Farmland, My kids, Taiwan (CC / BY-NC-ND Harry in Taiwan)

The program, which Walmart calls Heritage Agriculture, will encourage farms within a day’s drive of one of its warehouses to grow crops that now take days to arrive in trucks from states like Florida and California. In many cases the crops once flourished in the places where Walmart is encouraging their revival, but vanished because of Big Agriculture competition.”

Read the whole thing at “The Great Grocery Smackdown.” It’s a good read, but I’m more fascinated by an academic-meets-business movement referred to in the piece, called “Agile Agriculture.” Most of the online information is available through the Applied Sustainability Center at the University of Arkansas. Among other goals, the endeavor hopes to provide “increased profitability [to producers] from new marketing opportunities,” “meet consumer desire for local and regional products,” and “reduce transportation costs and GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions.”

Walmart says it wants to revive local economies and communities that lost out when agriculture became centralized in large states. (The heirloom varieties beloved by foodies lost out at the same time, but so far they’re not a focus of Walmart’s program.) This would be something like bringing the once-flourishing silk and wool trades back to my hometown of Rockville, Connecticut. It’s not something you expect from Walmart, which is better known for destroying local economies than for rebuilding them.

Agile Agriculture is apparently a national partnership made up of, among others, Drake, the University of New Hampshire, and the American Farmland Trust. What’s the point? “To get more locally grown produce into grocery stores and restaurants, the partnership is centralizing and streamlining distribution for farms with limited growing seasons, limited production, and limited transportation resources.” So is this all a good thing? What do you think?