Walmart: The Answer to Locavore Prayers?

Walmart’s gettin’ serious about hitting the high-end, fresh supermarket market. Via Lee Zukor on Twitter comes this Atlantic article by Corby Kummer, The Great Grocery Smackdown.

Do read it. The article has that breathless, omgomgomg tone of a man having his circuits blown. In this case, it’s Walmart selling local, sustainable, and organic produce that’s rearranging Cummer’s brain:

[F]riends started telling me I needed to look seriously at Walmart’s efforts to sell sustainably raised food…

In the grocery section of the Raynham supercenter, 45 minutes south of Boston, I had trouble believing I was in a Walmart. … The first thing I saw, McIntosh apples, came from the same local orchard whose apples I’d just seen in the same bags at Whole Foods. The bunched beets were from Muranaka Farm, whose beets I often buy at other markets—but these looked much fresher. The service people I could find (it wasn’t hard) were unfailingly enthusiastic…

Part of the problem throughout this articl, though, is that Cummer is lumping a number of ideas together: local, fresh, sustainable — you know, all those Whole Foodsy sorta things — without really defining what he’s talking about at any given moment.

For example, above, he mentions Walmart’s bunched beets from Muranaka Farm which is the largest shipper of green onions in the US. By my read, Cummer implies that Muranaka is local to Massachusetts, but their mailing address is in Moorpark, CA, about as far from the Boston area as you can get in the US. It’s probably just careless writing on his part, but, as a result, I’m dubious that Cummer is concerned enough about the concept of “local food” to keep his mind on what he’s talking about.

Cummer later goes on to describe produce in a Walmart in Austin, Texas, for the purpose of comparing its product to Whole Foods’ in a taste-test:

“We support local farmers,” read a sign at an Austin Walmart. I didn’t see any farm names listed in the produce section, but I did find plastic tubs of organic baby spinach and “spring mix” greens with modern labeling that looked like it could be at Whole Foods.

Hey, no labels telling us who grew what, but Cummer saw a sign? Expressing support for local? I’d really, really like to sell this guy some ocean-front property in Duluth. I’m just not even sure Cummer knows enough about the ins and outs of buying and selling local food to have a meaningful discussion about it.

Which is too bad, because there is good information about Walmart’s local-buying efforts in this article. Cummer spends the midsection of the piece describing Walmart’s Heritage Agriculture program which is sit-up-and-take-notice interesting:

The program…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.

It’s a nice idea, but how will this revitalization actually work? After all, Big Agriculture didn’t just centralize for the heck of it. It got a big push toward massive centralization in the early sixties with the advent of the supermarket, the very model that Walmart now utterly dominates. So if we’re talking about small farmers and renewed countrysides, how can Walmart’s program work without centralizing them?

It can’t and it won’t. Walmart will still centralize distribution, as Cummer points. But it’s too bad he didn’t walk this story just a little bit further, becauseonce you see how Walmart will make this work,  the Heritage Agriculture story gets fascinating.

What are the stated strategies of this new program? From the above Walmart .pdf:

New Strategies: Heritage Agriculture
1. Local
2. Outreach to Women & Minority Owned Suppliers
3. Ethnic Item Competitive Advantagee

In short, Walmart will put those farmers to work who were marginalized or abandoned by Big Ag, namely, the growers that were left stranded in these devastated regions. For example:

ALCORN STATE UNIVERSITY AND NORTH MISSISSIPPI DELTA GROWERS COOP
Quick Facts
• Facility paid for by Mississippi Dept. of Ag, with support from Alcorn State University has all but sat dormant for close to 10 years. CHR [the .pdf never defines this acronym - E.D.] is working with Growers from the North Mississippi Delta Growers Coop to start utilizing this facility to pack and cool produce.
• Facility will be utilized as a shipping point for Mississippi Watermelons while growing in Northern Mississippi.
• CHR is working with Elizabeth Myles and Dr. Magid Dagher to try to make this facility more
efficient.
• Minimal volume now, but working toward building supply chains utilizing this facility.

This is rockin’, and boy howdy, you better believe Walmart is making a play for Whole Foods’ lefty shoppers with a strategy like this. Plus, buying from cooperatives? This even puts grocery co-ops on notice. Walmart is targeting the core natural foods shopper, a demographic that Whole Foods has recently jilted.

Politics and marketing aside, Heritage Agriculture really is an impressive program. The program outline mentions many regional farm groups that really can produce on a level that Walmart can actually use.

Plus, these groups certainly are local. For example, in my state, Minnesota, Walmart Heritage Agriculture flags Bushel Boy as a regional partner. Now an industrial tomato operation with 20 acres of greenhouses hardly sounds “heritage” to me. Sustainable? No. Local, yes.

But here’s the meat of the matter. What Heritage Agriculture fails to address, and what Cummer failed to ask anywhere in The Atlantic piece, is whether Walmart states in this program that it will honor its contracts and pay fair prices to these regional and local growers. No where in any of the .pdfs that I read from Walmart or in the work of Walmart’s think-tank partner program Agile Agriculture of the Univeristy of Arkansas, could I find reference to price, payment, money or contracts. Lots of talk about greenhouse gases at the Applied Sustainability Center, but no talk about payment or contracts. And if you want to talk “sustainability,” in my book, you have to talk economic sustainability for the farmer, not just carbon.

And we have to talk about contracts because Walmart is notorious for (a) breaking them, which Fair Food Fight recently discussed here, and (b) bullying farmers to accept lower prices. If Walmart is willing to “go to the altar” with these sustainability initiatives and declare that they will negotiate in good faith with growers and honor their contracts, you can color me very impressed. Indeed, I’ve been saying for a long time that we need solid regional food systems that support our farmers with sustainable prices, and if Walmart doesn’t flinch at paying (and charging) more, they very well could be the driving force behind those systems. 

That’s a big “if” I know. Ironic? Crazy? Not really. “Only Nixon could go to China,” as I’ve been saying lately. With a group like the North Mississippi Delta Growers co-op, which doesn’t seem to have a website and or a regional brand identity already like Bushel Boy does (Googling turned up next to nothing  on this co-op), you have to wonder how these farmers will weather in negotiations with a great white shark like Walmart.

It would have been great if Cummer had actually spoken to an actual farm group that’s been selling to Walmart in the Heritage Agriculture program, so we could see how contracts are working now. But it’s too early to tell what’s happening, anyway, even if the farmers are currently happy. We really won’t know how successful this program is for farmers until we get two or three years into it.

But we’ll be watching.