AG and Health Evolution

The Western Relationship to the Land

Agriculture is a relationship.

It’s a relationship between Man and Nature.

Or, if you want to be specific, it's a relationship between farmers with a particular land and crop.

In this case: it's apples, apple trees, and the apple farmer's connection to a place. 

Ok, so agriculture is a relationship, we've covered that.

But what do we know about relationships and how do the fundamental properties of relationships appear in agriculture? 

One universal property of relationships is the "economy of care."

This economy is easiest seen in that ole quantity-versus-quality tension but it's a simple rule: 
The quantity of relationships you have directly effects the time and concern (the care) you are able to give. 

For instance: If a doctor is limited to 10 patients per day the the doctor will budget time and concern per those 10 patients (budget and economy are synonyms.) But if the hospital system tells the doctor they must see 100 patients in a day then the amount of time and care will be diluted. Things will get overlooked, patients will feel cheated and mistakes will happen. 

Same is true for the teacher/ student relationship and same is true with farmer-to-land relationships 

There is NO DOUBT stretching the quantity effects the quality of relationships. 

And yet every farmer and business owner I know thinks they'd be more successful if only they could scale up their production. 

Like lemmings to the ocean, we are chasing an illusion that completely contradicts the irrefutable laws of relationships. 

Someone else's financial numbers (the illusion) leads us, the herd, to the sea ignoring the very qualities, the intimacy, of what lies right there beneath our feet. 

I'm no exception. It's bred in me too.

"Get more land, plant more trees, incorporate crops harvested from other farms into our operation..."

This knee-jerk reaction is bred into us by a culture that is incurably progressivist (and by progressivist I mean philosophically: We are a people who assume good things happen if we just keep pushing in this direction. Progressivism is a way of being "based on the idea of progress in which advancements in science, technology, economic development and social organization are vital to the improvement of the human condition" - straight from the dictionary) 

My point is, western people have all the wrong instincts. By now we should've proven to ourselves we're unfit to lead this planet. It's time just to stop moving, stop growing, and look down. Care.

The One Percent

Given the choice, people choose another cider over ours 99% of the time.

Ignoring that our cider is hard to find, even when they are presented the option this is still true. Respectively, they choose another cider because: 1) our price is too high, and 2) they would prefer something lighter or sweeter to drink.

If it were the other way around I’d be OK with this (albeit it disappointed in American tastes) but that isn't the dominant reason. I know that price is what turns people toward other ciders nearly every time and, yes, this bothers me.

But my response to being bothered is exactly opposite what you might expect.

Let me explain…

First of all, our cider price is about as low as it can be without us be forced into work elsewhere. We aren't getting rich, in fact, in the end, we pay ourselves about $4 an hour and our final price sits about as low as it can be given all the costs of doing business (all combined goods and services accrued along the way) plus our 4$/hour (Polly and I do 99% of the work ourselves.) And after we factor those costs, we then measure that against our overall quantity and there you have it: our relatively higher price.
“Aha!”, you say, “That’s the problem, the quantity! You need to make more cider so that the price of production can be better diffused! If you did that then the price could be lower and more people would buy your cider!”

  What, am I an idiot? Do you think I haven’t already considered this? 
Look, I know that our higher price is the #1 reason people don’t choose our cider but our response to this isn’t what you’d expect it to be. Instead of stretching, compromising, or magically upping the volume of fruit me and my farm (or wild trees) can produce, we work extra hard at changing the consumer’s opinion of what cider SHOULD cost. In other words, instead of compromising the product we're focusing on the narrative that consumers have concerning cider costs in the first place.  And rather than addressing the local market only (which has relatively high land and costs-per-living anyway) we are offering the larger market our higher-priced cider in an effort to change the narrative top down.

   Simply, to make a cheaper version of cider (particularly, to slip down that slippery slope of “stretching the volume”) I, or anyone who does this outside their local economy, must rationalize the shortcuts. There is no other way of saying this. If you told me you agree with those rationalizations (you literally “bought this explanation”) then I’d have no choice but to accept that we are "high priced" because you believe in those compromises, but I know (I ABSOLUTELY KNOW) that you, the customer are not aware of all those shortcuts and I also know that they erode the sustainability of real cider in the market place. If the cheapest always wins (and it seems to) then even Angry Orchard will become a rarely-purchased "luxury" product when China (who produce 55% of the world's apples) starts selling "good cider" at 3-cents/ per can (good because it is rationalized to be good).
  We (all people like me, grower/ producers who are truly tiny because of our limited local resources) have something better to offer than the tempting carrot of cheap prices. If America accepts the slippery-slope argument of stretching the volume then America is essentially condoning the current agriculture of apples which rewards scale consolidation and the heavy manipulation of the tree. In fact, apples are America’s most sprayed, most manipulated crop because customers already DID condone this. Why do you think most apples are grown on macro-farms far away from where people live? Without getting into the details of cloning and the heavy application of insecticides, herbicides, fungicides and rodentacides (etc.) it's these truths about scale-production that I am confronting with a higher price. When the local equation is taken out of it, price ALWAYS comes down economy-of-scale and it's "whatever it takes" measures.

  
   Most already know this but the disconnect between personal ethics and spending is instinctual. So I must repeat and repeat the argument and hope the message spreads when customers get together and talk. Before I die I want at least 98% of you to know the truth behind cider and it’s agriculture. I'm not going to make more cider, but to go from 1% to 2% of the market would mean more producers like me (and there are plenty like me already) could emerge and up-end the current narrative of cider pricing in American stores. That's what all this writing is about, that's why I've rejected all association with national and state trade associations, and that's why our price hasn't fallen. 
  Call me stubborn, call me an asshole, but don't call me rich. And you'd be dead wrong to think our customers are American's rich 1% too. Our ciders are for the 1% who agree with me about supporting the local economy, limited resources, and healthy agriculture. That's what pricing comes down to.