After the leaves leave, Leelanau County works to build economy less dependent on tourism

By Howard Lovy


The fall colors are past their peak, the sounds of summer festivals a distant echo, the taillights of the last tourist's car only a faint red as it travels south of M-22. Once again, Leelanau County is left to those who live here year round.
For some businesses in Michigan's peninsula-within-a-peninsula, now is a time for hibernation, to live off summer's earnings through the winter ahead.
J.T. "Chip" Hoagland, chairman of the Leelanau County Economic Development Corp., is having none of that.
There is work to be done to create an economy that keeps people working long after the snowbirds have flown south. And he has one word of advice: "charcuterie."
The word refers to a method of preserving and presenting pork — or, as Hoagland likes to call pigs, "local proteins," since he hopes to build on Leelanau County's growing reputation as a foodie's heaven. He just wrapped up a celebration of local proteins he called "Pigstock," where local chefs were introduced to local pork.
So what does this have to do with creating jobs in Leelanau County? It's about extracting more business and employment out of existing strengths and local conditions, as opposed to attracting entirely new industries.
Another of those strengths, simply put, is people — more of them. In the last census period, two parts of the state saw growth: West Michigan and northwest lower Michigan. It's also a population whose level of education rivals that of Washtenaw and Oakland counties.
Aside from tourism, Leelanau County's economy is built upon farming. While northern Michigan cherries are widely known, their season has come and gone. Pigs keep giving year round.
Hoagland pictures a test kitchen and restaurant incubator — much like the high-tech business incubators in Oakland and Washtenaw counties — where startup restaurants can work with local farmers to get their businesses off the ground.
The numbers seem to back up Hoagland's pigs-for-jobs strategy. According to a report produced by the Northwest Michigan Council of Governments "accommodation and food services" represented about one in six total jobs available in Leelanau County as of 2009. And, increasingly, these jobs are no longer seasonal only.
"It's really interesting how many restaurants are in the county and the fact that most of those stay open year round," said Matt McCauley, director of regional planning for the council of governments.
Like Hoagland, McCauley credits the local-food movement for a restaurant boom that is not so dependent on tourist season.
"Leelanau County is truly a leader in a resurgence around agriculture," McCauley said. "Because of the wineries, hops farms, all sorts of burgeoning agriculture and value-added activity, all sorts of people are choosing to locate here to be part of that."
By "value-added," he means businesses such as Cherry Republic in Glen Arbor, which not only uses local cherries but also turns them into chocolates, jam and other products that then are shipped around the world.
In addition, McCauley said, "The restaurants in the region — and we're getting more and more notoriety as a foodie destination — are choosing and actually seeking out local products for their menu items."
Hoagland uses the example of Bare Knuckle Farms, near Northport at the tip of Michigan's pinkie. The farm is run by two young business partners who met while attending the University of Michigan and wanted to test what they learned about linking a restaurant to a specific piece of land.
Bare Knuckle is small, as are other farms run by transplanted farmers in the local food movement. But McCauley and Hoagland both see the county's future in them.
Indeed, according to a recent Michigan Agri-Business Association report, agriculture represents a $70 billion piece of the state's economy and has been the most significant contributor to economic growth in Michigan in the past decade. It's also an industry, the association said, that's struggling to find enough people to fill jobs, "From high-level, technologically advanced professional jobs to managers to field workers who can help with harvest and milk cows."
Businesspeople such as the ones behind Bare Knuckle Farms embody what McCauley calls Leelanau County's increasingly educated "human capital." The county ranks third in the state in the percentage of the population with bachelor's degrees or higher — behind Oakland and Washtenaw. Those two counties have knowledge-based economies, for the most part.
"That same thing is happening in Leelanau County, but just at a smaller scale," McCauley said. With more workers choosing, out of necessity, to be self-employed, it is easy to live in Leelanau while telecommuting for a company in Chicago or New York, he said.
Still, what is happening now with local food is building for the future. The present still looks like a recession. The unemployment rate might be down to 7.7 percent, the lowest since 2008. But as the Leelanau Enterprise newspaper points out in an editorial, the local economy "is feeding off a solitary diet of tourism — and is now suffering from a lack of diversity."
Which brings up baabaazuzu, the next stop on any tour of Leelanau County's possible future — one that looks beyond the county's borders. The Lake Leelanau-based clothing company received the first-ever loan given out by the Leelanau County Economic Development Corp. — $25,000 in 2008 and 2009. That helped push baabaazuzu from a small operation in which clothing was cut by hand to a more automated manufacturing site whose products are sold at more than 900 retailers worldwide.
Baabaazuzu co-owner Kevin Burns said the county previously never pursued manufacturing, choosing purely agriculture. Baabaazuzu rests on the only plot of land in the county designated for industrial use. Burns credits the loan — which baabaazuzu since has paid back — for funding the equipment the company needed to grow.
Baabaazuzu has no intention of moving out of the county as it grows. As Burns says, you can't beat a commute that involves only one stop sign.
"We like the idea that we can produce in Leelanau County," he said. "We like the idea that we're from Michigan. People are cheering for us."
And, said co-owner Sue Burns, baabaazuzu has no need to move because Leelanau County has a pool of talented workers — especially off-season.
Baabaazuzu consistently has grown 30 percent to 40 percent every year, the owners said, except for last year — growth was 10 percent.
So, how can Leelanau County produce baabaazuzus?
"We're fortunate in that we produce a unique product that is not dependent on summer trade," Sue Burns said. "We don't get a lot of foot traffic; we sell our products out of Leelanau County. We're not dependent on this one little nucleus. I would encourage that.
"Whatever you're going to produce, how can you make it sell outside of this region?"
Just as baabaazuzu and Cherry Republic are successful because their products are in niche markets and can be sold around the world, local small farmers and restaurants have found success because they can sell locally.
Although Leelanau County is beginning to feel its way toward an economy not based on tourism only, these disparate attempts at adaptation are only in the beginning stages.
McCauley, who is also involved in a 10-county regional partnership known as the Grand Vision, sees hope because there is strength in numbers. An educated workforce with ambitious, innovative ideas is seeding the entire region.
"We remain a growing part of this state, and, as a result, a lot of economic opportunity is going on," McCauley said. "And population growth remains a true force behind all economic growth in this region."

 

'Locally grown' food sounds great, but what does it mean?

By Julie Schmit, USA TODAY

 

Virginia farmer Rod Parker can walk into a grocery store 10 miles from his farm, 40 miles from it and even 100 miles from it and see his fresh produce marketed as "locally grown."

 

Some retailers even consider "locally grown" to be something produced a day's drive from the store, he says. Meanwhile, "I'm sure consumers think it's grown right down the road," says the owner of Parker Farms.

Nationwide, retailers from Wal-Mart to Whole Foods are increasingly devoting more shelf space to "locally grown" products including such things as fresh produce and Thanksgiving turkeys. Whole Foods, for one, now spends almost 22% of its produce budget on locally grown products, up from 15% four years ago, it says.

The "locally grown" label is part of retailers' push to tap into consumer desires for fresh and safe products that support small, local farmers and help the environment because they're not trucked so far. At least one consumer survey has showed that whether something is locally grown is now more important than whether it is organic (which many local products are not).

But retailers may have far broader definitions of "local" than consumers do. And while freshness is more likely if food isn't trucked so far, food-safety experts say there's no evidence that locally grown products are safer, especially because small producers often lack the food-safety audits more common among big producers.

"There's a feeling that if it's local, it's safer. I consider that a myth," says Christine Bruhn, food-marketing specialist at the University of California-Davis.

Just how do some retailers define locally grown?

• Wal-Mart, the nation's biggest retailer, considers anything local if it's grown in the same state as it's sold, even if that's a state as big as Texas and the food comes from a farm half the size of Manhattan, as in the case of the 7,000-acre Ham Produce in North Carolina.

• Whole Foods, the biggest retailer of natural and organic foods, considers local to be anything produced within seven hours of one of its stores. The retailer says most local producers are within 200 miles of a store.

• Seattle's PCC Natural Markets considers local to be anything from Washington, Oregon and southern British Columbia.

What's marketed as local in one state or region may also be available nationwide.

In July, Wal-Mart pledged to source more local fruits and vegetables and noted, in a press release, that 20% of the fresh produce in its supercenters in the summer was already local, making Wal-Mart the "nation's largest purchaser of local produce."

For a Florida store, that 20% would include any citrus grown in Florida even if it's also sold nationwide, says Wal-Mart spokeswoman Caren Epstein.

"They're not defrauding people, but counting a product that is nationally shipped as local doesn't seem to be within the meaning of locally grown," says Jim Prevor, editor of Produce Business and author of the online Perishable Pundit.

Prevor also says that 1,000-acre farms may surprise consumers who equate "local" with "a 3-acre blueberry farm." Wal-Mart declined further comment.

Joanne Palmer, a retired music teacher who shopped at a Wal-Mart in American Canyon, Calif., likes locally grown. "It's a real good thing to spare the Earth in terms of gas and trucks," she says. "But I wouldn't say that all of California would be considered local."

Defining the market

There are no regulations specifying what locally grown means, as there are with organic products.

To be labeled organic, foods sold in the U.S. must meet production standards set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

One standard? No toxic synthetic pesticides or fertilizers for at least three years on a field growing an organic crop.

"Local" products are not necessarily pesticide-free.

When consumer researcher The Hartman Group surveyed consumers, it found that 50% defined local as within 100 miles; 37% said within the same state, says Hartman President Laurie Demeritt.

The survey also showed that 52% said it was important for them to buy local goods whenever possible; vs. 23% who said the same for organic. Consumers also tend to think of local products — namely fruits and vegetables — as fresher because they're grown "close to home" and to generally come from small farmers, Demeritt says.

That's a definition shared by Dick Swank, owner of the 300-acre Swank Farms of Hollister, Calif., 80 miles south of San Francisco. Swank grows tomatoes, corn, cherries and other produce. The farm sells its produce at farmers' markets and small stores within a two-hour drive and to a dozen Costco stores in the Bay Area and Central Valley.

Swank says 90% of his produce is sold within 24 hours of being picked. None goes through distribution centers, which can add hours to deliveries. Last year, he says he sold tomatoes to Wal-Mart which went to a distribution center before being sold in Nevada.

"You can't buy local if everything goes through a distribution center," Swank says.

Saving on freight

Farmer Parker says it's harder for big retailers to buy locally because they need large volumes, and it's easier to deal with a few large producers than many smaller ones.

The extra work for retailers pays off when freight costs are high and the cost to truck fruits or vegetables across country rises significantly.

"There's a significant savings in freight that drives the local deal," Parker says.

Still, locally grown products may not be cheaper, given that smaller growers lack the economies of scale of bigger growers. "There is not a tremendous savings to buy product locally," says Dave Corsi, vice president of produce and floral for Wegmans Food Markets, a grocer with 71 stores in the East.

Wegmans has sourced local produce for more than 20 years. Most of its local producers are within 100 miles of a store and work fewer than 100 acres, Corsi says. They also deliver to stores, not to distribution centers.

About food safety

While consumers may think locally grown food is safer, food safety experts say that's not clear.

Most food-borne illnesses don't get noticed because not enough people get sick to alert officials that an outbreak is underway. Undetected outbreaks are more likely with "local" products delivered in small quantities and sold in a small area, says Robert Brackett, senior vice president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association.

Small producers are also less likely than big ones to have had food-safety audits, which grocers often demand of big suppliers, says Matt Regusci, head of business development for PrimusLabs.com, a leading produce food-safety auditor.

South Carolina's Titan Farms, one of Wal-Mart's local growers, with 3,750 acres, links its website to a 13-page food-safety Primus audit that covers such things as whether there's evidence of insects on produce and whether Titan has enough bathrooms for workers.

Whole Foods requires third-party food-safety audits for its national produce suppliers and anyone producing ready-to-eat salad products, including packaged leafy greens and packaged fruit, says Karen Christensen, global produce coordinator.

But not all other local growers must have audits, she says. "Any place we perceive there's a risk, obviously we're going to require it."

Wegmans started requiring food-safety audits for large, national suppliers two years ago. It started special training for its local producers, which number about 800, last year. This year, those that produce leafy greens need food-safety audits or they'll be dropped as suppliers, Corsi says. Next year, the same will be required of local growers of tomatoes, melons, herbs and green onions.

"We're trying to create a baseline that at least everybody meets," Corsi says.

Swank Farms has never had an independent third-party safety audit, Swank says. The buyer for Costco inspected the operation, he adds. Swank also trains workers on good hygiene and hires the same families to harvest products each year, he says.

Primus' Regusci says many small producers have good food-safety practices but haven't purchased audits, which can cost hundreds of dollars.

"The vast majority of food safety is common sense," Regusci says. "Are there a few small idiots out there messing things up for everybody? Yes. But there are big idiots out there messing things up, too."

A Website For Michigan Food Festivals

http://www.foodreference.com/html/michigan-food-festivals.html

This is a great website that lists featured food events in Northern Michigan.

Here is a sampling of just a few Featured Food Events:

June 8-10, 2012 National Asparagus Festival
Shelby, Michigan
Held every year during the second weekend of June in Oceana County. Events include a Grand Parade, Family Activities, Arts & Crafts Fair, Motorcycle Run, 5k Run, Asparagus Food Show and much more!


June 29-30, 2012 Pasty Fest 2012
Calumet, Michigan
This festival celebrates the Cornish pasty, which is pastry filled with beef, sliced potato, turnip or rutabaga and onion, and baked. Pasties were traditionally eaten by copper miners in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Events include the Pasty Walk and Pasty Parade, music, pasty bake-off, and children's games, including the dreaded Pasty Pull.


July 7, 2012 39th Annual Int’l Cherry Pit-Spitting Championship
Eau Claire, Michigan
Tree-Mendus Fruit Farm hosts the event, with competitions for men, women, and youths. The current world's record spit is 93 feet 6-1/2 inches.

When ‘Local’ Makes It Big

by New York Times--Kim Severeson:

WHEN Jessica Prentice, a food writer in the San Francisco Bay area, invented the term “locavore,” she didn’t have Lay’s potato chips in mind. 

      But never mind. On Tuesday, five potato farmers rang the bell of the New York Stock Exchange, kicking off a marketing campaign that is trying to position the nation’s best-selling brand of potato chips as local food.
Five different ads will highlight farmers who grow some of the two billion pounds of starchy chipping potatoes the Frito-Lay company uses each year. One is Steve Singleton, who tends 800 acres in Hastings, Fla.
“We grow potatoes in Florida, and Lays makes potato chips in Florida,” he says in the ad. “It’s a pretty good fit.”
Mr. Singleton’s ad and the other four will be shown only in the farmer’s home state. A national spot featuring all five potato farmers begins next week.
Frito-Lay is one of several big companies that, along with some large-scale farming concerns, are embracing a broad interpretation of what eating locally means. This mission creep has the original locavores choking on their yerba mate. But food executives who measure marketing budgets in the millions say they are mining the concept because consumers care more than ever about where their food comes from.
“Local for us has two appeals,” said Aurora Gonzalez, director of public relations for Frito-Lay North America, which is owned by PepsiCo. “We are interested in quality and quickness because we want consumers to get the freshest product possible, but we have a fairly significant sustainability program, and local is part of that. We want to do business more efficiently, but do it in a more environmentally conscious way.”
The original “eat local” movement, an amalgam of food and environmental politics, came of age a decade or so before the term locavore was coined in 2005.
To a certain set of believers, supporting locally grown food is part of a broad philosophical viewpoint that eschews large farming operations, the heavy use of chemicals and certain agricultural practices, like raising animals in large, confined areas.
“The local foods movement is about an ethic of food that values reviving small scale, ecological, place-based, and relationship-based food systems,” Ms. Prentice said. “Large corporations peddling junk food are the exact opposite of what this is about.”
But people on the other side of the argument say the widening view of what it means to eat locally is similar to the changes the term organic went through as it grew from a countercultural ideal in the 1960s and 1970s to an industry with nearly $25 billion in sales last year. A related debate about how to define sustainable farming is now gathering force in government, agriculture and business.
Concerns over food safety, quality and cost are driving people beyond hard-core locavores to seek out food that has traveled fewer miles and has a traceable provenance, said Stephanie Childs, a spokeswoman for the food conglomerate ConAgra.
The company recently began a marketing campaign to highlight its Hunt’s canned tomatoes, most of which are grown within 120 miles of its Oakdale, Calif., processing plant.
Of course, the tomatoes would be local only to people in the area. But if the company can show consumers its tomatoes are grown near the plant that processes them, shoppers who want to know where their food comes from might be more apt to buy them.
“The problem is there is absolutely no way we can have local produce within 100 miles of every person in America, so the question is how do we take it to that next level,” said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst known as the Supermarket Guru who ConAgra recently hired to work on its Hunt’s tomatoes promotion.
Other companies are embracing the term “local” in their own ways. Foster Farms, a $1 billion company that is the largest producer of poultry products on the West Coast, markets its fresh chicken and turkey as “locally grown” because it contracts with hundreds of local growers in the states where it operates.
Some producers are stretching local to mean locale, emphasizing the geographic origin of their food. Dairy products from California, oranges from Florida and almost anything made in Vermont are getting special attention from marketers. Kraft is trying to figure out whether people in Wisconsin will buy more pickles if they know the cucumbers that go into a jar of Claussen’s are grown there.
“The ingenuity of the food manufacturers and marketers never ceases to amaze me,” said Michael Pollan, the author of “In Defense of Food” and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine. “They can turn any critique into a new way to sell food. You’ve got to hand it to them.”
Some people marketing their big-scale food on a small-scale level understand that. They say they’re not pretending to be something they are not.
“This is celebrating the notion of community,” said Dave Skena, vice president for potato-chip marketing of Frito-Lay. “We don’t use the term ‘locally grown’ because that’s a personal issue for so many people.”
Large farms usually given over to commodity crops are also having a local moment, driven in large part by economics.
In central California, the Sacramento County Farm Bureau recently started a “Grow and Buy Local” initiative with a $50,000 grant from the county.
Part of the money is being used to encourage 3,000 area farmers whose fields are filled with feed grain, safflower and other commodity crops to plant acres of grocery store crops like strawberries or artichokes, or to hold some fruit, like pears, back from the canner.
That fresh produce can then be marketed as local and sold to nearby institutions like hospitals and jails that want to buy food raised nearby. And some of it can fill farm stands, which helps satisfy consumers who want to buy local fruits and vegetables and don’t care as much about, say, farm size or organic practices, said Charlotte Mitchell, the executive director of the county farm bureau and a Foster Farms turkey rancher.
“We have to continue to feed the world, but we need to make people aware that going to that local strawberry stand is so important, too,” she said.
For some big agricultural interests, promoting local food has a protectionist bent. Sales of Virginia apples were hurt a few years ago when Chinese apples flooded the market, said Martha Moore, director of governmental relations for the 38,000-member Virginia Farm Bureau.
Those kinds of threats from imported food is one reason her agency started a local food marketing program last year.
“If promoting local agriculture will help America to become food independent, that’s what we want,” she said.
She doesn’t buy into all the values many local food advocates hold dear, like cage-free eggs; limited use of herbicides, fertilizers and other chemicals; and small farms.
“We don’t think the argument should be about the size of the farm,” she said. “It should be, ‘Do you know the farmer and where is the farmer from?’ You can have good and bad actors in any size farm.”
For hard-core locavores, watching the food industry adopt their language is frustrating. But it also means things are changing.
“You know the locavore phenomenon is having an impact when the corporations begin co-opting it,” Ms. Prentice said. “Everyone should know where things are processed. The ‘where’ question is really important.”

Shires in the Spring