Farmers, philanthropies, butchers and chefs transform the local food system in Chattanooga, Tennessee

Abstract. This study examines the evolution of a local food system in Chattanooga, Tennessee, through the lens of ecological resilience. Based on interviews, participatory observation, and supplementary research, this paper proposes a model of eight causal factors of ecological resilience: modular connectivity, local organization, ecological integration, building assets, redundancy, complementary diversity, conservative flexibility, and periodic transformation. The case of Chattanooga is used to illustrate how this model can be applied at multiple scales to examine system resilience. This study is one in a series of nine case studies of causal factors of ecological resilience in local food systems in regions of the Southern United States largely recalcitrant to local food system development.

I. Introduction

Nicknamed “the Sustainable Blue Collar Town,” Chattanooga, Tennessee, is a small but lively city marked by a history of unexpected turns of events. Chattanooga today is vibrant, open, and clean. Surrounded by Southeastern Tennessee’s rolling green mountains and parted by the Tennessee River, it possesses a natural radiance that has led the City of Chattanooga to dub itself “the Scenic City.” The streetscape is filled with sidewalks, small tucked-away parks, shrubs bursting into bloom, and an ever-growing number of new businesses.

This is a sharp contrast to the Chattanooga named the most polluted city in America in 1969.1 Today, however, it stands as a pioneer of the South’s local food movement. Chattanooga’s journey from a declining industrial hub to a vibrant, environmentally progressive city is in many ways a story of resilience.

Chattanooga was one of many once-booming cities that harbored a deteriorating industrial core in the 1970s. Even as the factories shut down one by one, they left polluted water and air in their wake. However, municipal government partnered with local businesses and community development organizations to take industrial flight as an opportunity to reimagine Chattanooga as a livable city. In the 1970s, the City of Chattanooga set stricter emissions laws, which thanks to the coincident decline in industry, the city was able to meet. The emptied factory buildings in Chattanooga’s downtown also opened the opportunity for a pedestrian greenway system and an eco-industrial park to attract new businesses.2

Philanthropic interest played a large part in this transformation. A heart of funding Chattanooga’s 1970s about-face was the Lyndhurst Foundation. Lyndhurst Foundation, like several other Chattanooga philanthropies, was founded by a wealthy heir of Chattanooga’s industrial empire. 3 Lynwood was founded under the name of the Memorial Welfare Foundation

1 http://apcb.org/index.php/about-us/history2 Johansson, O., 2000. Environmental Quality as a Post-industrial Urban Growth Strategy: The Chattanooga Case. The Geographical Bulletin, 42:23-32. http://www.gammathetaupsilon.org/the-geographical-bulletin/2000s/volume42-1/article2.pdf3 Stettler, A. E., 2001. Chattanooga: A Reinvented City. University of Tennessee Honors Thesis. http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj/496; Johansson, ibid.

in 1938 by Thomas Cartter Lupton, a pioneer of Coca-Cola Bottling Company. Following Lupton’s death in 1977, the foundation changed its name to Lyndhurst in reference to a Lupton family home. It was at this time that the Lyndhurst Foundation reorganized and set the inner city revitalization of Chattanooga as its main priority.4 Other critical philanthropies involved in Chattanooga’s revitalization included Chattanooga Venture, RiverValley Partners, Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise, and the Chattanooga Institute for Sustainable Cities and Business. RiverValley Partners, which focuses on local economic development, and Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise, which brings community voice into urban planning, were involved in the creation of a master plan to revitalize Chattanooga’s declining core.5 The master plan, which included the creation of Tennessee Aquarium, making the land along the Tennessee River public, the creation of an eco-industrial park, and neighborhood improvement has largely been implemented. Of the key organizations involved in Chattanooga’s transformation, Chattanooga Venture, River Valley Partners, and Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise were all essentially launched and funded by the Lyndhurst Foundation.6

Since 2010, Chattanooga’s clique of philanthropies has turned its eye to the emerging local food scene. This is most evident in the Gaining Ground Initiative, a 2010 plan that provided funding and support in Chattanooga to increase farmer’s markets, strengthen relationships between farmers and chefs, and contribute to a local food infrastructure. The Benwood Foundation, the funding force behind the Gaining Ground Initiative, also rests on an industrial legacy. It began in 1944 with the generous gift of George Thomas Hunter. Hunter was the nephew of Ben Thomas, founder of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company. After his uncle’s death, Hunter became the president of Coca-Cola. Benwood is named in honor of Hunter’s Uncle Ben.7 Since Hunter’s death, Benwood has been an active player in the development of Chattanooga, most recently—and most significantly to this study—in building a local agricultural network.

However, it would be inaccurate to say that Chattanooga’s fast-rising local food impetus is fully the result of Gaining Ground. About 15 years before Benwood’s involvement, Bill and Miriam Keener of Sequatchie Cove Farm had already launched their own local agriculture enterprise. The Keeners are among the pioneers of Chattanooga’s local food movement, and their legacy is a series of restaurants, farmers, vendors, and processors dedicated to supporting local agriculture. To understand Chattanooga’s local food movement outside of philanthropic influences, this study incorporates interviews with three enterprises that essentially began on their own: Bill Keener, of Sequatchie Cove Farm; Mike Mayo, of the Farmer’s Daughter restaurant; and Dan Key, of Main Street Meats, a local butcher’s shop. Though philanthropy has played a role in the development of Chattanooga’s local food network, it is made evident through the interviews we conducted that non-profits like the Benwood Foundation primarily aided a movement that was already happening at the grassroots level.

This article is an assessment of the ecological resilience of Chattanooga’s local food system. It is one of nine case studies of resilient local food systems in recalcitrant areas across the Southern United States. Ecological resilience is a measure of 1) how much change a system can undergo before fundamentally changing; 2) the extent to which a system can self-organize; and 3) an 4 http://www.lyndhurstfoundation.org/about-the-foundation/5 Jacobson, Louis. "Tennessee Triumph: Louis Jacobson visits Chattanooga". 1997. PLANNING -CHICAGO-. 63 (5): 20-22.6 Johansson, ibid.7 http://www.benwood.org/about

increasing capacity for adaptation.8 9 It proposes a model where a resilient system goes through four phases based on natural cycles: 1) growth (r); 2) conservation (K); 3) release (Ω ); and 4) reorganization (α).10 While past literature on ecological resilience has identified indicators of resilient systems, this study aims to understand the causal factors underlying ecological resilience. We argue that there are eight components that must be present in order for a system or individual enterprise to be ecologically resilient: modular connectivity, local organization, ecological integration, building assets, redundancy, complementary diversity, conservative flexibility, and periodic transformation. This article will begin with a description of the enterprises and systems we observed in Chattanooga, follow with an analysis of our observations according to the eight components of ecological resilience, and conclude with reflections on Chattanooga’s overall ecological resilience.

II. The Pioneers

Bill and Miriam Keener of Sequatchie Cove Farm are widely credited as the pioneers of Chattanooga’s local agriculture. Tucked among the misty, rolling mountains that border Chattanooga’s suburbs, Bill and Miriam launched the farm in the mid-1990s. Miriam, a horticulturalist, wanted to move there to start her own native plan nursery. Bill had no farming background of his own. However, through a friend he came to know a circle of influential and alternative farmers, such as Joel Salatin, Wendell Berry, and David Klein. With the advice of alternative farming mentors, Bill brought these methods to the Chattanooga area.

Sequatchie Cove has already lived through many massive changes to its infrastructure. In the past, Sequatchie Cove ran on a Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA, model that served 100 to 150 participating community members, providing them with vegetables and fruit. This was among the first local food enterprises conducted in Chattanooga. Through time, the Keeners have produced honey, shitake mushrooms, poultry, sheep, pigs, cheese, and beef. The farm also offered pick-your-own berries, an enterprise that continues today. Bill has found that while bringing community members onto the farm can be troublesome and time consuming, it is also a critical venue through which most of the Keener’s other goods, such as cheese and honey, are sold through their on-farm stand. Though it retains a diversity of products, the Keeners no longer hold a CSA and instead focus on beef and dairy.

To raise cattle, Bill Keener employs methods widely considered more resilient than conventional techniques. Following in the footsteps of farmers like Joel Salatin, Bill uses rotational grazing, dividing his 100 acres of pasture into long, skinny paddocks. Each day he moves the cattle to a new paddock, so that the top quarter of the plant, which holds the most energy, is eaten, and the rest of the grass is trampled and left to grow back. In the many years he’s done cattle for beef and dairy, Bill never ceases to experiment with breeds. He tells us that the only variety he’s sworn off of is Milking Devons, after one of the bulls charged him and cut his leg with one of its

8 Gunderson, L. and C.S. Holling, 2002. Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Island Press.9 Cabell, J. F., and M. Oelofse. 2012. An indicator framework for assessing agroecosystem resilience. Ecology and Society 17(1): 18. http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-04666-17011810 Abel, N., D. Cumming, and J. Anderies, 2006. "Collapse and reorganization in social-ecological systems: questions, some ideas, and policy implications." Ecology and Society, 11: 17. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss1/art17/

long horns. Despite their newfound distaste for the Milking Devons, the Keeners have been focusing more on their milk cows, since they got into cheese-making about five years ago.

"Dairy affects everything in itself to this whole next level,” Bill told us as we walked down the dirt road through his pastures. “Everything’s got to be perfect, every single day.” Plus, he explained, the steep learning curve and the expensive equipment involved in cheese making forced the Keeners to concentrate all of their resources and energy on the dairy. To compensate, Bill and Miriam were forced to abandon several of their other enterprises, including the CSA. Another reason to move on from the CSA was that the Keeners realized that in order to truly make a livable wage from the CSA, they would have to serve at least 200 community members, a growth spurt that would require enormous investments in both time and equipment. In order to follow through on the cheese business, the CSA could not progress. Bill told us that in retrospect, though the cheese business is finally starting to become both manageable and successful, reducing the diversity of the farm was a mistake.

Sequatchie Cove is now at a decision point where the Keeners are considering whether to diversify again or to downsize. The Keeners have passed off the cheese business to an enthusiastic intern, Nathan, who suggested they start it in the first place, and this has freed their resources and their attention again. Ultimately, Bill tells us, the direction that Sequatchie Cove Farm takes next will depend on his son, Kelsey. Based on an Amish model that Bill admires, the Keeners are slowly selling their farm to Kelsey, piece by piece, so that by the time they’re ready to stop farming, Kelsey will already be the legal owner of the farm, and the Keeners will be able to retire from the sale. The continuation of the Keener’s legacy is also visible in their daughter, Ann, who runs a local food café in Chattanooga, appropriately called the Farmer’s Daughter. Beyond their children and other successors, though, the Keeners have also contributed to the local food scene in being among the first in the area to maintain a prosperous small-scale farm.

A more recent local food development built on the success of the Keeners, but from inside the Chattanooga city limits, is Crabtree Farms. It sits on what used to be a privately owned old farmstead in the middle of the city. The owners didn’t have any desire to use the property but wanted it to remain as an agricultural site. After years of neglect, the twenty acres was largely overgrown with weeds and the buildings were beginning to degrade. In 2009, a young man named Joel Houser show an interest in the property. He and his wife were interested in homesteading and had a strong desire to farm. After some long discussions between the owners, the couple, and city officials the 20-acre site was turned into a land trust for sustainable agriculture. After a few years and a brokering attorney, the homestead was in the hands of the couple for just a dollar per year. The Housers hit the ground running, opening a community garden, building a farm stand to sell produce and networking farmers to later create the Main Street Farmers Market. While making all these connections, they began surveying producers to create a report on local food. This was a final straw that got some philanthropies interested in local food systems.

III. Philanthropic Leadership

Partially due to the success of the Keeners and the Housers, the Benwood Foundation, a Chattanooga philanthropic organization, established the Gaining Ground Initiative. An initial goal was creation of more farmer’s markets. To create resilient local food systems, it was not enough that the Keeners and other farmers multiplied and replaced themselves. Vendors also needed to multiply in order to both generate awareness of local food and supply its growing

demand. Chattanooga Market, the only existing farmer’s market prior to Gaining Ground, worked together with Benwood Foundation to network farmers in the Chattanooga area and support the development of new farmer’s markets

In 2010 the Benwood Board of Trustees commissioned a survey of business leaders and individuals to discover what the community of Chattanooga felt needed the most support. The result of the survey unveiled that there was an enormous desire for local food initiatives. From there, Benwood took the lead. It created the Gaining Ground Initiative, with Jeff as Program Director, to given actors in Chattanooga’s food scene the support they needed financially and organizationally to grow.

At the time, the only local food vendors in the city were Crabtree Farms and Chattanooga Market. There were also a handful of high-end restaurants, such as Market Restaurant 212 and Saint John’s. Loopy’s Pizza, a more casual joint, also tried to buy local produce and meat when possible. Greenlife Grocery, a food vendor that bought the surplus of local vendors, used to be at the heart of the movement. However, Whole Foods bought it out. Though there is now a Whole Foods store in Chattanooga, it buys far fewer local goods that Greenlife Grocery did. There were also some communities within Chattanooga that had taken matters into their own hands by hosting “Slow Food” nights, where local chefs were invited to cook a community meal with exclusively local ingredients.

Meanwhile, Jeff and the Gaining Ground Initiative were also working to coordinate a chef’s collective. Many chefs and restaurant owners expressed a desire to incorporate more local ingredients into their menu, but kept running into road blocks. After several long hours of discussion together, it became evident that chief among the difficulties chefs had were lack of communication with farmers. Chefs rarely had the time to network with individual farmers, found it challenging to coordinate pick-up times that were convenient for both parties, and weren’t always able to coordinate their menus with what farmers had to offer. When the Gaining Ground Initiative phased itself out in 2013, the chef’s collaborative had failed to fully materialize on its own. However, the discussions that the chefs had among themselves and with farmers produced some valuable results.

One result was the creation of Eat Up Cookbook Series, a compilation of recipes from local chefs, farmers, and other regional producers. Each new book had a new set of recipes with a different theme. The books educated the consumers on how to cook with local or seasonal ingredients. Since Gaining Ground distributed the books only at farmer’s markets, picking up the book also required customers to actually attend a farmer’s market, exposing some people to the markets for the first time.

Another result of the chef’s collective was that after talking with farmers, some chefs discovered ways to incorporate more locally produced foods into their menus. Several restaurants around Chattanooga now use some degree of local food. One such new restaurant is the Farmer’s Daughter, a breakfast and lunch café. Though the café has only been open for six months, it’s already thriving.

Chattanooga Market also worked with Gaining Ground to develop the Harvested Here logo, which certifies that an item has been produced within 100 miles of Chattanooga. This label was part of Gaining Ground’s desire to shift the emphasis in the burgeoning food scene from “sustainable practices” to “transparent practices.” Their goal was to bring business to local

farmers, ranchers, and food producers, many of which are not necessarily certified organic of naturally grown. However, as the Keeners noted, through their CSA and pick-your-own-berries, keeping a farm transparent and open to potential customers often encourages people to buy more. Harvested Here has become a ubiquitously recognized symbol of community and local autonomy in Chattanooga.

By the end of its run in 2013, the Gaining Ground Initiative could count many successes among its endeavors. There are now so many farmer’s markets that Jeff Pfitzer has lost count of exactly how many there are. Harvested Here restaurant week, in which certain restaurants feature local foods, is in its fifth year and increasingly popular. However, one of the greatest obstacles chefs continued to face was the lack of an established distribution network for farmers and restaurants. One of Gaining Ground’s final accomplishments was establishing a food hub to make distribution more efficient for farmers and chefs alike.

Towards the end of the Gaining Ground Initiative, Jeff caught word that the Chattanooga Area Food Bank was talking about focusing on sustainable, community-oriented agriculture. Gaining Ground and its farmers were looking for a way to launch a food hub, and the food bank’s mission seemed to align well with the prospective food hub. Through the last of the Gaining Ground funding, Jeff and farmers worked with the Chattanooga Area Food Bank to establish a food hub that Chattanooga Area Food Bank continues to run today.

Looking back at Gaining Ground, Jeff tells us, one piece that was missing was an emphasis on processors. Chattanooga now has a growing supply of farmers and local food vendors, but for goods like meat, there usually must be an intermediary actor to cut and prepare an item for sale. Although the Gaining Ground Initiative had less emphasis on supporting processors, some have sprung up in Chattanooga of their own accord.

IV. Beyond farmer’s markets: processing, retail and a complete food system

While Benwood played a crucial role in stimulating farmer’s markets and raising awareness of local food, private individuals have been the source of innovations beyond the farm scale. The Farmer’s Daughter is named for Ann Mayo, Bill and Miriam Keener’s daughter, who co-owns the café with her husband, Mike Mayo. We caught up with Mike one sunny afternoon as he was busy filling in for the dishwasher, who called in sick. The Farmer’s Daughter is housed in a quaint white building with an enormous, slanted overhand that casts shade on a dozen happy diners in the Chattanooga morning sun. Astonishingly, the building used to be an Exxon Mobile gas station, which Mike transformed himself with small crew into a small café. Mike tells us that he and Ann both used to work at Greenlife Grocery, and decided to open a restaurant together at the suggestion of their former boss, Greenlife Grocery’s owner, who also leased them the building.

Part of the success of the Farmer’s Daughter is the combination of fortunate circumstances. Mike and Ann already knew several farmers in Chattanooga, at least in part thanks to Ann’s own upbringing. Mike was also raised in a small business background. His mother was an advertising executive in Nashville, and his father had an office furniture business. It was the culmination of all of these pieces that made a restaurant the perfect fit. “It’s kind of this perfect storm, right?” Mike says. Through the backgrounds they brought to the table and Mike’s carpentry skills, they were able to do themselves what most businesses would have to pay a consultant for.

Another factor in Mike and Ann’s success is their balance between pursuing their values and finding a place in the existing market. Echoing the conclusion of the chef’s collective, Mike told us that one of the biggest challenges of running a local food café is that there isn’t much of an existing network of farmers. The Farmers Daughter has essentially created its own distribution network, drawing on relationships that they had already developed with the surrounding agricultural community. Sourcing the café locally required the Farmer’s Daughter to place orders far more in advance than conventional restaurants, and it also necessitates that their menu is seasonal. Mike explained that part of planning local meals is explaining to customers that some items taken for granted as conventional, such as BLTs, are actually only seasonal for a limited time during the year, and therefore not usually served at the Farmer’s Daughter. Out-of-season, shipped tomatoes are not up to the quality the Farmer’s Daughter strives for.

Aside from cobbling together their own supply system, the Farmer’s Daughter runs within a conventional model. Mike said that 30 percent of the café’s budget is spent on food, 30 percent on labor, 35 percent on other expenses, and about 5 percent profit for Mike and Ann. Their menu prices, too, are reasonable. “It’s something that everyone else is trying to sell the American people, that local agriculture is expensive,” says Mike. “We’re making money like every other restaurant in America.”

The trick, Mike told us, is “finding the balance between being approachable and pushing the culture forward.” The Farmer’s Daughter strives to create a culinary and philosophically exciting menu, with the primary goal of supporting local farmers. Mike realizes, though, that Chattanooga culture is not quite on the same page yet. Ann and Mike incorporate some unusual items into their menu, such as baked quinoa dishes, but also have approachable favorites, such as a chicken salad sandwich. Mike and Ann are both fulfilling their vision of a culturally progressive and ecologically responsible menu, while maintaining a flourishing customer base. Essentially, Mike and Ann are transforming their customer base even as they serve them.

The Farmer’s Daughter also supplements this transformation through an effort to educate their customers on how to eat locally and why. The café hosts about two workshops a month on food-related skills like canning, and invite local artists and potters to present their work at the café. Through continual reformation of its customer base, the Farmer’s Daughter is in the process of creating a demand for and interest in its own values among the community.

The Farmer’s Daughter is but one instance of an emerging local food restaurant in Chattanooga. Right now, the young enterprise purchase more local food than any other restaurant in the city. Ann and Mike are pioneering their own path to a commercially successful, profitable business that still espouses their commitment to local agriculture. Though the chef’s collective initiated by Gaining Ground aimed to establish networks between farmers and chefs, it still takes a passionate and organized restaurateur to source locally.

V. It takes a supply chain

The need for passionate, organized management for local food system success is also illustrated by Dan Key, owner of Main Street Meats. Bill Keener had pointed out Main Street Meats as one of the vendors he regularly sells beef to. While visiting the Keeners at their stand in the Chattanooga Market, we came across Main Street Meats. Nestled next to a bakery, the shop is one piece of Southside’s burgeoning downtown revival. We pass through streets packed with

public art, hip restaurants and boutiques. The landscape is a mishmash of dingy buildings and broken windows alongside freshly painted storefronts with chic lighting.

Early one morning on our way out of Chattanooga, we stop by Main Street Meats for an interview with Dan, who warmly welcomes us in and offers us coffee. He’s impeccably dressed, and it’s quickly apparent that he’s also sharp and well-rounded. It should come as little surprise, then, when Dan tells us that he used to be an economist. Dan, originally trained in economics at North Carolina University, is retired from a long career beginning with banking and ending as the Executive Vice President of sales, marketing, and branding for a large world-wide apparel business. As a child, however, he spent a great deal of time with his grandparents, who were tobacco farmers in Appalachia. Dan says his time with them taught him the value of hard work, along with the relationship between work and food. His grandfather also taught him salt and cure meats to keep them for winter. These lessons were on Dan’s mind when he was on a bike ride with a friend, Jim Johnson, and he that what Chattanooga really needed was a butcher shop, and that Dan himself would be the right person to do it.

In 2010, Jim introduced him to Mark Moore and Tom Montague, owners of Link 41, a USDA certified butcher’s shop in Chattanooga. Mark had been hoping to expand the business beyond the small-scale farmer’s market sales he was then making and open up a full-sized shop. After talking, Dan and Jim agreed to merge their business plan with Link 41’s existing LLC. Together, they obtained a loan to convert the space next to Link 41’s kitchen into a storefront. Thanks to their LLC partnership, Main Street Meats didn’t need to create all-new facilities, only a space to sell specialty meats and value-added products. Dan’s past life as an economist came in handy as he generated business plans and marketing strategies for the shop. One of his main tasks, he tells us, was developing relationships to farmers to ensure a regular supply of meat.

Developing modular connectivity has been a balancing act for Dan. He knows that farmers need a regular income, so he purchases roughly the same order every week from a given array of farmers: Since these farmers know Dan will buy from them on a weekly basis, they have adopted the preferred breeds of pork and cattle for Main Street Meats. Dan also asks his farmers to keep track of the animals’ feeding and care so that is a batch of meat is amiss, they can detect what caused it. In promising such regular business, Dan realizes that he makes some sacrifices on behalf of Main Street Meats. For example, sometimes he has to buy meat that isn’t up to par and donates it to the local food pantry instead of selling it. Though keeping an array of farmers allows Dan to be modular, but through the web of relationships he is developing, Dan most certainly is connected to the community around him.

Part of this connection is not only to farmers, but literally to his location itself. Dan has demonstrated a clear commitment to Southside Chattanooga. He tells us that the rise of businesses in the neighborhood has made the streets and sidewalks busier with the deliveries and crowds that popular stores generate. There have been some complaints about sidewalk pandemonium from residents, but Dan hopes that residents will understand that a busy street is a successful one. He tries to be supportive of other businesses emerging in the neighborhood and develop relationship with them. Niedlov Bakery, next door to Main Street Meats, is one example of such a partnership. Niedlov was a local favorite long before Main Street Meats came to fruition, and the bakery has been extremely supportive of the butcher’s shop. In return, Dan buys Niedlov rolls for the lunchtime meals he sells. To Dan, in order for Main Street Meats to be successful, Southside must be successful too. He notes that in the not-too-distant past, Southside

was in decay and generally looked down upon by Chattanooga’s residents. With Southside’s recent revival, he’s come across several new customers that otherwise had not ventured into the neighborhood for years. Dan’s butcher shop and other locally-oriented food venues are part of this revival.

The stories that Dan Key, Bill Keener, Jeff Pfitzer and Mike Mayo told us are all part of a larger revival: that of Chattanooga. Since hitting the environmental rock bottom in 1970, the city has been motivated to change its ways and its reputation. Mike thinks that philanthropy has been a critical tool in supporting local food initiatives in a predominantly working class town. The Benwood Foundation and its Gaining Ground Initiative illustrate that well. There’s no doubt that philanthropy has shaped the face of Chattanooga’s local food system. However, we assert that it was not money alone that enabled the city to do an about-face. Mike Mayo’s own business is an example of how many actors in the local food system have emerged without charitable contributions. Additionally, the Gaining Ground Initiative’s programming was implemented in many ways that touch upon the components of resilience. The result is that Chattanooga, once the most polluted city in America, is blooming with the attributes of a resilient city.

V. Assessing Resilience in Chattanooga

Modular Connectivity

It is significant that all of our interviewees knew each other, not only on a personal basis, but on a professional basis. Main Street Meats regularly buys from Sequatchie Cove Farm, which also supplies to the Farmer’s Daughter. Looking sequentially, it is evident that at least indirectly, Sequatchie Cove Farm and other farms like it are part of the reason that both Main Street Meats and the Farmer’s Daughter came into existence. Dan Key revealed to us that one of his primary inspirations for opening up a butcher’s shop was that there was no other enterprise filling its role as a community-conscious processor. Similarly, the Mike and Ann Mayo observed that Chattanooga has the agricultural capacity to support a mainly local café, and that the existence of such a business would greatly benefit nearby farmers, such as Ann’s father. Both Mike and Dan told as that relationships with the farmers they buy from are at the heart of their businesses. Sometimes this relationship means that convenience or even short-term profit takes a sacrifice—as demonstrated by Dan, who buys meat even when it isn’t up to par, and Mike, who organizes food orders several weeks in advance. The Gaining Ground Initiative also put relationships with farmers at the front of their agenda. Though the chef collaborative never fully materialized, it is clear that the initial meetings did help some chefs build bridges with farmers.

Another outcome of the Gaining Ground Initiative was the recognition that it is not enough for farmers and chefs to have relationships. Farmers must also build relationships with each other. As nearly all of our interviewees told us, the biggest challenge facing local food vendors is that there is not yet a common distribution network for farmers to participate in. Though the Chattanooga Area Food Bank has taken up the dual function of a food hub, it was clear from our meetings with the Farmer’s Daughter and Main Street Meats that there are still hurdles to overcome in a building common local agriculture network. “At some point before the market need is there,” Mike said, “small producers have to figure out how to leverage their infrastructure, their delivery networks to help one another, knowing that a rising tide raises all ships.”

Relationships with consumers is another component of Chattanooga’s connectivity. Each individual actor we spoke to within Chattanooga expressed the importance of building relationships with their customer base. For Sequatchie Cove Farm, the sale of goods directly to customers depends on the customers being willing to pay more for cheese, vegetables, honey or beef that has been produced near their homes. Bill thinks that the ability of customers to see the actual farm where everything is created plays a large role in the value customers place on buying locally. For the Farmer’s Daughter and Main Street Meats, whose customers don’t necessarily see the farms where the food was made, relationships often come in the form of education. Mike Mayo hosts workshops at his restaurant, but his servers also take the time to explain why they don’t offer BLTs year-round, which according to Mike is a strong lesson in seasonal eating. Dan also feels that the value of his meat in large part comes from teaching his customers about the meat they’re eating, and the differences and benefits of each cut. The Gaining Ground Initiative sought to build relationships with potential local food consumers. The creation of Taste Buds, the Chattanooga local food guide, and the Eat Up Chattanooga Cookbook were resources for customers to learn how to find and cook seasonal local foods. In the Chattanooga approach, relationships between producers, vendors, and customers are recognized as necessary components in a fully functional local food system.

In addition to the connectivity we see in Chattanooga, each piece and actor within the system has the modularity to stand alone when necessary. Sequatchie Cove Farm is perhaps the clearest example of this, as it was the first piece of this network to come into existence and has proven that the Keeners can make local farming work even without an infrastructure to support them. The Farmer’s Daughter depends on the success of nearby farmers for their supply, but as Mike Mayo pointed out to us, “nearby” can be a flexible term. That means the restaurant uses Chattanooga’s farmer network, but it also taps into other local food systems that are reasonably close, such as Nashville’s. The Chattanooga Market also casts a broad net for its hinterlands. It welcomes vendors not only from Tennessee, but also from Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.11 At each scale, from an individual farmer to the City of Chattanooga itself, the web of connections is drawn appropriately large enough to ensure that the fall of any one piece of the system would not spell its destruction.

Defining “local” is a critical part in determining the width of each web of connectivity. The Keener’s definition of local is limited to their manpower and resources—that is, how far they can afford to travel before the expenses outweigh the profit. As a direct producer of food, the farmer does not get to determine what “local” means at the vendor’s scale. The vendors, such as Chattanooga Market, Main Street Meats, and the Farmer’s Daughter determine what “local” means by the circumference through which they’re willing to buy and sell food. In each case, “local” is a flexible term determined by individual actors within the food system.12 The power that actors within Chattanooga have over defining what they consider to be local is a form of local autonomy.

Locally Organized

Local autonomy is significant and clearly visible in Chattanooga’s approach to food. The emphasis on a local food system is a significant move toward community autonomy in an

11 Chattanooga Market Vendor Information 201412 Ackerman-Leist, P. 2012. Rebuilding the Foodshed. Chelsea Green Publishing.

agricultural system that typically defaults to shipped foods.13 Sequatchie Cove Farm was among the leaders of buying locally in Chattanooga, with the introduction of the area’s first CSA system. It is also one of the area’s foremost producers of local meat and cheese, for which there is an ever-rising demand in the city.14 Furthermore, by cutting out complete dependence on fertilizers and pesticides, Sequatchie Cove Farm itself makes itself more autonomous over its processes. Main Street Meats also finds itself less dependent on the twists and turns of the meat industry. Dan told us that there was a disease hitting pigs last year that caused pork prices to skyrocket. Main Street Meats, however, was able to keep prices stable, since local farmers were not affected by the blight afflicting industrial hog producers. The City of Chattanooga, too, exerts autonomy in defining for itself what “local” means through the use of the Harvested Here logo. Though it poses some challenges, buying and selling locally grant the community some autonomy from the broader agricultural system, and even the regulations imposed by federal organic and local certification. Chattanooga’s climate is also nearly ideal for agriculture, which contributes to the possibility of local autonomy.

Ecological Integration

Ecological integration was a less prevalent theme in Chattanooga, but it appeared in a few significant ways. Ecological integration is apparent in the ability of an actor or system to be productive while working with, not against, their natural setting. It is to the good fortune of the city that it is situated between the Appalachian Mountains and the Cumberland Plateau. This setting is nearly ideal for farming in the United States. The naturally-occurring rich soil, abundant water resources, and relatively temperate weather allow for 42 different types of fruits and vegetables to flourish in the Chattanooga area, as well as cattle, pigs, and poultry.15 Ecological integration also emerges at the individual level.

Sequatchie Cove Farm provides perhaps the strongest illustration of ecological integration that we found in Chattanooga. The farm uses the rotational grazing method, also known as the management-intensive grazing method. This method uses the natural environment to its advantage. Rather than harvesting a single type of grain to feed cattle, the Keeners allow the grass to grow naturally and use the timing of when they allow cattle into paddocks as a way to manage the growth of the grass. In the rotational grazing method, the definition of “weeds” is reduced to anything the cattle won’t eat. Over time, Bill pulls out weeds, so that eventually the paddock becomes relatively weed-free. The manure from the cattle is also left in the paddock as a natural fertilizer. In this way, the grass and the cattle perpetuate each other’s growth.

Increasing Physical Infrastructure

The Keener’s slow cultivation of their paddocks is also an illustration of building physical assets. Building assets is investing in resources and infrastructure. At a farm level, Sequatchie Cove Farm has done this by cultivating grass fields that are ideal for grazing, the construction of cheese processing plant, and through the use of solar panels to power the cheese processing plant. By investing in their infrastructure and non-monetary resources, the Keeners improve their resilience to fluctuations in the economy and the market.

13 Ackerman-Leist, ibid.14 ASAP, 2011. 2011 Food and Farm Assessment: Chattanooga, Tennessee. http://asapconnections.org/downloads/asap-food-and-farm-assessment-gaining-ground.pdf .15 ASAP ibid.

The Farmer’s Daughter and Main Street Meats built assets as vendors by investing in their physical infrastructure. For the Farmer’s Daughter, Mike Mayo actually participated in the transformation of the shell of a gas station into a charming, rustic diner space with a certified kitchen. Main Street Meats’s partnership with Link 41 allowed them to forgo building a new kitchen and invest the majority of their resources into a LEED certified storefront, which features not only a counter but a cozy set of tables and chairs for diners to enjoy their meals. Meals sold at Main Street Meats not only uses meat from the shop but also the bread rolls from neighboring Niedlov Bakery. By using other products form the neighborhood, and even by donating meat that isn’t quite sellable to a nearby soup kitchen, Main Street Meats seizes every opportunity to not only to invest in its storefront, but to invest in the actual neighborhood itself.

Chattanooga at large has been investing in its green infrastructure since the 1970s. By replacing hollowed factories with greenways, parks, and an eco-industrial complex, the city and organizations invested in the city have steadily transformed Chattanooga into an environmental leader of its region. The Gaining Ground Initiative, funded by the Benwood Foundation was only the latest in a decades-old history of partnerships between municipal government, non-profits, and local businesses to invest in Chattanooga as a resilient and relatively self-sustaining city. By aiding the launch of new farmer’s markets in particular, Gaining Ground directly shaped the cityscape in a way that supported its overall capacity for a local food economy.

Redundancy

Key stakeholders in Chattanooga appear to recognize the importance of redundancy on multiple scales. At the micro scale, individual actors—such as farmers, vendors, and processors—must have a way of a) replacing themselves to continue their legacy and b) fostering enough similar existing enterprises to be able to support whatever demand is generated. Sequatchie Cove Farm is a strong model of this. Although Bill and Miriam are not yet looking to retire, they have already initiated the process of talking in depth with their son about taking over the farm, piece by piece. Their experiences also supported their daughter Ann in establishing the skills and networks necessary to open a local food café. Similarly, they have put Nathan, their intern, in a place to take over their cheese business. The lone example of Sequatchie Cove Farm hardly suggests that all individual actors of the Chattanooga food system exhibit redundancy. However, the Gaining Ground Initiative’s emphasis on redundancy is a promising sign. One of the initiative’s key moves was multiplying the number of farmer’s markets in Chattanooga, something that the existing markets were in favor of, recognizing that generating more awareness of and demand for local food outweighed the potential economic competition.

Concurrently and perhaps significantly, most farms in and around Chattanooga are small, locally-owned farms. Between 2002 and 2007, there was actually a significant increase in small farms, especially for farms of less than 50 acres. In the same period, there was a decrease in overall farm acreage by 2 percent, largely due to the fall of large farms in the area.16 Currently, smaller farms in Greater Chattanooga are experiencing a boom in redundancy, while large farms are dissipating. Despite this, most of the overall agricultural income in the area can still be attributed to large-scale farms.17 Bill Keener actually told us about his desire for more farmers like himself. Sequatchie Cove Farm has outgrown small-scale farmer’s markets and moved into the league of mid-sized farmers. The difficulty is that since there are so few mid-sized farmers in

16 ASAP, ibid.17 ASAP, ibid.

Chattanooga, the marketing opportunities are not yet able to support them. Farmer’s markets generally generate enough revenue for small-scale and beginning farmers, and large farms have no trouble eking out a place in the market. The competition that more mid-sized farms might create for Bill and Miriam is outweighed by the value of having a collaborative market force. In the case of local food, redundancy is about more than generating healthy competition and replacing retiring systems. It’s about creating demand through collaborative networks and giving traction to a new (and yet old) approach to food.

Complementary Diversity

Complementary diversity is another critical component to the creation of a local food network. It refers to a wide array of potential goods or services that could be offered so that the failure of one does not determine overall failure or success. It is critical that this diversity also be complementary, or are appropriate to each other. In the case of Chattanooga, complementary diversity manifests primarily at the level of the individual actor. The Farmer’s Daughter provides both “culinarily exciting” dishes as well as reliable favorites like chicken salad sandwiches to be both approachable to more hesitant customer and intriguing to forward-thinking foodies. By sourcing from a variety of farmers, the Farmer’s Daughter protects itself from disaster in case one farmer or rancher falls through. Main Street Meats also buys from an array of farmers and offers a diversity of services. A customer can buy a cut of meat to bring home, some broth, or a full meal, including a beer. The diversity of goods is complementary in that all of the services are value-added side businesses. The broth turns leftover meat scraps into a commodity, and the meals provide another source of revenue for the store. However, of all the businesses we examined in Chattanooga, Sequatchie Cove Farm provides perhaps the most poignant example of complementary diversity. From the beginning of the farm, the Keeners have juggled multiple projects including beef, dairy, poultry, sheep, honey, mushrooms, berries, and a native plant business. Though in the past few years Bill and Miriam reigned in their diversity to focus on the cheese business, Bill told us that in retrospect, he thinks it was a mistake.

At the city level, Chattanooga itself has complimentary diversity. This manifests in a variety of ways. As we saw through our interviews, Chattanooga is home to producers, vendors, restaurants, and processors that focus on local food. These individual actors fulfill different roles, but provide support for each other’s businesses. That is, restaurants and vendors need farmers to supply them, and farmers need outlets to process and market their food in a variety of ways. Ideally, Chattanooga should also have a diversity of agricultural landscapes. While Greater Chattanooga does have a growing number of small farms spread throughout is, and even encompasses parts of other states in the 100-mile radius of “Harvested Here,” it could perhaps be stronger in its number of urban farms. Currently, the most prominent urban farms are Crabtree Farms, which sits on five acres in the heart of Chattanooga, and Fair Share Urban Growers, a farm that moved to Chattanooga in 2011 and aims to use agriculture as a tool to reduce poverty. Fair Share hosts multiple sites, including a parking lot that has been transformed into a garden and a “truck farm,” or a pickup truck transformed into a mobile garden.18 To our research, these are the two largest examples of Chattanooga’s urban agriculture.

Nevertheless, Chattanooga zoning regulations pave the way for more urban farms. Zoning determines what types of agriculture and livestock are permissible in a city area, and is therefore important to the creation of urban farms. In 2000, Chattanooga passed Ordinance No. 11107, 18 http://www.wedigfairshare.org/

which created an urban agriculture district within the city of Chattanooga. In this district, crops, forests, and livestock are permitted, within certain regulations. The district even allows for dairies and stables, making it more flexible than urban agriculture districts in most other cities. However, one of the limiting factors of the ordinance is that it has a minimum area requirement of 20 acres—no small feat of acquisition in Chattanooga. Such a high minimum land requirement is an obstacle to potential small urban farms.192021 Nevertheless, Chattanooga is among the first cities to establish an urban agriculture district.

Conservative Flexibility

Chattanooga’s venture into urban agriculture zoning is also an illustration of conservative flexibility, a term composed of two traits that temper each other. Flexibility refers to the ability to apply unusual or innovative solutions. Conservation describes a degree of adherence to old, tried-and-true methods. Conservative flexibility, then, is a balance between the introduction of new, more appropriate practices and reliance on older inherited knowledge. At the city level, the development of an urban agriculture district demonstrates flexibility. In fact, the City of Chattanooga’s interest in developing a local food system at all is an expression of conservative flexibility. It demonstrates flexibility in re-imagining the way a food network can look, but demonstrates conservation because eating locally is, after all, a sort of homecoming. Before the creation of our modern conventional food system, where most goods are shipped long distances, most food was produced, bought, and consumed locally.

For this reason, our interviewees also demonstrated conservative flexibility. Sequatchie Cove Farm drew many lessons from Amish agriculture, such as in its focus on redundancy. It also uses some technologies of modern conventional agriculture, like the use of antibiotics on sick animals. However, the Keeners weren’t named pioneers for nothing. Sequatchie Cove Farm is trying to make local food sell in a market designed for conventional agriculture, and it’s working. The CSA the Keeners launched in the 1990s was among the first in the area, and they’ve also introduce rotational grazing to Chattanooga. Similarly, the Farmer’s Daughter adheres to a traditional business model, but is creating their own distribution network composed of local farmers and processors. Through this, Ann and Mike Mayo have found a way to both support their values and make a livable wage. Main Street Meats, too, is both conservative and flexible. The traditional butcher’s shop that Dan Key launched is actually a very old practice. Dan’s own knowledge comes from the practices of his grandparents in Appalachia and the salt shops found in European villages. However, applying old knowledge to a modern contexts poses challenges. Dan must give the customer a reason to pay more money for artisanal meat. Flexibility at Main Street Meats means selling more than just meat—it means selling lunches, recipes, and an experience. The customers who enter Main Street Meats can expect to have a conversation with the butcher about the meat and receive advice on the best way to cook it.

19 https://www.planning.org/zoningpractice/2010/pdf/mar.pdf20 http://www.sustainablecitiesinstitute.org/topics/food-systems/urban-agriculture/promoting-urban-agriculture-through-zoning21http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCAQFjAA&url=http%3http://www.sustainablecitiesinstitute.org/topics/food-systems/urban-agriculture/promoting-urban-agriculture-through-zoningA%2F%2Fwww.chattanooga.gov%2Fcity-council-files%2FOrdinancesAndResolutions%2FOrdinances%2FOrdinances%25202000%2F11107%2520AmendZoningOrdinance-A-1%2520UrbanAgriculturalZone.doc&ei=i-EiVKruKuXK8gGD8IHoBA&usg=AFQjCNH3dy4BpXNYKcjb_5Q3Lz0yx6jwRA&bvm=bv.75775273,d.b2U)

Creating a thriving local food network today is about reviving old practices, infusing them with new technologies, and adapting them to a changing populace.

Periodic Transformation

The final, and perhaps most distinctive, component of resilience is periodic transformation. Periodic transformation essentially refers to the phase of the adaptive cycle known as “reorganization” (Ω).22 In order for a system to be ecologically resilient, it must periodically undergo changes to its infrastructure in order to adapt to changing circumstances. In the case of Chattanooga, periodic transformation seems to be a clear practice since the 1970s, when philanthropic action mobilized the city to become an environmental leader. Today, both the municipality itself and the individual actors within it have participated in strategic infrastructure changes to build Chattanooga’s growing local food system.

Among our interviewees, Sequatchie Cove Farm provides the best illustration of periodic transformation. The Keeners have cycled through many different products on their farm, beginning with the CSA and most recently making the leap to a cheese business. The changing emphasis at Sequatchie Cove Farm is usually linked to periodic reflections and predictions about where the market is going and what the farm will need next. For instance, in the case of the CSA, the Keeners realized that they would need to invest heavily in equipment to support a large-scale CSA, and decided against it. Now that the cheese business is stable and has been handed off, the Keeners find themselves in another moment of periodic transformation. Where they take the farm next will depend on what is best for their redundancy. In other words, whatever changes are made next will be made with the Keener’s son Kelsey in mind. The Farmer’s Daughter and Main Street Meats have less experience with transformation, but it should be noted that both businesses are less than a year old and perhaps have not encountered the need for transformation yet.

One factor that might throw a wrench in Chattanooga’s capacity for periodic reformation is the heavy hand of philanthropy in the city’s local food movement. As discussed in the introduction, most of the money behind environmental changes in Chattanooga since the 1970s was from philanthropies. Ironically, powerful philanthropies such as the Lyndhurst Foundation and the Benwood Foundation are based on endowments from the large-scale industry that made 1970s Chattanooga an environmental disaster in the first place. At least in terms of where money comes from, it appears that power has not changed hands since the reign of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company over Chattanooga. It is merely that those who hold the money have changed their goals. However noble the current goals of philanthropic actors might be, if the capacity for Chattanooga’s change rests on the interests of the elite, Chattanooga will not be truly resilient.

Conclusion

However, to say that change in Chattanooga is monopolized by an elite group of philanthropies would be to ignore the substantial number of individual actors who are contributing to local agriculture. Sequatchie Cove Farms was one of the pioneers of the local food movement in Chattanooga, and its progress continues to lead the way for other farmers of the Greater Chattanooga Area. Right now, the Keeners are leading the way in producing and selling local cheese, challenging traditional milk regulations, transitioning their farm to the next generation, and evolving into a mid-sized farm. Between 2002 and 2007, the 100-mile area around 22 Abel et al., ibid.

Chattanooga has increased profits from agriculture by 66 percent. In this same time frame, the number of farms in the Greater Chattanooga Area has actually increased, with the most significant rise in farms under 50 acres.23 Other enterprises are also emerging without philanthropic input, such as the Farmer’s Daughter and Main Street Meats. As we saw among our interviewees, these enterprises support each other by buying each other’s goods and educating consumers about their local food system. Though Gaining Ground helped facilitate relationships among local food actors like chefs, farmers, and farmer’s markets, these relationships for the most part are continuing even after Gaining Ground was phased out in 2013. Philanthropic dollars catalyzed change in Chattanooga, but the drivers and directors of change were already at the forefront, among the farmers and entrepreneurs themselves.

This is not to say that Chattanooga is not in danger of relying too much on philanthropic funding. The heavy hand on non-profits poses a serious threat to Chattanooga’s ecological resilience. After all, a system where power never changes hands can hardly be said to have undergone true cycles of transformation. The question that remains is whether Chattanooga can continue its streak of progressive policies and green infrastructure with reduced philanthropic input.

The lens of ecological resilience allows us to pose these questions. Although we draw no conclusions about whether Chattanooga itself is fundamentally resilient, it is clear that the city has both successes to celebrate and struggle to overcome on the local food front, including reducing dependency on philanthropy. However, even the most lavishly funded movements will fall flat if the will of the populace isn’t there. The “Sustainable Blue Collar Town” is proving itself capable of the unlikely.

23 Wilson, M. K., 2012. Community Food System Data Collection and Synthesis. Chattanooga/Hamilton County Food Coalition. http://www.jlchatt.org/documents/12373/6168583/FoodCoalitionAssessmentWilson.pdf/f83bc6d8-3947-4cff-aeaf-f96ddf87bca2