Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Backyard Chickens
I saying, Cook-cook-cook, cluk-cluk-cluk
Bob Marley - Who The Cap Fit
Hot Chicks
Legal or Not, Chickens Are the Chic New Backyard Addition
By Adrian Higgins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Shenandoah is a red-feathered hen nestled under the right arm of Anna Mae Conrad, who is 10 and lives in Takoma Park. "When you hold her for a long time," Anna Mae says, "you can feel her relax; you can feel her putting pressure on you." Anna Mae strokes the stole of plumage around Shenandoah's neck, and the bird closes her eyes in a moment of chicken bliss. "This is actually my chicken."
The announcement is to distinguish Shenandoah from the four other hens clucking softly in the back yard of the home where Anna Mae lives with mom Mary Cush, dad Kevin Conrad and sister Zhania. The family got its first bird six years ago, and the hens live in a converted greenhouse in a corner of the shaded lot, which is in an established suburban neighborhood inside the Capital Beltway.
The Conrads are at the vanguard of a resurgent interest in backyard chicken keeping, especially in distinctly nonrural settings. In cities across the United States, raising backyard poultry has suddenly become as chic as growing your own vegetables. It's all part of the back-to-the-land movement whose proponents want to save on grocery bills, take control of their food supply and reduce the carbon footprint of industrial agriculture.
The urban homesteading movement got a huge symbolic boost this spring when the first family installed a 1,100-square-foot vegetable garden at the White House. Poultry is the natural next step in the sustainable back yard; chickens produce eggs, devour kitchen scraps and add manure to the compost pile.
"Chickens are America's cool new pet," said Dave Belanger, publisher of the magazine Backyard Poultry. When he launched it three years ago, "we were thinking 15 to 20 thousand" subscriptions, he said. The print run for the bimonthly is now 100,000.
Belanger's magazine is published in Wisconsin, where five years ago chicken activists in Madison succeeded in getting the city council to reverse a ban on chicken coops. Madison's ordinance is typical of other cities'. You can raise chickens for eggs, not meat; they must be enclosed in a coop or run; and it's strictly a hen party: Roosters who crow day and night are prohibited.
In Baltimore, you can keep up to four hens (no roosters, ducks, geese or, darn, ostriches), in a coop no closer than 25 feet from a neighbor's residence. A one-time fee of $60 is required for the permit.
Whether the Obamas could join the ranks of chicken fanciers may be a more difficult question. The District does not permit backyard chickens, said Michael Rupert, a spokesman for the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. You can have racing pigeons and captive-bred species of cage birds, meaning parrots and the like, but you can't have chickens.
The District's ban stands in contrast to other cities in the nation that have either permitted poultry all along or succumbed to pressure recently to allow them once more. In and around Washington, the convergence of so many jurisdictions each with its own rules has clouded the question of whether chickens are allowed. The resulting confusion has produced two types of chicken owners: Those who raise poultry openly and lawfully and those who do so in the shadows.
Kevin Conrad is confident he meets the requirements of Montgomery County (see sidebar on local ordinances), but elsewhere in Takoma Park another owner, fearing the loss of chickens his daughter views as pets, is willing to talk only anonymously.
He started keeping the chickens early last year and has three hens. Two of the chickens he raised turned out to be roosters, and they were given to a friend in a rural area. His neighbors have been supportive and share in the eggs, he said. Chickens "are easy pets, and the eggs you get from them are spectacular," he said. Two close neighbors also keep chickens, and he is about to allow another neighbor's daughter to keep some hens in his coop in exchange for chicken-sitting when needed.
I am walking along a block of rowhouses on Capitol Hill to meet a young professional who is also flying under the chicken radar. She offered to show me her coop, but anonymously, because she feared that her enterprise was unlawful. She leads me through the house to the back yard, where three Rhode Island Red hen hybrids live in a homemade coop and adjoining run, which is enclosed with chicken wire. "I bought a circular saw to make it," she said. The coop is lined with newspapers (try doing that with a laptop), and the base slides out for cleaning.
When she returns from work, she lets the hens out to roam in the garden, which includes newly planted fruit trees and raised beds with lettuce, beans and strawberries in growth.
"It's been fascinating," she said. "All my neighbors know about them, and some of the neighborhood kids love to come over and collect the eggs. They're really curious about them, and they love to feed them."
She got the hens -- named Dree, Dot and Fluffy Bottom -- in March as 1-year-old egg layers and says they are quiet and their coop is easy to keep clean. "I named them after my grandmothers. Well, not Fluffy Bottom," she said.
"I really like producing my own food," she said. "My father always had a vegetable garden."
The District's anti-chicken stance troubles activists such as Liz Falk, who ran an inner-city vegetable garden on Seventh Street NW before moving the enterprise to the former playing field of the shuttered Gage Eckington Elementary School in LeDroit Park. "Other cities are more welcoming of urban agriculture than us," she said.
To those who would say chickens should be raised only in the country, Falk would say no. "Why don't we grow food where the people are? It's so much more sustainable," she said. She'd like to keep poultry at the garden, called Common Good City Farm, but "we are unclear as to the law."
So what's it like to keep chickens? From what I gather, they are exasperating, dumb, funny, beautiful and so hopelessly ill-equipped to survive on their own that you have to love them. They also have a distinct social hierarchy. In the Capitol Hill garden, Dot rules the roost and poor Dree is last in the pecking order.
Whether in the country or city, unprotected birds will usually fall prey to an array of predators, including hawks, owls, raccoons and, of course, foxes.
Until this winter, Robin Wedewer's coop in rural Calvert County was ruled by a black feathered cock bird named Johnny Cash. The second banana was a white rooster, T. Boone Chickens. Late one afternoon, as the light was fading, she returned to her 22-acre farm in Huntingtown to see a pile of white feathers on the front lawn, another pile on the back lawn. Johnny had vanished in what may have been an eagle attack. T. Boone was gravely injured, with talon wounds on his sides. Wedewer's 18-year-old son, Benjamin, had dug a grave behind the chicken coop, not expecting him to last the night, but the plucky bird pulled through.
T. Boone still walks with a pronounced limp, but he now rules the roost. He crows a lot, but he has a lot to crow about, both as protector of his harem and as its lone lusty prince. He guards the hens while they take dust baths behind a lilac bush, and if Maude and Myrtle, two red starters, wander off, he will call to them and go racing off to retrieve them. With a limp. When he finds food, he will offer a low, repeated cluck, which is his way of telling the hens to dig in.
Wedewer gets about half a dozen eggs a day and raves about the flavor, the size and color of the yolks, and the stiffness of the whites. The chickens live in an Amish-built playhouse and a caged run that Wedewer and her husband, Harry, put together from lumber and chicken wire last year when they got the birds. "I make my own cheese, my own wine vinegar, my own wine," she said. "Why not have chickens?"
In the evening, the Wedewers like to sit in lawn chairs by the vegetable garden and watch the birds scratching around. "We call it chicken TV," she said.
For the Conrads in Takoma Park, the chickens have been a way to introduce their children to the joys and grimmer realities of the natural world. One of their birds was taken by a fox, another by a raccoon. "It's like a big science project," Mary Cush said.
For her most recent birthday, Anna Mae had friends over for a slumber party. "When we woke up, we all got to go into the coop and pick our own egg for breakfast," she said.
Tiffins - am I hip or what?
Cutting down on plastic usage is a goal with many worthy reasons. We have been trying to cut down on plastic when we carry our lunch with us to school or work. When I was a kid, lunch boxes were metal but I don't see them any more. A few years ago I saw tiffins at the local National Wholesale Liquidators store (now since closed down) and bought some. We have been able to eliminate using plastic for carrying lunch - no plastic containers, no plastic wrap, no plastic lunch box. And the tiffin retains heat so hot food is at least warm when it is time for lunch.
My kids had no resistance to the tiffins and at this point they have received enough positive comments from a variety of people - kid and adult - that they think the tiffins are cool. I have had two of the tall ones from National Wholesale Liquidators that have problems with their lid - it screws on but it doesn't stop. I also have had two that worked fine. The small one has a clamp lid. National Wholesalers sold the tall one for about $15 and both are stainless steel.
Newly Frugal Indians Revive Tiffin Tradition
Homemade Lunch Delivery Surges
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 10, 2009
MUMBAI -- Outside one of this city's busiest railway stations, Vilesh Shinde balanced 50 metal containers on a wooden board atop his head and rushed into the thick morning traffic, sprinting through the financial district to deliver home-cooked meals to his newest customers: young Indian professionals.
Shinde is one of Mumbai's approximately 5,000 dabbawalas, or lunch deliverymen. Dressed in white caps and starched chef's smocks, bearing foot-tall lunch pails known as tiffins, the fast-moving dabbawalas are a symbol of old India who not long ago appeared to be an endangered species.
With incomes rising and the Indian economy rapidly growing, sociologists predicted the demise of the dabbawala. That is, until the global financial crisis in the past year caused many middle-class urban Indians to return to the tiffin, shunning the city's more expensive restaurants and cafes in favor of the way their grandparents used to eat.
For about $6 a month, the dabbawalas collect lunches from white-collar workers' homes in the city's vast outskirts and deliver them, still hot, directly to their desks in the bustling city center. The business dates back 125 years, to a time when British colonial administrators wanted homemade meals they knew their foreign stomachs could safely handle.
For office workers feeling the economic pinch, Indian women's magazines and talk shows are recommending the dabbawala over debt.
"There's so many more tiffins these days. We can't be late and let down the newcomers. So we have to work really quickly," said Shinde, 32, a third-generation dabbawala whose clientele has doubled in the past three months. "I thought about computer classes. But I stayed with this. I heard there were no jobs. Plus, my customers are always happy to see me."
In the late 1990s, India's burgeoning economy unleashed an explosion of street-food stalls, air-conditioned cafes and international fast-food chains. Suddenly, young Indians wanted lattes with their lentils. The chains successfully Indianized just about every cuisine imaginable: Think masala muffins or McDonald's Chicken Maharaja Mac, two grilled chicken patties with smoke-flavored mayonnaise on a sesame seed bun. Going out to lunch became a status symbol among India's emerging middle class.
Now such spending seems reckless. The engine is slowing, and to many people here, that's not all bad.
"The dabbawalas are part of a culture, an era in India, where frugality and an authentic taste of home were very serious virtues," said Harish Shetty, a prominent psychiatrist in Mumbai. "We all predicted that this would die out. What young person would want to be a dabba in the heat and traffic? What young person wants to bring their lunch to work in India's version of a brown bag? But we were wrong. Now in times of recession, we are finding the old ways still work. That's very comforting."
But the dabbawala revival is not just a matter of rupee-pinching. The lunch deliveryman has recently become a pop-culture icon, with a cult status built on nostalgia for old-time Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay. A retro-looking dabbawala appears on coffee mugs and coasters. Psychedelic posters show a white-uniformed dabbawala dreaming of hundreds of tiffins, which swirl around his Gandhi topi, or trademark white cap. There's even an online video game in which players are given a map of an Indian city and must deliver food on time.
In 2006, when more and more urban professionals were dining out or eating lunch at corporate cafeterias, Manish Tripathi, a software engineer, set up a Web site and text-messaging service to boost business for dabbawalas. He was quickly adopted as an honorary dabbawala, because most of the lunchbox carriers aren't computer literate.
But it wasn't until the economic crisis that tiffin services reported a surge in customers not only in Mumbai, but also in Chennai, New Delhi and Bangalore, especially among university students and young workers at high-tech companies.
"The increase in the clientele of dabbawalas . . . is spreading so quickly because people realize they have to return to wholesome, home-cooked food at cheaper rates," said Mohit Satyanand, an economist. "The tiffin is a survivor. It's trendy again."
In Chennai, Geetha Mehta, a housewife-turned-caterer, has become a national celebrity, featured on TV food programs for starting a service that provides an evening tiffin of healthful snacks to students and white-collar employees working into the night.
"We thought these tiffins were for our grandparents. But these days, beggars can't be choosers. Because we have a monthly allowance, we eat out much less than before," said Apurva Yadav, 19, an economics major at Delhi University who recently started using the service.
Though some clients use caterers, in most cases wives, mothers, sisters or domestic cooks assemble lunches for family members in homes throughout Mumbai every morning. Starting at 7 a.m., the dabbawalas pick up the lunches and sort them by destination. From 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., the deliverymen travel the city's railways, the backbone of the system.
Mumbai's railways are so crowded and the commutes so long that the dabbawalas have their own train cars. Outside the stations, they sort the lunchboxes by color-coding or by numbers written on the lids. Then they take off, sometimes on a bicycle, more often on foot.
At 12:15, they take a five-minute chai break, highly unusual in South Asia, where drinking tea is seldom quick. Then they are off again, running through the streets, up and down stairs, delivering lunches.
Sitting in a one-room office in Mumbai, Raghunath D. Medge, president of the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Charity Trust, as the dabbawalas' organization is formally known, proudly displays a gold-plated tiffin on his desk.
"Our dabbawalas don't drink alcohol. They don't waste time. They, in fact, wage a war against time," he said. "You see this modern Mumbai life, it's an artificial life. People miss the old ways. In India, life will change. But the good parts, like a home-cooked lunch, should stay."
Special correspondent Ria Sen in New Delhi contributed to this report.
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Tuesday, November 11, 2008
A View of Whole Foods in August 2008
This is Mr. Sham's article:
Whole Foods Is Worth a Whole Lot More
By Sham Gad
RealMoney.com Contributor
8/20/2008 12:59 PM EDT
URL: http://www.thestreet.com/p/rmoney/investing/10434043.html
One of my favorite investors once remarked, "You pay an expensive price for a cheery consensus." Indeed. When is the last time you found bargain investments among today's popular investment groups? It rarely ever happens. The commodities sector is case in point. While I believe the long-term outlook for commodities is strong, that doesn't mean I would go out and quickly invest in the industry. Anyone with a pulse knows that oil prices have soared and pushed up the prices of gasoline, diesel fuel and heating oil. Largely hidden from view, however, have been steep and continuing price increases across a basket of commodities. Coal sold for about $30 a ton during 2003, and hit $139 in 2008 before slipping back a bit, tripling in 12 months. Copper went from 82 cents a pound in July 2003 to $3.72 by the end of last month, an increase of 350% over five years. The price of steel has climbed from under $240 a ton for hot-rolled steel in 2003 to $1,125 a ton last month, a fourfold rise in five years. Grain prices are no exception. U.S. corn prices jumped from $3.01 a bushel in July 2007 to $5.37 one year later. Wheat doubled from $3.05 a bushel to $6.02 over the past two years. The old adage, "what has risen shall fall and what has fallen shall again rise" rings very true in investing. Blindly investing in commodities today can lead to some very quick and painful results. Just look at a few oil companies' equity prices over the past few weeks as oil has fallen from $147 to $113 a barrel. They have fallen just as quickly. Believe it or not, some of the best opportunities today lie outside the commodities and in areas where many investors frown upon.
The Economic Case
When demand is high, prices rise; conversely when demand softens, prices fall. This principle also applies to stock prices. Right now, energy and commodity businesses are the hot topics. Unfortunately, the real money was made a few years ago when corn, wheat and coal were considered boring topics, and patient investors were picking up businesses on the cheap. Enterprising investors would be well served to look in today's orphaned sectors. Hundreds of businesses have lost 50% or more of their market valuations over the past year or two. Understand, however, that a cheap stock does not equate to an undervalued investment opportunity, and an undervalued business is not necessarily characterized by a cheap stock price. A wonderful example is Whole Foods (WFMI) .
Pricey Food, Affordable Stock
For years, I have been a big admirer of Whole Foods. The quality of the business of is evident the minute you step inside one of its stores. For years, Whole Foods was the darling of Wall Street. Between 2002 and 2006, shares leapt from $18 to nearly $80 a share, and the average annual P/E ratio was over 35. During this time, the company traded for as high as seven times book. Now, with consumers cutting back, the grocer has felt the pain. The most recent quarter's results indicate choppy waters ahead. The company lost nearly 18% of its value in a single day. Make no mistake, Whole Foods is experiencing a very tough operating environment. Management indicated as much when they announced that they would be reducing expansion plans for the rest of the year. But now, with the stock at $18, the P/E is 18, and the company sells for less than two times book value, investors are avoiding it. Yet Whole Foods is a business with a wonderful economic moat. With the sticky acquisition of Wild Oats behind it, Whole Foods has eliminated its biggest competitor. Even Wal-Mart (WMT) , with its might, has yet to do anything to damage the Whole Foods brand. As a value investor, what has me so excited about Whole Foods at the current prices is simply this: to any potential buyer, Whole Foods is worth a whole lot more than its current market value of $2.65 billion. The exact figure, no one knows; but the company's assets, brand recognition, market dominance and growth prospects all add up to something more than $3 billion. Just think of how long and expensive it would be for Wal-Mart or Kroger (KR) to build a 270-store organic food chain in some of the country's top real estate locations -- and then spending the marketing dollars to achieve the image and recognition that Whole Foods has. It won't happen for $2.65 billion. In the organic and natural foods industry, Whole Foods is the Coca-Cola (KO) : it owns the market. Markets environments like today reward the investor who can anticipate what is to come. Under a tough consumer environment, Whole Food's pricier fare looks like a suckers bet. Yet, many of its customers view their food habits as a lifestyle necessity, and are more tolerant of price changes. Besides, if conventional food prices continue to rise, the value of natural foods may look better. If you are expecting results next month or next quarter, you might not like the ones you get. But if you can analyze a business through the looking glass of a multi-year period, now is a good time to look at some quality unpopular businesses. As famed investor Shelby Davis aptly remarked, "You make your best money in bear markets, you just don't know it at the time."
At the time of publication, Gad had no positions in the stocks mentioned, although positions may change at any time. Sham Gad is the managing partner of the Gad Partners Fund, a value-centric investment partnership modeled after the original 1950s' Buffett Partnerships. Previously, Gad was a writer for The Motley Fool and a securities analyst for UAS Asset Management, a small, value-focused fund in New York City. Gad also runs a value investing blog inspired by the teachings of Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett. Gad is working on a value investing book (title forthcoming) to be published by John Wiley and Sons in the summer of 2009. Reach Gad at sham@gadcapital.com.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Sticker Shock in the Organic Aisles
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/business/18organic.html?em&ex=1208664000&en=f666e740e6b9ce5a&ei=5087%0A
Sticker Shock in the Organic Aisles
Shoppers have long been willing to pay a premium for organic food. But how much is too much?
Rising prices for organic groceries are prompting some consumers to question their devotion to food produced without pesticides, chemical fertilizers or antibiotics. In some parts of the country, a loaf of organic bread can cost $4.50, a pound of pasta has hit $3, and organic milk is closing in on $7 a gallon.
“The prices have gotten ridiculous,” said Brenda Czarnik, who was shopping recently at a food cooperative in St. Paul.
Food prices in general have been rising, but organic food lagged somewhat behind last year because of a temporary glut of organic milk and other factors. Some grocery chains adopted private-label organic products, which are cheaper than brand products, while others hesitated to raise already high organic prices.
In recent months, however, these factors have been giving way to cost pressures in the industry. On grocery shelves across the nation, sharp price increases are taking hold.
“It’s probably the most dynamic and volatile time I’ve seen in 25 years,” said Gary Hirshberg, chief executive of Stonyfield Farm, an organic dairy business. “It’s extremely difficult to predict where it’s going.”
Organic prices are rising for many of the same reasons affecting conventional food prices: higher fuel costs, rising demand and a tight supply of the grains needed for animal feed and bakery items. In fact, demand for organic wheat, soybeans and corn is so great that farmers are receiving unheard-of prices.
But people who have to buy organic grain, from bakers and pasta makers to chicken and dairy farmers, say they are struggling to maintain profit margins, even though shoppers are paying more. The price of organic animal feed is so high that some dairy farmers have abandoned organic farming methods and others are pushing retailers to raise prices more aggressively. Several organic manufacturers worry that sales may slow as consumers cut back.
Perry Abbenante, global grocery coordinator for Whole Foods Market, said sales were strong and customer counts were up. He said it might be too soon to know how consumers would react to higher organic prices, particularly in dairy.
“Man, $6.99 for a gallon of milk is pushing it,” he said. “We have to be very careful about not pricing organics out of the market.”
Over all, grocery prices have increased about 5 percent over the last year, though some staples like conventional eggs jumped 30 percent and milk, 13 percent, according to the Consumer Price Index. That government index does not break out prices for organic food.
Organic manufacturers and retailers said prices began increasing last fall but were only now starting to spike significantly in some parts of the country. Organic milk prices declined slightly last year.
Eric Newman, vice president for sales at Organic Valley, a farmers’ cooperative that sells mostly dairy products, said a half gallon of milk cost $3.49, on average, in 2007 while a gallon cost about $6. He said he expected the average price of a half gallon to exceed $4 in the months to come, while a gallon could cost more than $7.
The average retail price for Eggland’s Best Organic eggs in 2007 ranged from $3.79 to $4.29, company officials said. So far this year, the range has risen to $4.59 to $4.99.
Organic food is typically 20 percent to 100 percent more expensive than a conventional counterpart; the gap has narrowed in recent years as discount retailers like Wal-Mart have offered organics and more private-label organic products have become available, according to the industry.
Americans spent $16.7 billion on organic food and beverages in 2006, a 126 percent increase in just five years, according to the Organic Trade Association, an industry trade group. Organic sales account for about 2.8 percent of food and beverage sales in the United States, the group says.
The United States had 4.1 million acres of organic farmland in 2005, triple the amount in 1997, according to the Department of Agriculture, which regulates the organic industry. But farmers and grain buyers say the growth of new organic acreage has slowed, falling short of rising demand and causing organic grain prices to soar.
That is partly because prices for conventional corn, soybeans and wheat are at or near records, so there is less incentive for farmers to switch to organic crops; making the switch requires a three-year transition and piles of paperwork.
“There has been no new surge of land going into organic,” said Lynn Clarkson, who buys organic grain as president of Clarkson Grain in central Illinois. “We are having to compete with this ethanol juggernaut,” he added, referring to the growing use of field corn for fuel.
Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, an environmental research organization, said conventional dairy and grain prices were so high that they were nearly rivaling prices that organic farmers receive. Organic farmers normally earn a hefty premium for raising livestock and crops without chemical fertilizer, pesticides or antibiotics.
“We may be seeing over the next few years a turnaround, where organic agriculture contracts in this country,” he said. The price of organic grain has also jumped because hundreds of dairy farmers rushed to complete their transition to organic production last year, before more stringent government regulations took effect. The influx created a temporary glut of organic milk, which suppressed prices last year, but also added to the demand — and the price — for organic animal feed. In addition, a drought last year in the Upper Midwest caused relatively poor yields for some organic crops.
Doug Hartkopf, a dairy farmer in Albion, Me., said the high feed costs forced him to stop farming organically in December.
“Instead of paying $3,000 a month, I was paying $7,000,” he said. “It was a very tough decision. It was something we had to do.”
In all, at least 25 dairy farmers in the Northeast have retired early or stopped farming organically in the last six months, said Ed Maltby, executive director of the Northeast Organic Dairy Producers Alliance. He predicted that the shifts would continue unless farmers received a price increase of about 25 percent from milk processors.
The high grain prices are squeezing more than just organic dairy farmers.
“In the last three months or four months, everyone along the chain in organic food is not making their margins,” said Bob Eberly, president of Eberly Poultry in Stevens, Pa. The cost of raising poultry has increased 16 percent in the last six months, but he said his prices had increased only 7 percent.
“In the next month or so, our customers are going to see a significant price increase,” he said. “We just have to do it.”
Some organic bakeries, meanwhile, say they, too, are struggling to pay for organic flour and grains.
Michael Girkout, president of the Alvarado Street Bakery in Petaluma, Calif., said the farmers who supply his organic grain refused to honor a two-year contract in November and demanded a steep price increase.
“They said they could not afford to sell it to us at the price they agreed to two years ago,” said Mr. Girkout, who said he had little choice but to comply given the limited supply. He raised his prices for a loaf of bread 17 percent last year, he said.
Of course, the rising price of organic feed has another side. While organic livestock farmers are struggling, farmers who grow organic grain are being paid more than ever.
Organic corn is selling for $10 a bushel, organic soybeans for about $20 a bushel, and organic wheat is priced as high as $22 a bushel, all of them at least double the price of two years ago, said Oren Holle, a grain farmer in Kansas and president of an organic farmers’ cooperative.
“It is unprecedented,” Mr. Holle said. “Nobody saw these kind of market prices coming.”
Even with those prices, though, people in the industry say fewer farmers are starting the arduous transition to organic production because they can get record prices for conventional grain. Droughts, a growing global middle class and rising demand for biofuels produced from crops are putting heavy pressure on the world’s food system, sending prices up everywhere.
In the organic industry, the question is how shoppers will react to rising prices. “It will not be at all unusual for a mom to say, ‘No matter what, I am going to buy organic milk, but you know what, I don’t need to buy the organic cold cereal because I don’t see the value in it as much,’ ” said Laurie Demeritt, president of the Hartman Group, a market research firm specializing in health and wellness research.
At the Mississippi Market Natural Foods Co-op in St. Paul, Shaun Hainey, 26, said he had quit smoking and cut back on drinking and “superfluous recreational spending, like going skiing.” But he and his wife, Cassandra Hainey, have not cut back on organic food.
“We don’t foresee a price level at which we’d stop shopping organic,” he said.
But Scott Cordes, a 33-year-old budget analyst for the city of St. Paul, has found the high prices hard to bear. He now buys conventional 1 percent milk for $4.09 rather than spending $6.99 on a gallon of organic milk. Still, he does not expect to forgo organic foods altogether.
“You have to weigh the type of food you want,” he said. “I’ll only go so far to save money.”