Making local food affordable

Make locally grown food at Farmer’s Markets in Sonoma Valley more affordable to lower and middle-income consumers.

Justifying rationale:

Keeping a balanced triple bottom line of economic development, environmental sustainability and social equity. This strategy satisfies multiple criteria; it’s a wide, inclusive net.

Local food is good:

The customer base has to include more than well-off upper crust Sonomans. There will never be a balanced local food producing economy if people at the bottom can’t afford to participate.

How to make prices affordable?

-reduce taxes and fees on small growers locally precisely to make the food more affordable to lower and middle-income consumers. Incentives can be provided to give local small producers a tax/ fee break; these breaks have to be quantifiable in terms of lowering the price of produce to an affordable range for low-income consumers.

What is working against affordable local food?

-An upward spiral of inflated value resulting from dominance of a luxury wine economy and a concentration of wealthy people able to pay higher prices. This is part of a US growing inequality, which is especially evident in Sonoma.

-too much land devoted to vineyards and not enough to mixed agriculture

-the luxury end of the wine market has pushed agricultural land values through the roof

-a luxury economy drives up prices overall: land, taxes, rents, housing, gas, consumer goods

-small food producers see they can charge more because there are enough well-off people that can pay the higher price

-in Sonoma the market for food is cornered, like an airport, people have to drive to the 101 corridor or Napa to find decent prices on consumer goods

Solution A:

-find ways to chip away at locally grown food producer’s regulatory and tax costs with the specific goal of lowering prices and making locally grown food affordable for all, not just the wealthy.

-incentivize the use of agricultural land for local food production vs. vineyards and stipulate these incentives are contingent on affordability for lower and middle income consumers

-rezone food producing agricultural land so its fee and tax structure reflects equitable social values

Solution B:

-anyone receiving state or county economic assistance of any kind should have an ID and thus be already vetted as bone fide deserving of lower prices; this ID card can be shown to Farmer’s Markets and these low income consumers receive a meaningful discount that the grower then redeems for tax credits

-this same system could be used at supermarkets as well