You don’t need to spend more for local food: What $10 a week can do

Lots of families are still struggling with the slow economy, and we live in an area where people know the value of a dollar.  Local food is a very popular topic all across the country right now, but a lot of people hesitate to buy locally grown food because it might seem more expensive and they don’t think they can afford it.  Here’s an idea:  Instead of spending more of your food budget for local food, consider allocating a small portion of what you’re already spending on food to it—maybe $10 a week.  Instead of spending more, you could just substitute that portion of your food purchases.

What could $10 a week do?  This is a question the folks out in Maine looked into a few years ago.  A while back, I had an opportunity to visit Maine as part of a sustainable agriculture tour, and we heard a presentation from  Russell Libby, the executive director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. Russell spent the early part of his career as an agricultural statistician, so he was familiar with a lot of the numbers relating to agriculture. He figured that if people stopped thinking about spending more on local foods, and just substituted some of what they were already spending on the food they bought, it would make a tremendous impact on the local economy without hurting the families who bought the food.

If we look at that same approach to food purchases in Price County, here are some very interesting numbers:  Using the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Consumer Expenditure Survey, each “consumer unit”  (basically the equivalent of a household) in the Midwest spends an average of about $3,605 per year on food that they eat at home.  For easy figuring, that’s approximately $300 a month, or just over $70 a week, for food eaten at home.  Substituting $10 of that amount of purchases would equate to about 14% of the food bill, but it wouldn’t be an extra expense—just money spent differently.

According to the 2010 census, we have  6,329 households in our county.  If each of those households would spend $10 a week on locally grown food, that would be an economic impact of $63, 290 a week, or $3,291,080 a year!  That is money that would go directly into our local economy—money that would go to local growers who could use it to buy more goods and services in our area, to help support other community organizations, and yes—to pay some taxes that could also be used to help provide the services many people rely on to keep out communities thriving.  That money would circulate in our own area first, and our whole area would benefit.

So now that the farmers market season is getting ready to start, give this idea some thought.  We have lots of local growers who can provide you with fresh, locally grown, high quality foods like vegetables, fruits, eggs, meat, maple syrup, and so on.  And remember, you don’t need to spend more—just spend it differently.