The way we produce food has changed enormously within a few generations. Large, industrialized monoculture farms now dominate the U.S. foodscape, with real costs for our health and for the land.
The regenerative agriculture movement has pushed back, with thousands of smaller farms working to return food to a more local, community-based system.
At Ashfount, we believe farm and food businesses flourish when they Act Local. Here is what we mean by that, and how the idea holds up in a highly globalized market.
We've become disconnected from our food
Before industrial "Big Food," most people in the U.S. ate food grown fairly close to home. As industrialization reshaped where people lived and how food was produced, that link weakened quickly.
Busier working lives made convenience the main goal of food production and shopping. Many people are now disconnected from their food, with little idea where it comes from, how it was produced or whether it truly nourishes them.
Much of the system is built to produce food that is durable and cheap, so the ability to travel ranks above taste and nutrition. The land pays a price too. Farmland is exposed to soil degradation, which is why we believe we must heal the soil. And agriculture was responsible for 9.4 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2022, according to the EPA's greenhouse gas inventory.
We encourage the farms and food businesses we work with to treat their local environment and community as an integral part of their business model. When we work together, we thrive together.
The rise of the monoculture farm
Farm subsidies began during the Great Depression, as the USDA Economic Research Service's history of price-support programs records. Their purpose was to stabilize farm incomes and the food supply. Support favored crops that offered good value: high-yield crops that store well and have many uses. Corn and soybeans fit that description.
Over time, large farms produced a surplus of these crops, which found its way into products such as:
- high fructose corn syrup, used to sweeten food and drinks
- ethanol for fuel
- cornstarch, used in diapers and crayons
- soy lecithin, used in frying fats and margarines
- corn-based plastics, soy ink and soy-based lubricants
The surplus drove prices down and made farming less profitable. At the same time, monoculture wore down soil health, and farmers spent more and more on inputs such as chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Subsidies have continued ever since. According to the USDA Economic Research Service farm income forecast, direct government farm payments totaled $27.9 billion in 2025 and are forecast at $47.4 billion for 2026. A 2024 Economic Research Service report found that midsize and large-scale family farms made up 10 percent of all U.S. farms in 2023 but received 71 percent of countercyclical-type payments, which come from programs that target commodities such as corn, soybeans and wheat.
Program design shapes what gets grown. Much of the support follows commodity crops, smaller farms often qualify for only a small amount, and many producers of meat, vegetables and fruit do not qualify at all. Subsidies can also push up land prices and make it harder to diversify how land is used. Over time, the net effect has been to steer farmers toward monoculture.
Even so, a growing number of farmers are reclaiming ground from large-scale industrial agriculture.
How local farmers are reclaiming the food system
Many farmers want to return to a more diverse, environmentally sound way of producing food, one built around community and around practices that heal rather than harm. The response has been the Local Food Movement.
It is a loose collective of growers and food producers who share a commitment to keeping food locally sourced and sold: small farms, food activists, community gardeners, chefs, restaurateurs and processors. Their motives include supporting the local economy, sustainability, better and safer food, and offering an alternative to large agribusiness.
Regenerative practices often sit at the core of the movement, because they aim to manage holistically, respect nature and reconnect people with the land. These producers want to raise crops and livestock on healthy land, in ways that respect biodiversity and the natural instincts of animals. Many sell directly to customers within a small radius.
They also want to help their communities build a healthier relationship with food, often by teaching neighbors about nutrition and soil regeneration. So Act Local is more than selling produce nearby. It is a philosophy of food production that offers a real alternative to the industrial model.
How people act local
Food sold locally or directly, without large agribusiness contracts in between, keeps growing. In 2022, U.S. producers sold $17.5 billion in food through direct marketing channels, a 25 percent increase (after adjusting for inflation) since 2017, according to the USDA Economic Research Service.
The channels vary:
- Community Supported Agriculture: members pay the farm up front and share its risks and rewards, receiving a share of the harvest in return. Some also volunteer on the farm.
- Food hubs: local and regional food hubs connect small farms within an area, help them sell to restaurants and local businesses, and often offer wholesale distribution.
- Farmers markets: producers sell directly to customers, often alongside craft and artisan goods, and markets remain a popular way to shop.
- Farm shops and delivery: many farms set drop-in hours for customers to buy on site, and others deliver orders placed online.
The hurdles local producers face
Small Farm Nation identifies several challenges the Local Food Movement faces when selling directly to customers. Together they are the biggest hurdles for producers who step away from the industrial system:
- Inconvenience: most people shop in large stores open long hours every day, with a range of choice no single farm can match.
- Distance: most farms are far from suburbs and towns, and for some customers a pickup means hours of driving.
- Unfamiliar products: shoppers used to uniform, pre-prepared food can be wary of produce that looks different, or unsure how to cook fresh cuts of meat or a whole chicken.
- Processing bottlenecks: large farms have big, largely automated plants, while small farms often struggle to find a local processor for pork or beef, driving for hours and booking months ahead.
- Marketing: many small farms don't know how to reach consumers.
- Price: regenerative produce rarely matches the price of cheap, subsidized commodity products.
- Regulation: the rules get harder, especially for farms that sell across state lines.
These hurdles are real, but the way Polyface Farm has handled them offers some ideas for the way forward.
Why Polyface started shipping
In July 2019, Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm announced that the farm would begin shipping some of its products. The reaction was mixed, but the debate was a useful reminder that regenerative farms have to adapt to a competitive market.
Salatin had long championed selling locally, so some critics saw shipping across state lines as a betrayal of that ideal. He responded:
Forty years ago a "no ship" policy made sense. Amazon did not exist and Polyface was the first game in town. Today, Wal-Mart is the largest purveyor of organics (industrial junk organics, to be sure) and that has flattened sales at farmers' markets, Community Supported Agriculture, and direct farm sales.
We are still as committed as ever to local food systems and our prices will always be cheapest and loyalty to local customers always highest here at the farm and in our community. But as production compromise envelopes the organic sector, it's time to go toe to toe, head to head, with an authentic alternative.
His point concerns organic food mass-produced by large companies. It is good that more people want organic food, but cheap industrial organic brings problems of its own.
The organic issue
Low-priced organic ranges from large retailers worry many food producers and environmental groups. Mark Smallwood of the Rodale Institute has warned that if Walmart encouraged large-scale organic production, industrial organic practices would spread: farms would meet the bare minimum of organic standards, deplete the soil, then abandon the land and move on.
If smaller organic farmers are absorbed into that model, the market becomes uniform again and the farmer-community connection that Act Local depends on is lost.
Trust in organic standards matters too. A 2017 Washington Post investigation found that a shipment of 36 million pounds of soybeans had been relabeled as USDA Organic during transit, although the beans began as ordinary soybeans grown with conventional pesticides. The relabeling added about $4 million to their value.
Mislabeling and outright fraud, together with cut-rate industrial organic, explain much of Polyface's decision and why the idea of acting local deserves a fresh look.
Acting local in a global market
At Ashfount, we believe the best food is produced locally, with regenerative methods that heal the land and give farmers holistic solutions. We also know that tackling climate change and the harm industrial agriculture causes means changing attitudes to food at the local, regional, national and international level.
That change happens through interconnected food webs that reconnect people with nourishing, regeneratively produced food. Today's food webs mostly serve industrial farming. To offer a real alternative at scale, smaller farms need to band together and build alternative food webs of their own. Our Farms & Ranches directory collects regenerative producers worth knowing.
Many people in the U.S. live in large cities, far from a farmers market or a regenerative farm. Shipping and food hubs let farms like Polyface reach them. One reader of Salatin's announcement put it simply: food raised ethically by a farmer, packed by local people and delivered by a local driver still felt like buying local.
Shipping has its costs. It carries an environmental footprint, and it risks losing the in-person connection that does so much to change how people value food. Online communities matter too, though, and so does access to good local food for people with no in-person alternative.
That is how smaller producers can combine the ideal of selling locally with pragmatism about the market. It is also how we approach our consulting and media work: we help the farms and food businesses we advise build local roots, and the channels that carry their food further.