Healing America Through Local Food
72 million Americans can't pay their medical bills. The food system made people sick. The healthcare system manages the sickness. Both industries get paid. That cycle costs $1.1 trillion a year in healthcare and drives 20,000 farms out of business.
Someone close to me is in the hospital this week. And I can't stop thinking about how many people around me are paying the price for a food system that failed them.
Every week I hear from customers who found us because a doctor couldn't help them but changing their food did. People managing autoimmune diseases. Parents whose kids can't tolerate what's on the grocery store shelf. People who figured out on their own what this report just proved with data.
Click here to see the state-level economic impacts of locally sourced Food is Medicine (FIM) programs that drive economic benefits for states while strengthening local farms and building more resilient food systems.
The healthcare system spends 90 percent of its dollars on people with chronic disease. Not preventing it. Managing it.
This week the Rockefeller Foundation asked what would happen if some of that money went to the thing that could actually prevent it. Local farms. And for the first time, someone ran the numbers to prove it. Here's what they found:
- $5.6 billion in new annual revenue for small and mid-sized farms.
- $23.7 billion saved in healthcare costs.
- 2.6 million hospitalizations prevented.
- 316,000 jobs.
Doctors prescribing food instead of pills. Produce prescriptions sourced from local farms. Medically tailored meals delivered to people with chronic disease. Programs that already exist and already work. The system that's been ignoring farmers for decades might be the one that finally needs us. The food that keeps people out of the hospital is the food small farms are best positioned to grow. Fix the food and you fix the health crisis. Fix the health crisis through local farms and you fix the farm crisis. That's a $45 billion fix. And that's not idealism.
That's what the data says.
A view from our kitchen, overflowing with last summer’s bounty. When you work with nature, she always delivers rich, nourishing food.
If you're reading this email, you probably already know that food can change your health. A lot of you have told me exactly that. You switched what you eat and something shifted. Your bloodwork changed. Your energy came back. Your kid stopped getting sick. You didn't wait for a report to tell you what you already felt.
Now the report exists. And it says what you've been living is real. That the food you've been choosing actually keeps people out of hospitals. That the farms you've been supporting are exactly the kind of farms this country needs more of. You were ahead of this.
Help us make sure the policy catches up. Send this report to your state legislator. Share it with your doctor. And the next time someone questions why you spend more on food, send them this.
Your farmer,
Cody