Montanans spend over three billion dollars a year on food. However all of the agricultural production in the state, all of the vegetables, the grain, and the livestock that we produce doesn’t add up to three billion dollars. Of our food production in the 1950s, 70 percent of what Montanans ate came from Montana. Right now it’s less than 10 percent. That is approximately $300 million; we are leaving $2.7 billion on the table.

If you consider that the Department of Labor statistics says it costs about $58,000 to create a new job, we’re leaving tens of thousands of jobs in the state of Montana lying on the table.

Additionally, we need to look at the levels of obesity and diabetes in the state. We believe that a more local menu, based on foods that are in season, would be healthier for the whole population. When we look at developing local food systems and developing a food infrastructure in the state, we think there is a lot of opportunity there. That doesn’t take into account the multiplier effect that for every dollar we keep in the state, we get a dollar and 73 cents back. On top of keeping that money here we could be creating a whole economy based on just feeding ourselves.

We’re not going to take every pound of beef and every bushel of wheat and turn it into something we can eat in this state. We’re always going to be an exporter. But we need to start thinking about providing food for ourselves, and for our neighbors, and for the people in this state.

One of the stories I tell about being in the food business in eastern Montana is that the trucks would come to town full of food and that they would go back empty. Well they don’t go back empty. They go back with our money. And guess who is in the car right behind them? Our kids. Because they have to go someplace where there are jobs.

Over the last 50 years we have lost about 50 percent of our population. In eastern Montana our population right now is the same as it was in 1915.

Food security is an issue that comes up a lot when people talk about not knowing where their next meal comes from. It is usually associated with low income or people that are down on their luck a little bit. My contention has always been that everybody in the state of Montana is food insecure. We’re 3 days away from not having food on the shelves. One snow storm, one trucker strike, those kinds of things are a big deal here.

We are at the end of the food chain.

When they fill that food pipeline up in California and it goes to Reno, and to Boise, and to Salt Lake City, by the time it gets to Helena or Glendive there’s not much left on the trucks. You can take all of the people in Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota and we’re still less than one percent of the population of the United States; its only 0.97 percent.

When you’re only less than one percent of the population, you don’t have a lot of say.

When it comes to food security, we get left out of the picture. We can see at the Federal level that the money is being pulled from rural areas. If you live in Billings, Helena, or Great Falls you are still considered rural in most cases. If we don’t have a lot of voices and they’re pulling the funding, we basically have to pull our own selves up by our boot straps.

I think the number one way we can do that is by producing our own food.

It was once said, whoever controls the food supply controls the people. If we don’t control our food supply or we allow people to take it over we won’t be well off. Basically we’ve given it away, because of convenience or because it’s cheap. At some point in time we’re going to have to figure out how not only can we keep the money we’re spending on food in the state, but how can we use that money to create jobs and infrastructure that allows us to live healthier lives, economically secure lives. That’s not easy to do when you live in a place where basically everything you consume is shipped in and everything you produce is shipped out.

The whole idea is that by creating this food infrastructure, in addition to some type of manufacturing and helping communities develop local food councils, we can help figure out how our food is coming in and figure out what we want to put in our schools, in our hospitals, what we want on the shelves in our grocery stores, and this is going to create an environment that is an upward spiral instead of the downward spiral that we’ve seen over the last 60 years.

Montana's Food Economy