Can We Take Community Wealth Back From Walmart and Kroger?

In this Upzoned episode, Abby is joined by Strong Towns Chief Technical Advisor Edward Erfurt to discuss the emergence of food deserts in the United States. In the 1980s, the U.S. government stopped enforcing price discrimination laws, letting large supermarkets use their size to leverage better prices from suppliers. This led to the closure of many small, independent groceries and helped create today's food deserts.

Abby and Edward discuss the shift from grocery stores being neighborhood assets to regional destinations and how that extracts wealth from communities. Then they share bottom-up ways that everyday people can address these food shortages in their communities.

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  Abby Newsham 0:04

  This is Abby, and you are listening to up zoned.

  Abby Newsham 0:18

  Hey, everyone, thanks for listening to another episode of up zone to show where we take a big story each week that touches the strong towns conversation, and we up zone it. We talk about it in depth. I'm Abby Newsham, an urban planner in Kansas City, and today I am joined by my friend Edward Erfurt, who is the Director of Community Action at strong towns, welcome, great. Thanks for having me. Abby, yeah, it's always great to have you on and thanks for doing this at such short notice. Oh,

  Edward Erfurt 0:49

  I always love it. I want to support up zone. I always have so much fun.

  Abby Newsham 0:53

  Yeah, this is going to be a good one. Well, we're going to be talking a little bit about a subject that I don't think Chuck and I have ever covered. And, yeah, I don't think we've talked about this much on up sound we're gonna be talking about grocery stores. So this is an article that was published in The Atlantic by Stacy Mitchell, and it is entitled The Great grocery squeeze, how a federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert. So the article really examines the emergence of food deserts in the United States and their link to really the proof the changes in federal policy that occurred in the 1980s for people who maybe haven't heard of the term food desert, this refers to regions where residents have very limited access to affordable, healthy food options. And this particular this particularly happens in low income and rural areas. Historically, both urban and rural, low income communities had access to grocery stores, including independent, small chain supermarkets. But as the article talks about, in the 1980s we saw a significant shift to the secession of enforcement of the Robinson patent act of 1936 which was a law designed to prevent price discrimination by ensuring suppliers often offered the same price terms to all retailers, regardless of size. So with the decline and enforcement large retail change leverage their buying power to secure lower prices from suppliers, and that disadvantaged smaller independence grocers who couldn't operate with these reduced prices, and this led to the closure of many small grocery stores. The article argues that current efforts to address food deserts, such as tax incentives and and other kind of incentive programs that cities often enact are insufficient, and instead, the art the author of this article advocates for the revival and enforcement of the Robinson Patman act to level the playing field for local retailers, suggesting that such measures could restore competition and improve access to groceries in these affected communities. So I think this is really interesting. We talk a lot about how a lot of different systems have favored scale and efficiency over maybe inefficiency, but but small scale and dispersed models for lots of different businesses and infrastructure spending models. And this is no different. I mean, I'm really grocery stores to me, are a lot like schools, where the sites have gotten bigger over time, they've become more consolidated. There's a lot more parking these days. They're much less integrated into neighborhoods. You know, both of both schools and grocery stores seem to have moved in this direction over the over the years. And so very interesting topic to me.

  Abby Newsham 4:14

  And yeah, but I'm curious what your thoughts are on this topic. Edward, well,

  Edward Erfurt 4:19

  this is near and dear to my heart. So one of the reasons that I am an architect is and not a grocer, is because my family had a grocery store, had a meat market and sold it. I come from a long line of Germans. We had a family grocery store, and I shared sometimes in my talks, because the timing of it relates to a lot of the stories with strong towns, but my family had a meat market in Columbus, Ohio, down in the German village. So this day, when I'm down in that area, there's always somebody that remembers being a kid and getting meat from my great aunt and uncle, but they. Corner grocery store. There was the the meat market. It's what that and the farm helped my family survive to the Great Depression. My family built that. And the timing of this is really interesting, because in the around the 1980s is when my great and uncle decided to sell the grocery business. They decided to finally retire. It makes a lot of sense when you put this together now, they never talked about the bad times of the grocery store. They're always optimistic of it, because good business people never talk about the rough times. But yeah, as a corner grocery store, it's it grow. The grocery business is a cutthroat business. They would, they would tell me, they have to watch the, you know, the suppliers would come in that they would work with, and they would get better deals based on how fast they'd pay. They how well they treated folks. You know, in a grocery store, everything on the shelf you pay for being at eye level at the front of the store versus the back. So highly competitive in that business. But yeah, so in the in the 80s, they they sold that store and closed that corner business. And I could tell you, the closest grocery store was the big, giant, I think it was either a Kroger or Golden Bear. It was one of the those local at the time, local ish, but large grocery stores, so yeah, this, I have some personal connection to this, which is always fun to put the pieces together when you realize that it wasn't just because a family lost interest in the store. There also were these pressures from well intentioned top down approaches that literally squeeze them out.

  Abby Newsham 6:59

  Yeah, it's really unfortunate because, you know, corner stores in bodegas and markets used to really be conventional. They were a part of neighborhoods. Traditionally, when neighborhoods were being built, you know, pre World War One, it's like that. That's the way you build communities, and it wasn't kitschy, it wasn't specialty, kind of like it is now. It was the primary way that you had access to food and just daily needs. And now it's not conventional, and I certainly think that another big part of that is, of course, the proliferation of personal automobiles, right? I mean, it used to matter how much time it took you to get between a grocery store and your home, you know, carrying milk or some groceries and you were probably walking or maybe even taking a street car, and now you can get a lot further in 15 minutes. And so it's these, these grocery store sites really are designed to be almost regional destinations. And instead of being neighborhood oriented assets,

  Edward Erfurt 8:25

  yeah, my grandfather and great uncle delivered the groceries with their wagon in the neighborhood. And in an old German neighborhood, they'd have to deliver the beer to all of the women in the neighborhood for their stuff. So I don't know how little 12 year old Eddie Jr did that, knowing both my grandfather and grand uncle how ordinary they were, but that's the type of thing in the community. My great great grandfather used to read the letters in the grocery store. When people would come in, they'd have their mail, and either they were German speakers, so they didn't understand the English, or they were at through time, had lost German, and we're getting letters from Germany, and needed the German translation to it, and that's what happened at the store. That's the even more than eyes on the street. It was the real community piece. Now you'll see some of that, like we as humans still want that. So when I go to our big grocery store in our town, I see that same thing happen. It's not just because I'm in West Virginia. I see it all over, when I travel, when I go to grocery stores, there's something fundamental that we need. You know, food is one of those things we go and that interaction. It's just harder, because when you own the store, you have that ability to work with the prices and to you know, somebody might be able to. Short, to pay for all the groceries this week, but they can cover it next week. You have those interactions. You can't do that in a big corporate piece. You get, you get 1000 choices of cereal, but they're still all the same cereal.

  Abby Newsham 10:17

  Yeah, it's like the illusion of having more options. And you know, I think another part of this is really thinking about what this means for how money circulates throughout a community, throughout a region, even nationally, because bigger box retailers and national grocery chains, you know, they really do kind of extract that money from communities, rather than keeping it circulating locally. Yes, they do have employees, but at you know that get paid for labor, and then they're spending money locally, but a lot of that money does go to the company, and $1 that's spent at a locally owned grocery store or market circulates within the community far more than $1 that is spent at a national chain. And, you know, I think for for communities, it's really important to consider policies that encourage that kind of economic resilience by supporting businesses that that really promote wealth and and money to to circulate throughout communities and be built for families and communities, rather than kind of moot siphoning it, in some sense, to the corporate headquarters of whatever chain that might be. Well,

  Edward Erfurt 11:38

  yeah, it's not only that. We were all in Cincinnati last year for the National gathering, and right in the middle of the downtown, one of the biggest buildings is Kroger's headquarters. Like that, headquarters was funded by everybody buying stuff at all the Kroger stores all across the nation. The other thing is, when we think about the food systems, when we think about where we're getting food, where you need all of these logistics systems and warehousing and transportation to get the food, whatever is being mass produced for bread or cereal at a location, is being shipped across the continent and and timing just right so there's not too many in the store. You know, when we think about all of that, there's always right the right amount on the store shelf, because of all of that logistics to it, when something is at that block level, when something is local, and they need to fill the shelf. And I see this when I go to a lot of the smaller towns, like especially in West Virginia, the towns that have kind of the corner store that has kind of survived, you can see on the shelf, there's always things that get stuck on the shelf that are the locally made because they're not going to get they miscounted how many loaves of bread they were going to buy. So there's that little piece to it that ends up on the shelf. Pepperoni rolls are really big in West Virginia. That's a big shelf filler. Yes, they can buy it from the mass produced houses, or they can call down the street and get it from the local bakery. And that's not something that a big national chain can do. So just locally, supporting that economy and working with folks, it is something that can be done at that corner store scale that these large supermarkets can't do it just work in their system.

  Abby Newsham 13:40

  Yeah, I want to talk a little bit also about just the physical aspects of the scale of more national retailers and grocery store chains, because, as I mentioned before, grocery stores are a little bit like how schools are and they they used to be embedded into neighborhoods. They maybe didn't have any parking on the site, or it was very minimal. And people walked to these places, they were kind of a kind of an anchor, right, like within a block, or within a broader community, a destination, a place that people who knew each other would go to, kind of a third place, and large supermarkets are very much typically separated large scale sites that are isolated from surrounding neighborhoods, and in a lot of ways, They rely on government subsidy and tax incentive and artificially low infrastructure costs like roads and utilities that make them appear more cost effective to communities, but from a land use perspective, they do require a lot of surrounding infrastructure to support and. And from a value breaker perspective, they're they're really not as potent as they might seem on paper, as these smaller sites that that aren't comprised of so much parking and unproductive use of land.

  Edward Erfurt 15:16

  Yeah, I mean, they really are almost the pinnacle of our suburban development pattern. So when every town across America gets excited when they get a grocery store like you never hear anybody say, Oh no, I don't want the grocery store, the smaller ones, the dollar stores, there's a different attitude towards that. But there's this Hurrah for a grocery store. It represents this illusion of wealth that you're getting something great in your community, they're highly consumptive of land. Whenever I've worked with grocery stores in the T and DS or traditional neighborhoods, it is so hard to try to get them to build to the street and behave like a corner store. They just are never going to do that. They've got their little short, you know, little front doors that with the automatic sliders, and then all the rest of the building. All those exterior walls are being used, floor to ceiling for storage, so you're not getting outdoor windows. I've been to a couple of grocery stores recently where it's like their little cities inside them that some of the Whole Foods and the Wegmans, you go in and like, all sudden this, it's like a shopping mall. It's supposed to feel like a farmer's market. So you go through that experience, and then you can go down and they've got the wine bar and the pizza and the sandwich place, and also you've experienced all of that. When you look at the efficiency of one of those, it's almost like you want to turn them inside out there. Every time I go to those places, like, oh my gosh, if only we turn this inside out, and we'd have all these cool little shops on the outside that would build the place. Yeah. So through this act, we've supported this efficiency, and when we talk about that suburban growth pattern, it is all about maximum efficiency. Maximum efficiency for outward growth, we have to have the wide streets to it so that we can get not only the traffic to the store, but all the trucks to the store. We've got to supply 80,000 or 60,000 square feet of retail space, so large volumes of stuff, when you have stuff, there's cold stuff and hot stuff, so they need different stuff spaces, and it just, it's almost like a giant warehouse. Exactly as consumers, I when we can walk in a neighborhood I've I experienced this in my own neighborhood, there's this mental block of walking out the front door up to the Main Street. It's a completely enjoyable walk, but it's like, Oh, I've only got in the car. But every time we get in the car, it's almost like sitting down with a nice Lazy Boy, because the seat's really comfortable. It holds you well. It's conditions. You have the air conditioning heat. I've got my radio, so I'm listening to the music. It's this whole environment. It doesn't matter if I drive five minutes or 50 minutes, once I get in the car, I'm out and about. We've downsized to a single car. So I start to understand now how that is a bit of a privilege to it. And when we start moving these grocery stores on the in edge of town, even if I drive there and we you've probably seen these little diagrams of like the the Walmarts or the giant grocery stores, and you look at where you park, which is never by the front door, yeah? And then you do the little trace of walking all the way back, because the way back of the store is the eggs, because that's staple. So you've gone through all the retail that you have to come back out to the registers and then out the door,

  Abby Newsham 19:19

  yeah? It's like you've walked half a mile at that point

  Edward Erfurt 19:23

  easily. And so then when people are in their downtowns and they say, Oh, I would never, like, I could never walk half a mile, and it's like, well, you just did that at the grocery store, and you've been there six times this week. Like, so it but again, it's maximum efficiency if we want to consume a lot of land, if we want to go and build quickly. This is a celebrated art. It has a lot of consequences to it, as we've seen, and in the article, it talks about food deserts and. And I understand lots of communities are struggling with that. When I look at that, it in the way the article is framed. It's almost acting like we are incapable of addressing this issue. And I will tell you, there's lots of places that are capable of addressing it. It may not be the fanciest approach to it, it may not be the highest level of stuff, but I think we can address this issue. Yes, we should talk through the federal policy and how that top down approach is bad, but we should also be talking about some of the bottom up stuff, because I we can pick on, I will be gladly pick on the suburban development pattern for an hour. But I can tell you that it doesn't help anybody, because the new grocery store, we're all going to celebrate when it comes.

  Abby Newsham 20:56

  Yeah, when we shop at it, right? I shop at grocery stores, I don't, I mean, for me going there's markets in town and there's smaller grocers, and I love going to those too. But I do go to both because of just the culture and efficiency. So it, I mean, not to shame anybody who goes to grocery stores, because it's totally conventional and normal, but we've really changed the way we we shop in this country over the last 75 years. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about bottom up strategies, because I know that this article really emphasizes the Robinson Patman Act, which is is an act that I had never heard about before reading this article, and so I don't know that we can get into the nuance of whether or not that assertion is correct. If, if we fix the way we approach this act, it would just change everything or not. There's probably people who are listening to this, who may understand that nuance, but, but regardless of of that, I do want to explore some of those ideas of bottom up ways of supporting like, I guess, Less, less efficient approaches to to groceries, right? More neighborhood based bottom up approaches,

  Edward Erfurt 22:25

  yeah, and it's not going to be a smaller version of the grocery stores we know. Yeah,

  Abby Newsham 22:32

  there's lots of Aldi has that covered, by the way.

  Edward Erfurt 22:34

  Yeah, and, and, and Walmart's abandoned the approach, yes. So I've worked in a lot of trying to think of the nicest way the technical term were blighted neighborhoods, but neighborhoods that have gone through a lot of stress, neighborhoods that have seen a lot of disinvestment, working in those types of neighborhoods, the definition of a grocery store. Of course they would all those neighborhoods want to have the Kroger the safe way. They want to have those things, but when you don't have the ability to or luxury of getting in a car or having transit, you start to find things that are different in your neighborhood to fulfill that need. And many of the projects I've worked in there are the CVS, the Walgreens, those become the local grocery store. They provide that function. So that's that level. There are places here in West Virginia communities that I'm aware of that it's even a level below that they can't even get the pharmacy. So we talk about food deserts. There's also deserts of medication where you can't get those basic pieces. And they're becoming more creative in how to address this need for food. We all, we all need food. There's a, you know, we've got to do transactions, whether it's cash or goods, shifting hands for that. So when I look at these, and I hear about this one breaking away from we're not going to just build a smaller thing. I would love for what my great uncle had the quarter meat store to open up. But I know that's not a reality. They you can't compete with this. But in communities, there are things that are happening, where entrepreneurs are coming out, and the way they can be competitive is by working at the smaller micro scale. So the we share a lot of these stories through strong towns, the ultra small sheds, I'm sorry, there's chalets in Muskegon, Michigan. Sample of that in some of the towns in West Virginia, there's. That scale that is existing, that is fulfilling that local need, as folks in the community, embracing that is really important in rural areas. So where I'm at West Virginia, and just north of us in Pennsylvania, there's a lot of farm stands, and they're manned and unmanned, and they're becoming more and more popular with the honor box is another way at a smaller scale, in rural to small communities, there are versions of this that are happening in urban areas where So thinking through the Chattanooga urbanist society. I forget all the names of the folks involved with that, but one of the women that's involved with that program realized that there was food deserts that they were dealing with in Chattanooga, and had figured out that there are lots of people throughout the communities that had refrigerators that maybe weren't the latest version. They've got the new stainless steel that energy efficient, or the ice machine didn't work, and they've changed it out for something else, and they couldn't figure out where to put these. She's collected these refrigerators, and then she went and worked with businesses and churches, and not for profits, to find places that she could plug the refrigerators in. So there are these opportunities in the community for people to fill the refrigerators with the cold goods and perishable goods, and then also put out, whether you want to call it blessing boxes. This is something in a community that is something somebody could do. When you think about it's so hard to get rid of a refrigerator that may still have some life in it, and in many places, we can find a plug, yeah, but yeah, that's looking at that from that most basic thing. What I like about that approach is that it's not a single person doing that when a good idea starts to come about from that most basic step. I like the idea that somebody and imagine the picture of somebody carrying a refrigerator around town with a looking for a place to put in a plug. That's not exactly the what's happening, but what is happening is that individual says, I have an idea. And they talk to another individual says, Can you help me with this idea? What are the things that we both have? How do we connect the refrigerator to the plug? And that type of conversation? If we have more of those in our communities, then people start to realize it, that the beautiful story about Chattanooga is that since these have been put into place, they've always been full. People are filling them in the community to make sure that that's there. And that's the power of thinking more bottom up and thinking outside the box, literally outside these giant boxes, in a different approach.

  Abby Newsham 28:18

  Yeah, I part of the way that I think about it is just thinking about people's approach currently to grocery shopping. And my thought is that it's really important that if, if you're going to distribute food more locally in a neighborhood context, then it needs to be really efficient and convenient for people. And I think about my own neighborhood, where there's there's community gardens, there's people that are doing, I would say, alternative food creation and distribution. But it's not, it's not. It's seasonal. It's not really conventional and normalized, and I can't say that it's it's well integrated into people's daily lives. I would imagine that a lot of people still go to grocery stores, and these things are really seen as secondary. And so I struggle a little bit to to come up with solutions or ideas for how, how this could really work and become less conventional in Kansas City, really the the places where we have alternative, I would say, more regular methods of distributing food is the river market, the city market area, where there is year round small independent grocers in a collective area. And it's very much, you know, people leasing small spaces, and they sell their specialty. Thing. They're a butcher. They sell spices. This is an area that is owned, at least, I believe, by the city. So it's probably, you know, less expensive for retailers as well, in some way. And it's really, really successful. And people go to it, of course, more people go to it when the season is, you know, warm like, like now, so, you know, less so in the winter, but that's really the places where I see alternatives working. And I'm sure that's the case in many cities that that farmers markets have really become the alternative approach to the grocery store, but they're still not conventional, necessarily.

  Edward Erfurt 30:45

  Yeah, we we have a really vibrant Farmer's Market in our community in Charlestown that has inspired our city to support a grocery in the middle of our downtown called Bucha and peck. It started as an extension, really an extension, of the farmers market, and it would not have been able to have started without the support of the city, essentially giving them space to start this operation. Because when we think about the building, it is, is a historic building that needed to be renovated. There's no parking associated with the building. I'm sure there was a struggle about the zoning, because the grocery store has to be a minimum size. And you know, all the things, all the barriers we put in front of ourselves. But what I've seen through this kind of experiment, and it wasn't inexpensive for the city to provide this rent for this space, because it's, you know, a popular Main Street. But what's happened there is it started out with the kind of things you would expect a crunchy farmers market, things to have the all the different products we see that run, all the organics and and all the healthy things. What's emerged from this is a supportive market that is occurring that there's a freezer in there with local beef and chicken and whatever has been gone to freezer camp from the local farms. When Bucha and peck doesn't have that they've run out of the 12 ribeyes that have been brought by the local farmer, they give the local farmers phone number to the person at the store, and they realized that within just 10 miles of this grocery store, is where their food came from, and they can engage in that way. This has built this great little market. It led to a restaurant supporting a restaurant in the space. It was really only possible when we took down the barriers. We're not going to fight the federal barriers, but at the most local level, what are the barriers we put in for this? Can Can we allow a corner grocery store with no parking? Can we be flexible with the use and look at every zoning code commercial uses. You may have 15 or 16 commercial layers within in your pieces. They started out they didn't have a sign on the outside of the building. They did it on the glass. I always found that when you write the name on the glass, that is sometimes exempt from all the sign ordinances and all the historic preservation pieces, it's really inexpensive to get, and if it's if it's like, doesn't work out, you can just peel it off, but putting a sign up and meeting all the electrical and building codes, it is a big hindrance. So just allowing that to happen that has led it's now a cherished place. It when people go and find other jobs somewhere else, there's like a celebration of them graduating off to the next thing they're doing in life, because everybody knows them. And so, yeah, when we, like in Kansas City, or in any kind of urban area that may be built out, trying to think about that, what are all of the barriers we put in front of ourselves that would prevent that type of business to emerge? Yeah,

  Abby Newsham 34:38

  yeah. And there's many. I mean, there really are. And I think at the local level, it's definitely important to look at all the barriers that that we put in in front of ourselves. Locally, as you said, there's there's state, there's federal policy. Policies that certainly impact these grocery stores and other industries pretty greatly. And while that's important, it's an important fight for people to to do. It's also it's very important to look at what we can do locally to make it easier to just do the next best thing, to do something really small, to enable entrepreneur entrepreneurs to try things and try new models that the greater that barrier to entry is, the the less creativity you're going to see in reality

  Edward Erfurt 35:39

  and leveraging so like the next thing people always tell me, when you get food now you have the health department and USDA and all of those pieces in many communities, using the term farmers market, using the term cottage craft. Those are things that allow you to experiment, because it allows you to do so much before you trigger those big

  Abby Newsham 36:08

  requirements. Oh, that's really interesting. I didn't realize that,

  Edward Erfurt 36:11

  yeah, so really, like as somebody is thinking about doing this in their community, which I would encourage folks to explore this, you can have an indoor farmers market that might be less restrictive than a grocery store. They're going to look the same, right? They're going to look and feel the same because you're under roof, you're having the same products there, but really thinking through that and working with what we can, you're not going to be able to buy and sell Cheerios or a big name brand product, because you could never compete with what General Mills or Kellogg's can offer a giant grocery store and then you put coupons and rebates and all of that. You just can't compete with that. But you can compete with local goods. You can compete with locally made products that fit within that market, and these are things that you can't get other places, and our Bucha and pick there's some bougie stuff in there, don't get me wrong, but there's also a lot of stuff that's highly competitive with all of our grocery stores like, I'm sure, right now. Well, for a while there when all the market grocery stuff was all out of control, our local grass fed beef was the same price or less than what the regular conventional beef was at the big chain grocery

  Abby Newsham 37:39

  stores, Yeah, isn't that amazing? So

  Edward Erfurt 37:42

  it just different different scales of or we're doing it. The decision on pricing for our local farmer was based when they bought their cow 18 months ago. The big chain grocery store is whatever the big corporate office is saying across the entire food chain system. And what people are, you know, completely different scales. So, yeah,

  Abby Newsham 38:05

  it does make you wonder, which model is more resilient to, you know, the current fluctuations and and prices in the long run.

  Edward Erfurt 38:18

  Well, locals gonna win out. Yeah, one bad ex post or one slip of the tongue of a corporate executive can crash a company or hundreds of 1000s of people are impacted, but a corner grocery store has a lot more resiliency to it, and the smaller feedback loops, the feedback loops are a lot faster. You know, right away what people are buying, when you think about seasonal stuff, building up the what's available, you know, the the things I've seen in our town, the when the coffee shop started offering they, you know, they have the pastries and the cinnamon rolls and the things you would expect at a coffee shop. Those retailers also then started to do cupcakes. And then it was cupcakes, like, four or five at a time you could buy so you've got, like, a packet of them. And then they'd have sandwiches. And also, now they had artisan bread. These are things that like built on. Those have been so popular, it's like running these, these poor entrepreneurs ragged, trying to do in their small kitchens. But it shows you that there is this need in every community, and there's an opportunity if the platform's there. Yeah,

  Abby Newsham 39:38

  totally. Well, I appreciate you joining me for this conversation, and I'm looking forward to learning more about it. But before we finish today, I want to go into the down zone, which is part of the show where we can share anything that has been on our minds lately, anything we've been reading, watching, listening to. You, Edward, I'm going to put you on the spot. Do you have a down zone for me today? I

  Edward Erfurt 40:05

  do. So I love doing my backyard garden. That's my like spring time, and I'm thinking about that for several years. We've been thinking about doing chickens. Everybody's doing chickens. So we we took the plunge, and we have ordered chicks, and we're going to see if I'm going to be a good chicken farmer in the next couple of months. I know it takes months to get eggs. It's not about that. It just something we've always kind of wanted to do and try. I've got young boys. They're super excited about chicks. They've done that type of stuff in school. So there's a bit of a agriculture farmer Ed thing happening. So my reading and time has been learning all about how to do poultry, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. And so we'll, we'll see where I'm at in about July.

  Abby Newsham 41:02

  Yeah, well, we'll have to have you back on in July, or at least before then, because I want updates. I actually so I live in in a different neighborhood than I did, you know a couple of years ago, not very far away, but but a different neighborhood. And what I didn't realize when I moved here was that I knew there were some neighborhood there's a few blocks where there's some pretty significant neighborhood gardens, and they actually put out a lot of food, but there's a lot of neighbors that have chickens, and these chickens will just, they'll just let themselves out sometimes, and I'll will come home and there's like a chicken just hanging out in my front yard. Apparently, they're very smart, and they just will go back to where they came from. So it's not really, I guess it's unsafe for them if they get hit by a car or a dog gets them.

  Edward Erfurt 41:57

  When I was in Florida, the number one zoning complaint was loose chickens

  Abby Newsham 42:01

  really, well, they're not hurting anybody. I mean, they're kind of cool looking too,

  Edward Erfurt 42:06

  yeah. I mean, it's, it's one of those things you it's, there's no middle ground on this really, yeah, like, there's just none. And so, yeah, we, we definitely will be coupe people, but it is, and we're not doing roosters and all that stuff. Yeah,

  Abby Newsham 42:25

  there's a rooster, and it doesn't know how to tell time that thing goes off whenever.

  Edward Erfurt 42:31

  Yeah, so myth. So yeah, we'll see how all this goes. And we've got some other neighbors that are kind of in the same but we are, and they, they have a little bit more experience, but, yeah, I will tell you that when I was in Florida, the number one zoning complaint was chickens, and it was a jurisdiction that allowed them, but like, a loose chicken, you can't call animal control, because it's not a cat or dog. Oh, really. You can't call why the wildlife folks, because they're like, No, it's a farm

  Abby Newsham 43:04

  animal. Yeah, it's a domestic farm animal.

  Edward Erfurt 43:07

  So it, yeah, it'll be, I'll be one of those crazy people,

  Abby Newsham 43:14

  yeah, with all the chickens, you'll be giving people eggs all the time. Which eggs are pretty expensive now, so you'll be,

  Edward Erfurt 43:23

  yeah, you'll be well liked, yeah, I've never passed up farm eggs. So totally,

  Abby Newsham 43:30

  absolutely, well, yeah, I'm kind of in the same boat. I'm, I'm full on into springtime. This has been the first week here in Kansas City that has been genuinely nice out every day in the 70s, even, I think, hitting into the 80s. So I've been doing a ton of yard work outside, cleaning up all of the leaves, pruning plants, checking on things. I'm about to start looking at replacing some bushes that died over the winter. They actually died in a pattern. I have this whole row of bushes, and so they died in this, really, you know, alter alternating pattern, which I appreciate, because everything's still, it still looks fine, but yeah, I've just been, just been working on my yard for the past week. And yeah, I'm very, I really thrive when the sun is out and it's warm outside. So I'm very, very happy that it's finally winter seems to finally be gone. Yeah, my

  Edward Erfurt 44:43

  garden is my happy place. Yeah, there. I read a book a few years ago somebody recommended about how all the plants talk to each other with their roots,

  Abby Newsham 44:53

  yeah, mycelium and yeah. So

  Edward Erfurt 44:56

  like I go out there and they're. Are also folks that feel that plants vibrate. They have a vibration that other animals can pick up. So do you talk to them? Yeah, no, like you and then, but we, we have a, we do have a groundhog that always seems to show up right at harvest time. And then I'm, you know, it's like Caddyshack in our backyard when that happens. But, yeah, no, but my garden is a happy place, because it's just like, it's, frankly, really amazing, if you ever grow a tomato from seed to just that whole experience of how that little seed all of a sudden becomes this plant, and then before you know it, you have more produce than you know what to do with. It's all at once. So that leads to other kind of homesteading practices of canning and freezing. So all of that keeps me busy throughout the year. So yeah, we are. We've had a week of warm weather, and then we got hit with cold again. So it's like that time where Mother Nature keeps playing tricks on me. So I'm a little jealous that you've been out in your yard, doing yard work. I'm, I mentioned to do that.

  Abby Newsham 46:17

  Yeah, it's, it's been really nice. And I'm so I bought this house last year, and it's the first time I've had a backyard. I mean, it's a very small backyard, but it is a backyard. So first time in many years that I've had one, and I'm like, it kind of has grass in it, and I kind of killed a lot of it last year, and now I have these flowers that are popping up everywhere, but not in like a ground cover kind of way. So that my next step is to figure out, like, what do I do with this dirt patch? That makes sense, because I really want to make it a usable area with lots of plants, but I really, really don't want a bunch of grass. I know that's like, the easiest thing that people do is they put grassy down and then they just mow it. But I don't know, I just, I don't want to mow grass.

  Edward Erfurt 47:13

  I went through that phase, and then I, what I found is that it's way more fun to go to the nursery and the plant shops and find incredible things. And each year, my beds get bigger and bigger. I gripe about what I pay for mulch and trying to find wood chips and all that stuff. But then I realized that I've taken, like, another swatch or two off that I don't have to mow. Yeah, exactly. It's way nicer to go out there and like deadhead flowers than it is to ride on the mower for an hour.

  Abby Newsham 47:46

  Exactly. Yeah, that's what I definitely want to avoid. I just want a space where I can sit there's a bonfire pit back there. I want to put some nice lights up and just have a nice place with lots of plants that isn't covered by grass, low maintenance, it would be great. So we'll see well, Edward, thank you so much for joining me today. It's always great having you on, and I hope you will come on again soon. Great. I appreciate. It's been lots of fun. Yeah, of course. And thanks everyone for listening. Have a lovely day. Thanks. Edward.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• “The Great Grocery Squeeze: How a federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert” by Stacy Mitchell, The Atlantic (December 2024).

• Abby Newsham (X/Twitter).

• Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom.

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