What if we could use technology-based products or services to grow local food systems ten-fold or even twenty-fold in the next few years–from one percent of the current food production in our country today to 10 to 20 percent in the next decade? Our new company, Goodeggs, seeks to do just that. Our hypothesis is that some technology-based product or service will be an important enabler of that future.

We’re a group of folks who care about the growth of local food systems–for the sake of health, environment, cultural impact, and plain old delicious meals. The six of us have been working in the technology industry for a number of years at big companies, startups, and everything in between.  (We’ve even sold a a startup to Google!) During that time, we have been increasingly inspired by the local food phenomenon in the Bay Area and around the country.

A few months ago we decided to leave our jobs and put our technology skills and business resources in service of the good food movement.

Right now our company is in research and design mode as we attempt to invent technology that will grow and sustain local food systems.  We’re trying to learn as much as possible about the massive wave of innovation going on in the local food universe: New CSA concepts, neighborhood grocers finding new ways to feed their customers, food hubs rebuilding infrastructure all over the country, community kitchens… the list goes on. In parallel, we’re learning about what drives people to spend their food dollars on local food instead of the alternative. What drives “convenience” in food shopping? What’s missing in the conventional grocery-shopping experience that can be met by new local food channels?

Our research isn’t being done in a library. It’s driven by real conversations we’ve been having with real people. In the past few months we’ve visited small farms and big farms, spent time interviewing food entrepreneurs and advocates, and followed along on grocery-shopping trips with a diverse set of folks.

Our latest research technique, started this past month, has been to run a mock daily grocery shopping service, where a small group of folks here in San Francisco have agreed to let us study their food shopping habits and run experiments in their food-lives.

Here are a few highlights of our research to date:

• The local food businesses that are making it work, profitably, truly care about their customers, across the board.  As a result their customers are extremely loyal and a new kind of community starts to emerge. We hypothesize that a future with more small, relationship-driven food businesses is good for the local food system.
• The local food businesses that are making it work, profitably, have diversified their sales channels: They all have a base membership (structured as a CSA or otherwise), plus they’re set up to sell wholesale and at various markets.
• Most people demand the convenience of a modern grocery store: Wide operating hours, easy parking, fine-grained control over what goes into the cart. We think this is what might be preventing CSAs from going more mainstream.
• For most food shoppers, taste is king. People want their food to taste great, period.  We see this as an inherent advantage for local food because most local food just tastes better.

• All sorts of food-shoppers crave inspiration about what to make (even the great cooks).  This is an opportunity for the local food system–seasonal eating is inspiring!
• Most food decisions are based on a protein: What kind of protein do I want to cook/eat?
• Cooking during the week is much harder than cooking on the weekend.

We also have a number of questions that we are working on today and we hope you can help us answer some of them:

• What are the newest innovations on the CSA model? We’ve learned about bread CSAs, beer CSAs, membership programs that involve pre-paying for groceries. What else is out there that’s inspiring and what hasn’t been invented yet?
• We’re interested in learning more about delivery-grocery services. We’ve learned about services that deliver local groceries to offices, a new wave of milk-truck businesses across the country, pickup locations for prepared foods, and more. What else is working to bring people the next level of convenience with locally sourced food?
• People mean all sorts of different things when they talk about health or nutrition. What kind of patterns exist across large numbers of shoppers? Are there any health considerations, or ways of thinking about nutrition, that are universal?
• How can we create new job opportunities in the good food movement for the many unemployed and under-employed folks in our country today?

We’d love to hear from you all and encourage you to comment on this post. What sorts of inspiring examples have you seen in your own communities of local food entrepreneurs making it work? As leaders of the food movement, what patterns do you see emerging? What needs are there in your own communities that could potentially be met by technology-based products?

We’re looking forward to working with you all to build the future of the food movement.

As antidote to those who argue that the future of food is all about technologies like genetic engineering and new pesticides, I refer you to entrepreneur Ali Partovi (full disclosure: Ali and I are acquaintances) who has an Earth Day post over at Silicon Valley’s Techcrunch, one of the most influential tech-entrepreneur blogs around. Partovi, a former Microsoftie, is a cofounder of the music recommendation service iLike and was an early-stage investor in such online successess as Zappos, Dropbox, and that social network site a few folks use, Facebook. And now, as evidenced by the title of his post–”Food Is The New Frontier In Green Tech“–he’s discovered the investment possibilities of food:

As an Internet entrepreneur and investor, my interest in food and agriculture began at home, taking care of my body and my kids. In 2008, my wife and I decided to adopt a healthier and more sustainable diet for our family. We switched to exclusively grass-fed meat and ate a bit less meat altogether, added more vegetables, and began raising egg-laying chickens in our backyard. That enabled our seven-year-old daughter to run a startup selling our egg surplus.

I was pleased to lose about 35 pounds within six months. But I was also surprised to find how inconvenient, obfuscated, and expensive it was simply to eat healthful, natural foods. I began studying the business and politics of food, convinced there must be investment opportunities that align with improving the system. Surely, I thought, there must be healthful, sustainable, yet scalable and profitable alternatives to our unsustainable food and agriculture sectors.

As a student of the space, I’ve seen enough parallels between food and energy to posit that food may be the next frontier in green tech. Like energy, food and agriculture are big, slow, and highly regulated sectors. But also like renewable energy, there might be opportunities for innovation and profit in “renewable food,” fueled by consumer preference today and by shifts in policy tomorrow.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that Partovi, like another Microsoftie of some note, is obsessed with GMOs and other high-tech toys. Well, you’re wrong. What’s in Partovi’s investment portfolio so far?

• Farmigo, a company that allows “consumers to purchase directly from local farms, removing middlemen and reducing food transportation. Farmigo’s Web platform enables buying directly from a farm while simplifying logistics for farmers.”
• BrightFarms which ”aims to eliminate shipping costs by building greenhouses on the roofs of supermarkets, producing the most ‘local’ food imaginable”

And here’s his take on the Bay Area’s meat- and poultry-producing Marin Sun Farm, which “enjoy[s] an enviable combination of high-margin sales and exponential growth.”

The biggest obstacle impeding Marin Sun Farms’ growth today is inadequate capital. It cannot secure land, water, and animals fast enough to meet the growing demand. This dynamic reminds me of the early days of Zappos, when Tony Hsieh was desperately seeking capital to secure shoes fast enough to meet the growing demand.

One might ask, is this scalable, or is it an anomalous niche? As it was for Zappos, that is the billion-dollar question, and I don’t know the answer. But it certainly makes basic economic sense. Feeding livestock on grass is patently efficient. The animals convert inedible, naturally occurring vegetation to human food, while recycling nutrients to sustain the grass, without requiring costly fuel-intensive chemicals or machinery.

In fact, his article mostly consists of a detailed and well-considered analysis of the unsustainability of our current system and the need to move to a regionalized, truly sustainable one that ends its reliance on corn and fossil fuels. In a phrase, the guy gets it. He even has a new website called FixFood where you can offer and vote on suggestions for improving the food system.

So while he’s not alone in his understanding of the problems in our food system and the desperate need for reform, unlike most, he’s willing–in both the literal and metaphorical sense–to put his money where his mouth is. To him, sustainable agriculture and regional food system businesses aren’t just worthy, they’re profit-worthy. And as someone who has proven his ability to see billion-dollar potential in small startups, his peers in “the Valley” might just want to pay attention to this particular investment advice.

Originally published on Grist

In the same breath that he criticizes these “Western elites” who support sustainable food production,  Paarlberg espouses the very Western, elitist argument that the only definition of “good,” “modern,” or “improved” agricultural inputs are the ones created, patented and sold by big Western biotech companies such as Monsanto, where Paarlberg serves on the Biotechnology Advisory Council (PDF).

Paarlberg seems to believe that the only two options for global agriculture are dirt poor subsistence farmers barely eking out a living or mass biotech production on the Green Revolution scale. But between these two extremes is a middle ground: A diverse and robust rural sector that includes small and medium farmers serving local communities and nations along with appropriate technologies that help re-balance the mix between locally sourced and imported food options. In my role at American Jewish World Service (AJWS), I see the wisdom of this third way set of approaches every day through initiatives like Lambi Fund of Haiti’s home-grown seed banks.

The insistence that “modernization” only has one meaning and one possible approach puts Paarlberg out of step not only with many of the people on the ground actually living with this issue every day, but also with the current consensus among experts in the field as laid out by the findings of the International Science, Technology and Development (IAASTD) initiative. This process – a three-year intergovernmental research and analysis project on the state of global agriculture conducted under the co-sponsorship of the FAO, GEF, UNDP, UNEP, UNESCO, the World Bank and WHO – came to almost the exact opposite conclusion of Paarlberg’s.

Wherever one stands on the issue of biotech in agriculture – and people of good will can disagree – the notion that all biotech practices are inherently “good” or “modern” whereas all non-biotech practices, such as indigenous seed banking and hybrid cultivation, composting and drip irrigation, are inherently “bad” or “backward” comes across as more ideological than scientific.

The first and biggest proponent of non-biotech food security is Via Campesina, a global social movement that represents millions of peasant and small-scale farmers in hundreds of developing countries. People who suffer from lack of food around the developing world do not need Western ‘eco-foodies’ to tell them that local food sovereignty is the best way to feed their families. They already know it, and knew it long before “locavorism” came to these shores.

No one is seriously suggesting that the current system is working. Paarlberg is right that farmers need good inputs (seeds, fertilizer, etc) as well as the existence of basic infrastructure (roads, power, etc) to succeed. But he undercuts his argument by failing to discuss the many factors that led to the current situation, other than a throwaway line about food aid, with which I heartily agree and wish Paarlberg would expound upon.

AJWS is paying particular attention to this aspect of hunger issues in Haiti, where huge influxes of US-subsidized bio-tech produced rice will continue to undercut local farmers’ ability to feed their country if something isn’t done soon. AJWS is asking Congress to support common-sense aid to Haiti – you can make your voice heard by signing our petition.

Most can agree with Paarlberg that food aid has not helped hungry people in the developing world and that we must switch from investing in sending bags of food to the continent to sending real support for agricultural development assistance. AJWS strongly supports US foreign assistance for sustainable agricultural initiatives, but only when they are supported and led by the people on the ground. People who really care about feeding the world’s hungry cannot create situations that just replace the old dependency on foreign food aid with a new dependency on inputs that are wholly controlled by biotech corporations.

According to Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton, authors of the recent book A Nation of Farmers, it’s only natural that we think that technology will solve all of our ills, because technology has been reinforced through popular culture and our current growth-based economic model as if it were the sole means of moving us linearly forward into a better future. And, the authors add, “the short term gains of linear systems are incredibly intoxicating.”

Thus, our society has fully embraced the idea that technology can perfect human beings. But most of the problems we now face are the unintended consequences of the very technologies we hold dear. It is only obvious then that the same thinking could be getting us into trouble in agriculture, the very foundation and lifeblood of our society.

Astyk and Newton continue:

As if drunk and playing with fire, we have settled into a way of growing food that requires enormous inputs of limited resources and burned away the age old practices that not only fed human beings for thousands of years but also sustained the soil in which crops grow and nurtured the streams and waterways that give the gift of water and nutrients… The idea that the same system that depleted aquifers, created the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico and enabled the transmission of mad cow disease will magically cease causing problems and merely create solutions is nonsense, and yet we are accustomed to believing it… because [the idea that technologies can perfect humanity is] all that has been offered, the instinctive reaction of many people who are told they cannot fix our problems is to assume that nothing can — the precisely parallel linear response.

Unfortunately, as hard as we try to say it ain’t so, we exist in a cyclical world, and we can choose to work within this existing framework, or deny it at our peril. Sustainable agriculture is that which embraces the necessary cyclical nature of agriculture systems. This doesn’t mean that no technology is to be employed, but that technologies will be employed that further that underlying aim.

By extension, today’s sustainable practices are not just a replay of the agriculture of our grandparents. As a commenter pointed out over at La Vida Locavore:

Organic operations here have some impressive remote sensing setups, with computer-controlled irrigation systems that check the weather, read moisture levels in the soil, and use satellite imagery to decide when and how much to water.

Organic farmers use drip irrigation and t-tape and other state of the art irrigation systems.

Organic farmers use studies that show what crops are best adapted to particular microclimates, which cover crops provide the best rotations, and which plants to grow together. Organic farmers use plant breeding to produce the qualities they want, which might be pest hardiness or drought tolerance or yield, or it might be nutrition and flavor.

Organic farmers use laboratory analysis of the soil to determine not only pH and mineral composition, but also the biological profile of the soil. Organic farmers use some of the latest science in helpful insects and bacteria to grow their best crop.

Organic farmers use tractors (sometimes biodiesel, sometimes not) to do the jobs tractors are good at.

So let’s finally put to bed the binary argument that sustainable agriculture proponents are all about hand tools and hard labor for little returns. We like technology, just not technology-worship.

*hat tip to Jill Richardson for her post pointing me to Federoff’s quote, and the commenter Elfling