Blog
The Brightfarms blog is where you’ll find what we’re thinking about, reading about, and working on.
In Defense of Local Food
It is no surprise that the local food movement has arisen in an age of increased global trade and information exchange. Although food labels tell us where our food comes from, they rarely tell us who produced our food or how. Sadly, price is the primary source of information consumers have when buying food. And prices often fail to reflect products’ true costs—to human health, to our communities, and to our planet. The local food movement is a reaction to the anonymous global food system, espousing taste, freshness, nutrition, health, social responsibility, environmental sustainability, and economic justice. The popularity of local food has grown out of a desire for more information about what we put into our bodies and how our food choices affect our environment.
Recent economic discussions (such as The Locavore’s Dilemma and The Inefficiency of Local Food) challenge whether the local food movement delivers the aforementioned benefits. In particular, they question the social and environmental benefits that are assumed to arise from purchasing local food but are potentially unproven. The crux of these arguments is centered on the neoclassical economic concepts of comparative advantage and resource allocation efficiency.
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09 May 2012
Save The Date: TEDxYouth@MSC
On June 8th, 2012, the TEDxYouth@MSC “Discovering Sustainability Science” conference will bring together educators, political figures, and 5th to 8th grade youth for live presentations, storytelling, and round-table discussions to encourage learning in a different way.
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09 April 2012
Lower Makefield Township Board of Supervisors Approves Plans to Build a Greenhouse
Last night, the Lower Makefield Township Board of Supervisors approved our plans to build a greenhouse. The greenhouse will contribute to the local produce supply in partnership with McCaffrey’s Market. We are very appreciative of the opportunity to work with the community and will continue to actively listen and respond to feedback as the project progresses.
08 March 2012
Why I Love a Great Tomato
In addition to all the attributes that make biting into a juicy, ripe tomato a rewarding sensory experience, I appreciate something about a tomato that may seem somewhat peculiar: it is a physical thing. It exists. Someone grows it, someone else buys it. A market has existed for tomatoes ever since someone figured out how to cultivate it.
Before joining BrightFarms, I traded carbon credits, a “commodity” that exists only on paper. Not only does the carbon credit exist by the grace of governmental regulation, but its supply and demand could change, often dramatically, because of arbitrary political decisions. In theory, the carbon credit existed to provide incentives to invest technologies and/or activities, such as waste-to-energy projects, that help reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, a major cause of climate change. Sometimes it worked. Often times, however, projects fizzled out because of lengthy, cumbersome and expensive regulatory processes.
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05 March 2012
Another Reason to Love Local Food: Job Creation
No surprise: local food creates more jobs. According to Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan, one million dollars in local foods sales creates 13 jobs; one million dollars in non-local food sales creates only three jobs.
I know firsthand that local food creates jobs because it created current my job at BrightFarms! As a Master’s Candidate in Food Systems at NYU, I was looking for a job that would allow me to contribute to building local food systems. I feel fortunate to have found one.
The positive impact of local food on local economies is one of the primary reasons the USDA, and citizens across the country, advocate for local foods. The USDA’s 2009 campaign, Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food and its brand new Know Your Farmer Compass connect consumers to producers to meet mutual demand. Below are some of the conclusions the USDA has drawn on local and regional food systems since the campaign began:
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05 March 2012
Walter Robb, Whole Foods Co-CEO, on Creating A Sustainable Food Chain
“When will we start putting externalities in the cost of food?” asked Walter Robb, Whole Foods Co-CEO. Robb spoke with NYU Professor Carolyn Dimitri at an event called “Creating A Sustainable Food Chain From Farm to Fork” hosted by the Wagner Food Policy Alliance.
Robb is referring to the fact that the prices we pay for food do not reflect the true costs of production—to farm animals, farmworkers, to communities, to our health, and to the environment. According to Robb, the plight of our “farmworkers is the next frontier” for intervention. The issue has been gaining more momentum since Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland exposed the modern-day slavery that pervades the Florida tomato industry.
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24 February 2012
How a New Business Model could Revolutionize Fresh Food
In his series of books on innovation, Harvard Business School Professor, Clayton Christensen makes one of the most compelling cases yet for the following maxim: You can build a better mousetrap, but that doesn’t mean they will necessarily use it.
Christensen’s argument goes something like this: Innovations that disrupt markets nearly always start with a new, or newly applied, technology that offers a significant improvement over previous ones. But, great technology alone is not enough for success.
To truly shake things up in a market, innovations also need new business models as well as what Christensen calls “value networks” – new supply chains, channels to market and so on. Without such support, established leaders can squash or co-opt new players, sometimes killing or at least sidelining their innovations along with them. Sometimes it can take a long time for new business models and value networks to evolve in support of a “new” technology.
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24 February 2012
Lettuce in Lower Makefield
Riding on the heels of Valentine’s Day, we held an informal meeting in Lower Makefield Township to share what we love with the community: our lettuce! Lower Makefield is home to a McCaffrey’s Market, the first supermarket to enter into a long-term Produce Purchase Agreement with us.
Our greenhouse in Long Island is now in full swing. Our amazing farmer, Andrew, brought an abundance of spring mix and baby spinach that was harvested on Monday to the meeting. The salad was so tasty that one resident said “I want a BrightFarms greenhouse in my backyard!”
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17 February 2012
The Prince's Speech
By Laurie David via HuffingtonPost.com
Last spring, right on the heels of one of the biggest events in his life, his son’s wedding — and with the eyes of the world upon his family — Prince Charles came to the United States to deliver a speech at Georgetown University about the future of food.
There’s nothing like sitting in an audience and getting goose bumps listening to a great visionary tell it the way it is. They say lightening doesn’t strike twice, but when I heard Prince Charles’s speech that day, I felt the same kind of jolt I got the first time I saw Al Gore’s slide show on global warming. Gore’s power point stood out because it was the clearest, most concise explanation of our climate crisis I had ever heard.
14 February 2012
Paul Lightfoot: A Produce Supply Chain Revolution [Video]
BrightFarms CEO Paul Lightfoot’s TEDx talk was just released online!
The talk is from the TEDxManhattan conference on “Changing the Way We Eat,” and explains what’s wrong with the produce supply chain, its negative impact on the environment, and what we’re doing to revolutionize local food!
08 February 2012