Imagine: Two birds, one stone - buy local!

Imagination. It’s what gets us through these long winters so characteristic to our wonderful state. We imagine the beauty of spring and summer and fall, remembering how it was and picturing it again as snow falls outside our early March windows.

Imagination is so evident in children playing: A stick becomes a sword or a spoon to stir a pot of something delicious cooking.

Imagination can also get us scared, when we imagine unsavory things like boogeymen watching from the dark as we walk outside alone at night.

But most of the time, imagination serves us well. It allows us to put on someone else’s shoes and walk for a mile.

Imagine you worked all year on producing a huge amount of lotion. Everyone who tries it loves your lotion, so you’ve decided to make it on a larger scale. It’s preservative-free, dyefree, and made entirely of natural ingredients.

On the small market, you price your lotion and sell it by the 12-ounce container.

So the large market can’t be much different, right?

You walk into a giant department store’s headquarters, who contacted you and said they would buy your lotion. You proudly plop a big basket full of your lotion on the table, which is your entire latest batch, and the rest of it is waiting in your enclosed trailer down in the parking lot.

The executives whisk away your lotion and give it to the employees, who start putting stickers on it and stocking it on the shelves. You smile and walk away, headed back home minus your year’s worth of lotion labors.

And then the check comes in the mail.

The price the store paid you is abysmally low- actually, there’s no way you can turn a profit on it! And you know they’re selling it for ten times what they paid you for it- you can see it in your local big-box store.

But you can’t contest the price they paid youthey determined that was what your product was worth and they’re the only market for your product.

That sounds crazy, right? Such a scenario wouldn’t exist in real life!

But it does.

Step into a pair of muck boots and into the world of a rancher and a farmer.

Farmers produce crops like grain and beans. Those crops are planted, grown, and sold in the span of about a year.

And when harvest time comes- which the plant chooses, not the farmer- harvest must commence. If the farmer doesn’t have the space to store the crop, then it has to be sold-and he doesn’t determine the price per bushel. That job goes to the elevator that buys his grain, likely part of a big conglomerate company. Very few small elevators exist anymore.

The company decides what grain is worth.

If one makes all of the baked goods from scratch, it takes an estimated 200 pounds of flour per family each year. To make 200 pounds of wheat, which transfers directly to 200 pounds of whole-wheat flour, it takes just over three bushels of wheat. One acre in our area produces 50 bushels of wheat, ballpark. So that one acre makes enough flour for around 16 families!

But the wheat itself is worth much less than the flour- just like the lotion in our scenario.

The product of ranching is livestock. Cattle grow for about two years and then are sent to a big meatpacking facilitysmaller ones don’t exist. They really don’t.

The meatpacker determines what the rancher is to be paid for their cattle- after they are already butchered. Just like in our lotion scenario, the product is likely already being sold by the time the check comes to the rancher.

They can’t dispute it. And also like our scenario: The packer is making a huge margin of profit- and the rancher is lucky if he’s able to keep his lights on. One butcher-ready cow is food for a family for an entire year, as a general rule of thumb. A rancher with 100 calves to sell feeds 100 families each year. Isn’t that incredible? Granted, there is the butchering process to go through in order to sell beef- not many people would buy a ready-tobutcher bovine and do it themselves. The same happens with wheat- not many people would buy the wheat and grind it into flour themselves.

But the profit margins are grossly lopsided.

Ranchers and farmers don’t want to make all the money, they just want enough profit to stay in the green.

But it doesn’t work like that. American beef is largely considered the best in the world for safety, quality, and availability. The good stuff is exported for big money (to the packers, anyway) and Americans, who eat a lot of hamburger (hello, grilling season! You’re coming closer every day!), are buying that hamburger from beef animals that lived their lives in a different country.

Brazilian beef is cheap and low quality, making it perfect for hamburger. Labels can be very misleading, because beef that’s been processed in the US is not the same thing as beef that’s been grown in the US.

You can bet that beef in big box stores almost always comes from a country that is not ours.

Flour, on the other hand, is likely American-grown. We don’t import much for grain as a country, because we produce good grain and a lot of it!

That’s where buying local comes into play.

If you’re able or willing, locally grown wheat and beef is out there. Farmers and ranchers would likely be happy to sell you some of their yearly products! And then we would be giving the profit to the farmers and ranchers, and not lining the pockets of a huge conglomerate company.

Buy Local- it’s a good rallying cry. With a little extra elbow grease, it would be possible and even fun to do things like make your own flour from locally grown wheat. Activities like that are a great way to keep the family entertained and togetherwithout the aid of a talking box on the wall.

Two birds, one stone.