Sunday, March 27, 2011

The Rabbit, the Carrot, and a Tail of Locavores

Via Marginal Revolution a fascinating story on carrots.

Now carrots should be one of the quintessential locavore vegetables.  They're easily grown, provided you don't have heavy clay soil and keep the weeds down, they can overwinter in the ground if the frost doesn't go too deep (protect them with leaves), they're nutritious, and furry critters like them.  As I remember, we used to store them in our cold cellar (actually the pump room off our regular cellar).  So under locavore theory it should be possible to raise and sell locally grown carrots in most of the U.S. The food movement also attacks the big industrial farms producing grain and cotton which they claim is founded on the basis of government subsidies. By implication, fruit and vegetable growers are smaller and unsubsidized.

But, as it turns out, two companies grow 80 percent of the carrots in the U.S.  And recent growth in their sales has been, not through flogging organic, naturally grown carrots, but by producing packaged "baby carrots", all clean and ready to eat.  (Disclosure: I buy them regularly.)
Bolthouse Farms sells nearly a billion pounds of carrots a year -- the carrots Farhang kept hearing about -- under a number of different brand names and supermarket labels. Only Grimmway Farms, a few minutes down the road in Bakersfield, California, sells more, just barely. Together, the two companies control more than 80% of the carrot market in the United States

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