Why Ken Meter Is on a Mission to Build Community Food Webs

In 1910, farmers earned 40 cents for every dollar in sales. Today, they only earn a penny from each dollar, the result of a drastic consolidation of farm ownership centered on a few big commodity crops such as corn and soy. More of our food is imported than ever before, says food systems analyst Ken Meter, while our agricultural system “systematically extracts wealth” from both farmers and farm communities while dividing farmers from consumers. Over time, he writes, farm policy shifted from being supportive to “compensating farmers for the fact that markets are fundamentally unfair.”

Meter has spent the past 50 years writing and working to build equitable communities and food systems. His new book, Building Community Food Webs, defines a food web as “overlapping networks of grassroots leaders and organizations working to define their own food choices. In it, he sketches out how the industrial, commodity-centered food system has drained wealth from rural communities, tells stories of food web building across the country, and draws from the lessons he’s learned to create a road map for the next generation of food systems leaders.

Meter’s father, the son of a Nebraska farmer, “did everything he could to get away from agriculture and the austere small town he grew up in.” Yet, Meter says, he missed the land and his hometown until the day he died in 1985. For this reason, rural agriculture held a mystique for Meter that set him first on a path as a journalist in 1970s rural Minnesota. He met farmers, bankers, and economic development officers fighting to set up interdependent businesses that would protect their communities from large corporate food interests—experiences that later led him to work on inner-city and rural capacity building and promoting local food systems.

Civil Eats spoke to Meter about the resilience of community food webs, how farming saps resources from rural communities, and why not all local food is the same.

This book is such a valuable distillation of decades of research on what you call community food webs, or food systems. What made you decide to write this book now?

It’s a book I’ve been trying to write for 40 years, but I kept getting swept up in community projects. Early in my career, the farm economy turned extractive. The 1973 oil crisis had erupted, and the U.S. was shelling out billions to buy oil at high prices. The U.S. Department of Agriculture wanted to recover those dollars by exporting more grain, so they told farmers to “get big or get out” of agriculture. Thousands of farms expanded but couldn’t repay the debts they took on. That led to the farm credit crisis of the mid-‘80s. I began to measure how that expansion drained money from rural communities. But when I spoke about the extractive economy, I got blank stares, people just didn’t understand. Now, the awareness is there, and my book has the numbers.