Rhode Island Positioned to Give Local Food Movement Needed Boost
By Frank Carini / ecoRI News Staff
Exeter farmer Ben Coerper has spent the past dozen years listening to Rhode Island politicians and bureaucrats talk about the need to build a robust local food system. He appreciates the discussions and the support, but is frustrated by a lack of any real progress.
“I mean, there’s a lot of talk and there’s a lot of people doing things in the name of bolstering local agriculture, but it doesn’t seem substantially better to me,” Coerper said during a late-winter interview. “I don’t know if the percent of food produced and consumed in Rhode Island has changed in that time, but certainly not substantially.”
From 2017 to 2022, about a dozen new farms opened in Rhode Island, bringing the total to about 1,050, and farmland increased by 4% to 59,076 acres, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Narragansett resident Azure Cygler, a research associate at the University of Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources Center, opened her farm in 2020. It’s a bit different than Coerper’s, but that’s what makes local food so interesting and vital.
Rhody Wild Sea Gardens LLC grows kelp and oysters, in a leased 2.5-acre site in the Sakonnet River in Portsmouth. Her first kelp crop was harvested in 2021. Sugar kelp is a brown marine algae that resembles lasagna noodles and often washes up on local beaches. Its value as a food is undoubted in Asia, where it’s widely cultivated and consumed for its vitamins, minerals, and fiber. It has been used for millennia as an organic fertilizer.
Cygler sells most of her kelp to farmers to use as fertilizer or as an nutritional supplement in livestock feed. She can only sell it wet for human consumption. The state hasn’t given her permission to dry it and sell it as human food.
Despite years of support for the movement and more awareness about the importance of local food — for both human and environmental health — the amount of local sustenance being bought and consumed here hasn’t changed much since Coerper and his fiancée, now wife, Rachael Slattery, opened Wild Harmony Farm on Exeter’s Victory Highway in 2012.
New England produces about 10% of the food it consumes. In Rhode Island, that percentage gets cut in half. Much of what is produced and consumed here is milk and potatoes, neither of which Wild Harmony Farm nor Rhody Wild Sea Gardens sells. Those percentages have changed little since Coerper and Slattery started a farm and became parents.
A significant amount of taxpayer money and state staff time have been spent commissioning studies and reports, holding legislative hearings, and creating task forces to address the local food economy. Coerper believes that money and time could be better spent.
“I am regularly saddened to see the massive amounts of tax-payer money going to various programs that are supposedly designed to bolster the local food movement,” he wrote in an email prior to our online conversation. “Yet every time I attend a government function, the food served is not sourced from Rhode Island farms.”
To highlight his point about how taxpayer money is and can be wasted, Coerper noted legislation filed last year by Sherry Roberts, R-West Greenwich. The bill, which was held for further study, called for, among other things, restarting the Department of Environmental Management’s organic farming certification program and allocating it an annual budget of $250,000.
“DEM was very understaffed to effectively run an organic accreditation program,” he wrote in the email. “This led to very slow turnarounds and very little support to the farmers. Yes, it will be more expensive to go elsewhere, but I have to say that it already feels well worth it.”
A more effective use of that $250,000, he suggested, would be to add it to the state government’s food budget, “so that they could prioritize serving local organic food at all functions.”
“The primary hurdle that Rhode Island farmers face is that most consumers aren’t willing to pay enough for food to actually support farmers to make a full-time living without off-farm jobs,” Coerper said. “It’s way simpler than the government tries to make it. Just stop the hemorrhaging of funds that supposedly bolster local agriculture, and instead demand sourcing food locally at a fair price to the farmer.”
Cygler believes the state is doing a “wonderful” job supporting local food, but she said both Rhode Island and the farmers, producers, and harvesters here could better share their resources and expertise.
She noted an exchange of labor would work well for both the enterprises and the workers who make the enterprises possible as one example. She noted the seasonal employees she hires work from November to late April. When their work is done at Rhody Wild Sea Gardens, help at land-based farms is in season. There are five other kelp/oyster farming operations in the state with the same seasonal help needs.
‘We need to look at creative ways of sharing and cooperating,” Cygler said. “We can support each other in more direct ways.”
The former commercial fisher is working to help strengthen local food partnerships, like donating, bartering or renting extra greenhouse space to a fellow farmer or harvester; sharing equipment; and passing on wisdom to younger farmers and fishers.
As for how the state could better support local food, she said the Ocean State’s six kelp farmers would like to be able to dry and sell their product as human food, as most other coastal states allow.
While they can sell pulled-from-the-water kelp to consumers, Cygler noted most people wouldn’t know what to do with the soggy marine algae.
“I grow and harvest it and I’m at a loss of what to do with it,” she said, laughing.
Dried kelp is used in smoothies, soups, and salads as a vitamin- and nutrient-rich supplement.
“Tell us how we can dry and sell kelp,” Cygler said. “Find the state with the strictest regulations and we’ll use that process.”
Wild Harmony Farm, which has three employees, is a GMO-free operation that feeds only organic grains and grass to its animals — a collection of cows, pigs, and chickens. The chickens are raised on a partner farm that specializes in poultry — Coerper sets the parameters of how the Wild Harmony Farm chickens are raised. The farm’s grass grows in naturally fertilized fields, and no pesticides are sprayed.
A robust local food system would help Rhode Island secure sustenance in times of trouble, such as prolonged drought in California or another pandemic that disrupts the global food system. It would also bolster the local economy, and would help mitigate the climate crisis.
Disappearing farmland — an ongoing concern as older farmers age out of the demanding work and sell or lease their property to developers — and the high cost of what remains makes farming in Rhode Island especially challenging.
Rhode Island’s transition to suburbanization has cost the state 80% of its farmland since 1945, and the resulting lack of access to affordable farmland threatens the state’s agricultural sector, according to DEM.
Rhode Island also has the highest percentage of beginning farmers in the country, according to the USDA.
Besides creating jobs and helping the local economy, local food also provides environmental benefits. Kelp stores carbon and removes excess nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus from seawater. Cygler noted kelp captures 20 times more carbon than land-based forests per acre, because it grows so fast.
Kelp farms also help buffer wave action and storm surge.
The state’s 40-page food strategy — Relish Rhody, published in 2017 — “envisions a sustainable, equitable food system that is uniquely Rhode Island; one that builds on our traditions, strengths, and history while encouraging innovation and supporting the regional goal of 50 percent of the food eaten in New England be produced in the region by 2060.”
Now of that can happen unless more people buy more local food.
“I think where the state could be more helpful is in improving the marketability of product,” Coerper said. “And the thing that stands out the most to me, that I mentioned to you, was you go to any of these events that they’re putting on to support local agriculture and they’re just serving crap food. It’s not local. It’s like the simplest thing you could do.”
The 42-year-old believes taxpayer money would be better spent getting local food into local institutions, such as schools, hospitals, state agencies, the Statehouse, and more restaurants.
“I just think that where they’re putting their money is not actually all that helpful,” Coerper said. “It seems to me it would make so much more sense for them to just buy food or put the money toward subsidizing local food, so that it can go into the school system or the hospitals or into the government itself. They’re not buying local food.”
He singled out crop insurance as a massive funding waste stream.
“All the money that goes to ensuring bad farming practices are the hugest waste of government money, and I think it’s causing so many more problems than it’s fixing, because it ensures that farmers can farm the way they always have, regardless of how unproductive it is and how damaging it is to the ecosystem,” Coerper said. “That’s the crop insurance system. We should be using that money to teach farmers how to grow in more environmentally resilient ways that are improving soil rather than destroying soil.”
Tillage and chemical spraying are the bad practices Coerper is most concerned about.
The federal government has long funneled billions in subsidies to industrial-scale farms that produce enormous amounts of pesticide-tainted corn and soybeans. All this monoculture and overproduction of two crops harm the environment and public health.
The vast majority of Big Ag corn grown in the United States is used in livestock feed and for fuel ethanol production. Corn-based ethanol, which for years has been mixed in huge quantities into gasoline sold at U.S. pumps, is likely a much bigger contributor to global warming than straight gasoline, according to a 2022 study. Ninety-eight percent of gasoline in the United States contains some ethanol, usually at 10%. About 40% of all corn is used to make ethanol.
Corn is also processed into industrial products including starch, sweeteners (high-fructose corn syrup), corn oil, and beverage and industrial alcohols. U.S. farmers plant about 90 million acres of corn annually.
About 70% percent of the soybeans grown in the United States are used for animal feed, Another 5% is used to make biodiesel. Soybeans are planted on an estimated 86 million acres.
This is why local food production is healthier for both us and the planet.