University Students Play Part in ‘Small-Mart Revolution’

DAVE LEFEVER
Editor

MILLERSVILLE, Pa. — Local food systems “are going to tear apart the centralized food system we have now,” predicts an economist, the author of a book called “The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition.”

Michael Shuman was a speaker last week at Millersville Univer-sity’s Ag Fest ‘07, organized by Dr. Marlene Arnold and her anthropology students. The event was the first of its kind on the campus.

“Local food is becoming economic,” Shuman said. Among the reasons he gave are that global companies are inefficient at distribution and that high fuel costs are contributing to the competitive advantage of local food. Huge retailers such as Wal-Mart also don’t have the means to adapt to increasingly popular local niche markets, he pointed out.

According to Shuman, a tipping point in the local food movement happened recently when the March 12 cover of Time magazine declared: “Forget Organic. Eat Local.”

Shuman said that global companies like McDonald’s are increasingly trying to “pass themselves off as being local,” a trend that underscores the notion that local businesses have advantages over gigantic competitors.

Telling a story — especially one that’s different from anyone else’s — is one strategy local businesses can use to woo customers, according to Shuman.
Other ways to draw a crowd include creating a “destination” on the farm or store, dominating a particular niche, direct distribution and using the Internet as a marketing tool.

Shuman is vice president for enterprise development for the Training and Development Corporation of Bucksport, Maine. He is the founder of Bay Friendly Chicken, a community-owned company in Salisbury, Md.

He joined in a panel with other leaders in the local food movement, including Brian Snyder of the Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture (PASA); Linda Aleci of Friends of Central Market and a Franklin and Marshall College professor, and Jonathan Thomas, a Lancaster County grower and sustainable farming activist who grazes goats and makes hay on a farm in the Manheim area.

In an informal roundtable over lunch, joined by others including Dr. Vilas Prabhu, Millersville University provost and vice president of academic affairs, Shuman aired some of his ideas for fostering more local investment.

He called it a “remarkable contradiction” that the “majority of the economy is related to local business, but most pensions, stocks . . . are not local.”

One way to bring investment back to communities could be to create local stock exchanges, he said. Others at the roundtable pointed out that Lancaster County could be an ideal place to launch one.

In the panel discussion, Lancaster County was also heralded as the ideal place to begin demonstrating that a community can have minimal dependence on outside food sources.

“There’s no question that this county can feed itself,” Brian Snyder said.
Lancaster County could also probably feed the people of Philadelphia, but “a fundamental place to start” would be feeding its own people, he said.

The lack of local food infrastructure is a challenge in many areas, but in Lancaster County, “in some ways it always was there,” said Jonathan Thomas.
He encouraged college students to familiarize themselves with some of the many farmers’ markets in the area.

Linda Aleci said the “system has brainwashed us on what is value.”

A Lancaster resident who is able to walk to Central Market, Aleci said she can do her shopping at the market with less time and energy than it takes to drive to a supermarket.

“Going to the supermarket, by the time you add it up (driving, finding a parking space and shopping), it’s not that efficient,” she said.

Panelists agreed that price is not the biggest barrier to people buying local food, but rather that they often don’t know where to find it.

About 60 people, mostly students, attended Shuman’s talk and the panel discussion.

The main part of Ag Fest ‘07 was held outdoors on the campus, featuring about 30 ag-related exhibitors and other attractions such as live music and a cow-milking contest between faculty and students.

“There’s been some buzz on the campus for about a week” over Ag Fest, said Amanda Snyder, one of the students who organized it. “It’s been a little hectic.”

The brainchild of about 10 of Marlene Arnold’s anthropology students, Ag Fest grew out their research projects on sustainable agriculture.

Arnold’s interest in agriculture was cultivated by her grandparents, who were farmers in Lancaster County. She also milked cows at a neighbors’ farm growing up in New York state.

Her students used the Lancaster County Blue Ribbon Commission report on agriculture as one of their research tools.

“We are looking at ways to solve local problems creatively,” Arnold said.