Thanksgiving has become a holiday about food, but as families gather and give their graces to the cornucopia of dishes on the dinner table, the origin of what they’re eating can be an afterthought.

The grocery store shelves provide it, and while some curious shoppers might look at the labels, that’s often as far as it goes.

Yet if families were intentional with their shopping, several local food advocates said, they could find almost every ingredient on the menu produced by an Arizona farmer. Cranberries and pumpkin filling were the exception.

Arizona ranks at the top in the production of several agricultural products, including pecans, veggies and greens. There are large-scale apple and pecan orchards in Cochise County, a booming dairy industry in central Arizona, and numerous turkey, pork and beef producers across the state.

“Almost every single ingredient in a Thanksgiving dinner could come, hypothetically, potentially, from Arizona,” said Cindy Gentry, president of Sun Produce Co-op, an organization made up of small-scale producers, distributors and buyers mostly from Maricopa County.

Small and mid-size farmers grow a diversity of crops in a diversity of climate regions, including onions, garlic, salad greens, spinach, carrots, green beans, celery and even sweet potatoes. About 16% of the state’s cropland is dedicated to vegetables, and growers supply dozens of farmers’ markets across the state.

“Then there is the matter of production, of volume, and of being able to find that where you are,” Gentry said.

Farmer-consumer relations remain key

Some grocery store products like milk and leafy greens are Arizona-grown, even if they are not labeled that way. Brands like Shamrock and Danzeisen source from Arizona dairies, and nearly all winter greens come from Yuma. A good percentage of Arizona-grown beef also ends in Arizona supermarkets.

“Arizona families have access to more local food than they realize,” said Julie Murphree, spokesperson for the Arizona Farm Bureau.

But most small- and mid-scale farmers depend on more direct relationships with the consumers.

Farmers’ markets, Community Supported Agriculture models and food box memberships, specialty markets and at-the-door sales remain the main source for locally produced foods.

That will remain true, “until we can create a system that supports the aggregation and distribution of locally produced foods,” said Patty Emmert, director of resilient food systems at Local First Arizona.

Small-scale farmers can’t compete in price with big companies, and are often stretched thin to pursue, on top of farm operations, marketing and distribution strategies that could support their businesses.

Cooperatives like Sun Produce Co-op and Pivot Produce have helped unify producers and lower distribution costs, but there is a long list of roadblocks and challenges to this day, like the increased cost of farming due to economies of scale, land and water access and labor shortages.

Pecans grow in Arizona, but producers face challenge

The pecan industry in Arizona is the fourth-largest in the country but remains almost invisible on grocery shelves and farmers’ markets.

Last year, some 22,000 acres of pecan orchards were harvested in Arizona, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which tracks such information in its National Agricultural Statistics Service. But there are only a handful of local producers on the list of Local First Arizona’s good food finder.

Jackie Lee says her family business has grown mainly by “word of mouth.”

She planted a pecan orchard in Willcox some 40 years ago with her husband, Paul, and today they produce about three tons of nuts a year. Most of her sales are from customers at the door and from shipping orders across Arizona and the U.S.

They won’t sell to grocery stores because they keep the product on the shelves, and fresh pecans have such a high oil content that they will go rancid if they are not kept in cold storage, Lee said.  

While they are in one of the country’s most important regions for pecan production, Lee’s Pecan Farm has to take the nuts to Texas for cracking and shelling, since there are no plants in Arizona that will take their product. They have 220 trees, while some nearby orchards have over 200,000 trees.

The largest producer, Green Valley Pecan Company, owned by the Farmers Investment Company, maintains over 10,000 acres of farmland and 300,000 nut trees in Southern Arizona. About two years ago they closed their processing plant and main retail store in Sahuarita.

Some local vendors that used to purchase local pecans from them are now sourcing from Mexico, even if there is an abundance of smaller pecan farms in Arizona.

‘A healthier choice altogether’

On Sunday morning, shoppers filled their bags with goods at the Rillito Park farmers’ market in Tucson. The venue was packed with vendors selling pasture-raised meats and poultry, goat cheese, honey, herbal medicine, veggies and greens, as well as all kinds of handicrafts.

Several producers delivered pre-ordered turkeys that day, while others continued taking orders for pecan and apple pies.

“Last one,” bragged a shopper as he took a frozen 20-pound turkey off the hands of Michael Simmons, who raises about 500 birds a year at Cluck Cluck Farm in Cochise County.

Unlike other producers, Simmons is dedicated almost exclusively to raising turkeys for the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons, and sells both in bulk and retail.

“I never had to branch out, so why stretch myself thinner than I need to?” he said.

Other stands sold local dates, apples, greens, butternut and winter squash, culinary sage, garlic, radishes and turnips.

Fall is one of the busiest seasons for the Rillito market, which is also the largest and best-attended of five farmers’ markets run by Heirloom, a nonprofit that operates in Southern Arizona. But in the last three years they have seen even a greater increase in sales of fresh produce, said Lena Melnick, the market’s director of operations.

Part of that bump has to do with Double Up Food Bucks Arizona, a program that doubles the value of SNAP cards, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly known as food stamps, when participants purchase fruit and vegetables.

The program doubling fresh produce purchases had a $20 daily limit, but during the pandemic, Double Up spending at farmers’ markets, CSA programs and farm stands across Arizona became unlimited. Grocery stores maintained it.

“It really helped the farmers at the time and the consumers too,” Melnick said.

Many shoppers felt at ease getting fresh produce at the farmers’ market during the pandemic, instead of going inside a supermarket, she added: “It was a healthier choice altogether.”

Because the new rule on unlimited spending hasn’t changed, purchases at farmers’ markets Iike Rillito have continued to grow.

“Last weekend was our busiest on record,” said Doran Hadan, Heirlooms’ development director. The farmers’ market recorded 83 transactions involving people using their SNAP card and Double Up perks.

A lettuce producer on the Sunday market said that nearly 40% of the purchases in their stand are made with SNAP.

Hadan said they do not track whether that money is spent the same day at the market, but they delivered an equivalent of $6,400 to SNAP participants.

Still ‘a labor of love’

The Double Up program has reduced the gap of equal access to healthy foods and helped farmers while doing so, but is not a permanent solution.

“We want to make sure that everybody has access to healthy foods and culturally appropriate food, and make sure that it’s also affordable at the same time, but also making sure that the producers that are producing these foods are able to make a living,” said Emmert, with Local First Arizona. “That’s a huge challenge.”

The choice of local foods isn’t enough to help small farm business thrive.

“I can never grow enough,” said Catherine Mead, who runs Cochise Family Farm near the Dragoon Mountains.

She raises beef, lamb, pork, chicken, ducks and rabbits, grows seasonal vegetables, and sells all kinds of baked and canned goods. She usually raises and sells about 30 turkeys a year, but she opted out this year because it’s too much work and she lack an extra pair of hands at the farm.

There is good demand for turkey, but costs eat the operation up and she barely recovers the investment.

“It’s more a labor of love than anything,” she said. “But I think this work is so valuable right now in the world, that I won’t give it up.”

Clara Migoya covers agriculture and water issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Send tips or questions to [email protected].

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