Food Files: Timothy Will on Why Broadband Is the Key to Local Food

Timothy Will is using the Internet to directly connect farmers and buyers, an effort for which he was recently awarded the Purpose Prize, which recognizes people who use the "second chapter” of their lives to benefit others in innovative ways. This growing farmer-consumer connectivity represents an exciting new frontier in local food, one that might well be the most important thing occurring in this field.

During a career as a telecommunications systems analyst, Will learned first-hand how technological innovation can change people’s lives. He brought that wisdom with him when at age 58 he moved to Rutherfordton, North Carolina, an Appalachian town in one of the most economically depressed counties in the country. Working with Foothills Connect Business and Technology Center, Will wired the county with broadband Internet and connected farmers to restaurants and residents in Charlotte via a specialized Web ordering system called Farmers Fresh Market.

I recently caught up with Will to discuss his project and find out why broadband is so important for local food. A voluble, friendly guy, Will regaled me with fascinating stories and facts. The interview below (only an excerpt!) is long, but worth reading. If you’re into sustainable food, you need to hear what this guy has to say.

Why did you decide to connect farmers with restaurants?

We’re not foodies. It had very little to do with food and everything to do with jobs. I’m in an area where the economy has collapsed. But there’s still a lot of land, a lot of it in private hands, small quantities of land, five to 20 acres, so it’s a matter of how do you use that asset to make the most amount of jobs? Because that’s my job. My job is rural economic development.

So when I moved up here a relative said, you know your cousin Matt is a chef in Charlotte? It’s about 70 miles away. Next time I was in Charlotte I looked him up, and I said my job is to make jobs, and there’s all this vacant farmland and nobody’s farming it. And he said that’s strange because here in Charlotte we can’t get fresh food.

And I said you’re in a Marriott! How could you not get fresh food? And he said the way that the system works, 90 percent of the food takes two weeks to get through the system. He told me the dirty little secret of restaurant life is that you end up throwing away between 15 and 25 percent of the food. It’s perfectly good, it’s just not presentable to a customer.

Wow. A light went on. You’ve got demand and then you got a supply, but we’ve got to put together the buyers and sellers. We’re technologists, so we used the Internet. So we hooked them up and the rest is history. It took off. We realized that we had a tremendous competitive advantage as a business if we could do just-in-time delivery of absolutely fresh vegetables.

We’re on our third version of a Website where chefs and individuals can pick food, and we don’t even pick the food until it’s ordered. Chefs are getting food by noontime that was picked at four or five in the morning, so it’s less than seven hours old.

Clearly technology was the lynchpin there. What role do you think technology can play or must play in a burgeoning local food movement?

Technology is the key, particularly the Internet. We’re in a rural area where there isn’t a lot of broadband. We went out and organized the community around the idea of broadband. We were able to get a grant for $1.5 million and we stretched a hundred miles of fiber optics. And now that gives us a basis to put a fixed-based wireless broadband system throughout the county.

This is a rural county and we’ve got a lot people who don’t see the benefits of broadband even though it’s the broadband that took their jobs away. They got globalized. We’re teaching them to fight back.

What's the story with the software you developed that uses bar codes?

I’m a rural economic developer and I spent much of my professional career before I came here in high-tech doling what was called process re-engineering, also called systems analysis. I use technology in business processes.

So we broke the business process of delivering food down and recognized that in our own process the biggest issue was that when you use multiple farmers for multiple orders, there’s some confusion as to who gets what.

So we custom-wrote a program. When a chef chooses farmer’s inventory, that farmer is sent an email with an attached JPEG that is a bar code that identifies the farmer, the customer, the product, the weight, the price and any other stuff. Eventually we might have to start putting the GIS coordinates of the field it came out of, but we’re prepared to do that.

As each product comes in, individually packaged, from the farmer, we scan in the barcode and the computer tells us which box to put it in. And the computer will tell us if there’s anything missing from that box. It cuts down on a lot of inaccuracies. Also now, when our truck driver takes it in, she will scan in every component of the order when the chef accepts them, and that way we’ve got the picked, packed and delivery slips in one neat little bundle.

Do you have plans to expand this to individuals and families?

We’ve already done it. We’ve got a pool of about 120 people. One of the chefs liked our food so much that he talked to the downtown development district and he let us put up a tent outside his hotel, on the busiest corner in Charlotte.

People started buying the absolutely fresh food from us, and they said, ‘the problem is, I live in the suburbs.’ We said if you get us a minimum of 20 orders of at least $30 and we’ll put them in separate boxes and deliver them to the community center.

We are now selling more to individuals than we do to chefs. And we are going to expand that business. That business is going to just explode. Our problem is getting enough farmers, now. We need more farmers.

Are you planning to expand further in your state or into other states?

I’m planning right now to expand the program to six other “business and technology centers.” I’m in the Foothill Connect Business and Technology Center, and there are seven of us. We’re all in highly depressed areas, where our jobs are to create jobs and entrepreneurship and small business through technology, that’s our mission. We cross-fertilize each other.

Every one of us has a free public Internet access site in our building because we’re in areas that don’t have broadband. The fiber optics we brought in just gets us infrastructure, but we’ve got to get a signal out to these rural areas, which is really a huge county.

So one of the important things we do is to get people to start using the technology so that AT&T doesn’t tell me again ‘why would a farmer need broadband?’ Well, how about to sell his food 70 miles away and avoid four or five layers of middlemen who take all his profit? The reason why there is very limited broadband out in the rural areas is because of this idea that farmers don’t use it; why would they need it?

What’s the most important thing you’d tell people who are concerned about the future of food in this country?

Oh my god, they should be terrified! They should be terrified.

What we developed since World War II is a terrifically centralized, hierarchical and petro-chemically dependent food system that’s extremely vulnerable. Last year when the gas prices went up to $4.50 a gallon, [the sustainable farmers I work with] were actually competitive on price. In many cases, we were the low-priced solution.

The whole [industrial food] infrastructure is subsidized by a multi-hundred-billion-dollar farm bill virtually none of which gets to small farmers. I’m a systems analyst, and the industrial food system is one of the most wasteful, inefficient systems I’ve ever seen, and it’s propped up by hundred of billions of dollars in public subsidy. There’s no way this thing can stand on its own.

I understand that there was a decision made at some time that cheap food is good. The result is that you’ve got this terrifically unhealthy population, and $180 billion of this trillion-dollar health bill goes to treat dietary-related diseases. They’re not getting cheap food; they’re getting expensive medical treatments.

What should Americans do? Buy local, buy fresh and buy environmentally sensitive food. People need to educate themselves and stop buying this junk food and the whole system will collapse on its own. The American people can solve this. We hold the key.