It probably won’t involve hover boards and gull-winged sports cars electronically connected to Town Hall clock towers, but the Maine agriculture and food sector’s best strategy for development is likely to involve a trip back to the future.

The Harvard Kennedy School’s project on Maine’s “food cluster,” headed by former Maine Technology Institute President Betsy Biemann, recently released its report – “Growing Maine’s Food Industry, Growing Maine.” While it never says so directly, many of the report’s recommendations point clearly toward the goal of achieving a structural balance the industry enjoyed a century and a half ago.

The report’s opening chapter – cleverly titled “The Roots of Maine’s Current Food Economy” – describes a time when Maine served as “the breadbasket of New England.”

Maine’s iconic forest cover, now at about 90 percent coverage of the state’s land mass, stood at about 70 percent – representing nearly 4 million additional acres used for farming. Maine’s rivers and coastal ports served as an aquatic highway to urban centers to the south. Cattle were driven from western Maine to Boston. And Maine entrepreneurs “were at the forefront of processing innovation.”

Factories for canning apples, peas, beans, corn, sardines, cod, salmon and lobster sprang up around the state supporting both sides of the supply chain – upstream (often both literally as well as figuratively) growers and materials suppliers and downstream brokers, shippers and wholesalers. Maine farmers and fishermen were the backbone of a well-developed “food system.”

Since then, however, the westward expansion of the U.S. population and its accompanying technological changes – first the railroad, then refrigeration, then dams and widespread distribution of water, then the interstate highway system – opened up vast expanses of new land and moved population centers farther and farther from Maine’s coastal waters and once-prosperous farms.

While these changes had devastating effects on Maine’s growers and seafaring harvesters, the greatest impact was on the less visible infrastructure linking growers and harvesters to their customers – the loss of food processors, truckers, wholesale distribution centers (both for crops going to market and for farm supplies and equipment coming to the producers), machine construction and repair facilities. Many of Maine’s farms today remain in the hands of fourth, fifth and even longer lines of earlier generations, but the “food system” their forebears used to enjoy are long gone.

This less-obvious evaporation of our food sector’s marketing infrastructure is the reason for the focus in the Harvard study on going back to the future, i.e., rebuilding the 21st-century equivalent of the food system that linked Maine’s growers and harvesters of the 19th and early 20th centuries with their customers.

The fundamental underpinning of our comparative advantage remains – a vast (for the northeastern region of the U.S.) expanse of productive land, a ready and abundant supply of water and relative proximity to a customer base of hundreds of millions of people. What doesn’t remain is the network of market channels to link the two.

Thus, while we revel in the growing buzz surrounding the “foodie” culture in Portland and celebrate the return to farming of the many young people over the past decade and gaze hopefully at the millions of people to our south who seem to long for healthy food sent specially to them from growers, harvesters, brewers and bakers in Maine they would like to know personally through digital media, we still face the difficult challenge of developing the far less clearly understood human linkages between farm and table.

We need to understand and develop “the middlemen.” We need to understand the process of aggregating farm products, of cleaning, packing and shipping, of understanding quality control and pricing, of linking the hard physical labor of farming and fishing with the 21st-century management practices required of successful participants in a healthy “food system.”

These are the “back to the future” recommendations that the Harvard study emphasizes and that point the way to a more prosperous Maine economy.

Charles Lawton is chief economist for Planning Decisions, Inc. He can be contacted at:

clawton@planningdecisions.com

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