and a rigorous calculation, their utility is to allow the proposal or exploration of an idea or solution to be fleshed out without getting bogged down in the details.
Dreaming: We have recently been advocating the dreaming of what our food system and foodshed could be as a first step in using food as a tool in pursuing greater sustainability. There is certainly a time for rigorous analysis, and there are great people out there with the skills and the patience to do this work, but for the rest of us, playing with some very simple data about a community’s local food system can help frame the broad issues and reveal the scope of the possibilities ahead.
Estimating expenditures: In order to draw attention to the opportunity to bolster the local economy by using more local food, over the past 20 years I have periodically dug out some statistics to allow an estimation of how much our county’s residents are spending on food. As a very rough calculation, I applied the average food buying habits of Western US residents to our population.
$200 million!! My latest calculation is $195 million dollars, or roughly $200 million spent per year by county residents at home and away from home. The data shows that of that $200M, at least $40M is animal products and $26M is fruits and veggies—key items that we do grow here. There is a lot of fine print involved, but the main message is that we have a great opportunity to divert some significant portion of that to our local producers and our local economy rather than elsewhere.
How much spent locally? My guess, based on input from related studies and colleagues, is that most communities currently spend perhaps 2% of that locally (which we will define as local and then regional)—a very hard number to define and pin down. That seems regrettably low to me, but on the other hand, reflects the magnitude of the opportunity facing us and allows us to put some numbers to our dreams:
- For our county of 50,000 people, perhaps 2% of $200M or $4M is spent locally now.
- What if we sourced 10% locally—that would be $20M. Not bad.
- What if half of that was purchased directly from farmers and ranchers—$10M.
- What if that $10M was provided by 20 producers—that’s $500,000 revenue each.
- Or, provided by 100 producers—$100,000 for each producer—again, not bad!
Dreaming of what could be: This brings up a series of additional questions to dream about:
- How much more of our food could we grow in our gardens—home, community, and school?—a less tangible, but very real economic opportunity.
- What if we committed as a community to always paying fair prices to producers?
- What if local policies made local growing, processing, and marketing a priority?
- What if we, by habit, looked for our food locally first, then regionally, and then with attention to the impact on others and the earth when sourcing from afar?
How? The “how” of doing all this starts to move beyond the dream stage, but knowing where we want to go is the essential first step and should take some critical, compassionate, but wide-ranging thinking before we get down into the weeds of making it so.
See the details for La Plata County here.
To explore this data for your own area, see our DYI Foodability pdf
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