Why Supporting Local Agriculture Matters More Than Ever

Why Supporting Local Agriculture Matters More Than Ever

Your choice is powerful.

When you pick up a bag of apples from the farm stand or grab a box of vegetables from a local CSA, it might feel like a small act. But here’s the truth: it’s anything but small. Every purchase is a vote, and those votes add up to either strengthen our community food system or hollow it out. Across the country, farmland is disappearing fast. According to the American Farmland Trust, we lose over 2,000 acres of farmland every single day in the United States—swallowed up by pavement, subdivisions, or storage units. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. Supporting your local farms is one of the most direct ways to make sure farmland stays farmland. Every CSA membership, every pint of peaches, every basket of veggies is another brick in the foundation that keeps a farm alive.

The other piece folks don’t always think about is where the money goes. When you buy a bag of arugula from a grocery chain, most of that money is gone from the valley before you even eat it. When you buy that same arugula from a farm stand or at the Wednesday Market in Mammoth, the dollars cycle back through local mechanics, printers, feed stores, and small businesses. It’s not just about food—it’s about an economy that feeds itself rather than leaking out to the lowest bidder. And it’s worth remembering that the average bite of food in America travels more than 1,500 miles before it reaches your plate, a number cited by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. Compare that to carrots pulled from the ground a few miles down the road—you can taste the difference, and your dollars stay where they belong, in our community.

We’ve all seen what happens when supply chains get disrupted—empty shelves, skyrocketing prices, and a whole lot of uncertainty. It was not that long ago that this realization hit hard for us here in Bishop. Remember COVID, when the shelves at Vons were stripped bare overnight? This isn’t some abstract idea—we’ve witnessed it just within the last few years. Remember when all three ways out of Bishop were blocked at once? If we as a community are dependent on outside sources, that is a very unstable and risky place to be. Local farms don’t shut down because of a cargo ship stuck in a canal halfway across the world. We keep planting, harvesting, and bringing food to our neighbors.

And this doesn’t stop with farms—our ranchers are part of this same lifeline. Local beef, pig, and dairy producers are the ones keeping pastures open, managing rangeland, and making sure protein is raised right here at home. Supporting them means we aren’t entirely dependent on meat shipped in from thousands of miles away. When you support local ag, you’re investing in resilience—real resilience that doesn’t depend on trucks and planes and middlemen.

Here at Blue Heron Farm, growing food isn’t just about filling boxes. It’s about soil health, cover crops, rotational grazing, pollinator hedgerows, and compost piles. It’s about kids running through the orchards, school groups coming out to learn where their food comes from, and neighbors sharing recipes at the farm stand. Farming done right is about stewarding land so it can keep feeding people long after we’re gone. And that only works when the community stands behind it.

Let’s be blunt: we’re never going to beat the big-box stores on price. And honestly? We would fail if we tried. We would never be able to be sustainable if we did. We have land to pay for, labor to pay for, irrigation and infrastructure to fix. No one is coming in to subsidize those costs for us. If we don’t find a way to make this farm successful financially—there will be no farm. That’s the reality of agriculture on a small scale. What local farms offer is something different. Food with a face, a story, and a place. Food that hasn’t been bred to withstand two weeks on a truck, but instead has been grown for taste, nutrition, and health. Food you can ask questions about, because the farmer who grew it is standing right there in front of you. And here’s a sobering fact: the average age of the American farmer is nearly 58 years old, and fewer than 9% of farmers are under the age of 35, according to the USDA’s 2022 Census of Agriculture. My own grandparents were horrified when I told them I was going to college to become a farmer. They said, “I thought you would go to college so you didn’t have to be a farmer.” That’s the perception we’re up against. The only way we’re going to encourage the next generation to step into this work is to prove that you can, in fact, make a living farming. That means supporting farms now, so they have a fighting chance to be here tomorrow. The stakes are high.

Every community has a choice to make. Do we want to be dependent on faraway supply chains and faceless corporations? Or do we want to build something rooted, resilient, and ours? Supporting local agriculture isn’t charity. It’s an act of self-reliance. It’s investing in a food system that keeps our valley strong, keeps farmland in production, and keeps us connected to the seasons and the soil.

So next time you’re deciding where to spend your food dollars, remember that your choice is powerful. It shapes the kind of food system we’re going to hand to the next generation. And from where I’m standing, knee-deep in the orchard rows, I can tell you this: every local purchase makes a difference. From one farmer to you—thank you for choosing to keep this valley alive, delicious, and resilient.