It’s a Tuesday evening at Prairie Fruit Farm just north of Champaign, IL. Goats are munching on organic alfalfa outside in the yard and inside the house laid flat on the floor is a large map of Illinois. Sitting around it are eight people: Two farmers, a cattle rancher, a goat cheesemaker, and an U of I student, two of Mayor Daley’s farmer’s market administrators, a veterinarian-rancher specialist, and an organics supplier. Three other diverse groups with maps are gathered throughout the house. They are collectively contemplating Interstate-57’s undulating line of transportation. It rises from Illinois’s southern-most forest preserve tip up to banks on Lake Michigan—Chicago. If you listen in on one of the groups, you’ll find discussion is focused upon how they can bring together area producers to re-create the I-57 Farm to Table Corridor.
Their attention is upon a 150 year-old route, originally populated with trains attached to the Illinois Central Railroad track. Linking tracks with the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad to Chicago, this route was a boon to farmers in Central and Southern Illinois and the Chicago industrialists who were discovering the quality of their own local food baskets. By 1970, funds from Eisenhower’s 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act had trickled down far enough that a proximate interstate roadway could be finished, ultimately usurping the efficiency of the Illinois Central Railroad. This was I-57, built in part, like other interstates, to defend the nation in the event of an emergency but to also spur and speed the development of commerce throughout the country.
The commerce that developed from these paved national passageways was a link for Chicago to glamorous, mass-produced product from all over the country. Without the demand or its reliable railroad, its own food basket became disorganized and forgotten.
But today’s renewed value for what’s local is inspiring Illinois producers to cooperate in reinventing a wheel their grandparents used so well. “It’s almost as if we have forgotten how things happened just 60 years ago,” says Terra Brockman of The Land Connection, a participant in the meeting. “What we should really do,” Harold Wilken of Janies Farm inserts at the beginning of his group’s discussion, half-playfully, “Is visit all the nursing homes along I-57, ask them what they did, and write down their oral history of this route.” He tells me the next day, “Transportation has become so mobile and easy and yet complicated enough that we are missing the obvious.”
Though the landscape has changed and the people and issues are different, the obvious remains: Organization around I-57. “The Corridor could begin to fill Chicago’s bottomless demand for local product,” says the meeting’s facilitator, Farm Forager Mari Coyne. She was hired by the City of Chicago and Chicago’s Green City Market to find more farmers to fill their markets’ slots. In visiting farms throughout the state, she has been a witness to their ideas and challenges in getting to Chicago. So she has orchestrated this Tuesday meeting to facilitate conversation about how to access the variety of end-users in Chicago.
“We want to look at a whole suite of solutions,” host Wes Jarrell says to open dialogue, just after dinner. In this vein, group discussions welcome all suggestions from the attending producers, food-buyers, distributors, marketers, and resource agencies concerning their assessment of key organizational strategies and resources.
“My group was really diverse and representative of everybody necessary to accomplish this local throughway,” Buyer for Goodness Greeness, Ben Perkins later recalls, “There was a representative from the Department of Agriculture, an organic farmer, a meat producer, a chef/owner, the director of Green City Market, and myself—the distribution buyer and supplier. From my perspective, I kept stressing that Chicago is a large block of concrete and regional suppliers all over the state of Illinois, not just around the city itself, are our “local” supply. It was a productive meeting. We saw there’s still a lot of hard work to be done but that it is a feasible idea.”
Discussion of the nuts and bolts was intended to generate modest but solid returns: To get ideas rolling. “We’re not trying to change the business models of these producers but to open opportunity,” Coyne says later over the phone, adding, “And to inform producers about the demand in Chicago—that this city is serious about local food.”
At the meeting’s summation, many responses from producers and consumers alike highlight how informative and eye-opening the evening has been. Many urge that more discussions on the topic should take place, spearheaded by individuals who would start isolating parts and solutions.
Despite the late hour and the long drive ahead, many groups linger, abuzz with the possibilities and the many challenges to come. It is clear something has been started. With the meeting closed, those large maps folded, and the goats probably satiated for now, the route from a farm in Illinois to a table in Chicago is wide and open. And it’s time to fill it.
Mercedee Renz, Goodness Greeness