The community feels like a company town rigidly divided between poor farmworkers and a managerial and professional elite. The farm's produce is trucked 3,000 miles over six days to a supermarket chain's warehouse in the northeast region of the US where it is redistributed to the chain's 200 individual units over the course of two to three days. The chain is owned by a Netherlands-based company. In the other food system, as many as 50 or 60 varieties of produce are grown on each of two dozen farms ranging in size from 5 to 100 acres. They are all located within a 30-mile radius of a major city.
Farm equipment is modest in size, appropriate to the needs of the operation and environment.
Many of the farms are certified as organic while others are working on ways to reduce their dependence on agri-chemicals. The owners run the farm, live there, and may be third or fourth generation farmers. Produce from this network of farms is either picked up at the farm by the consumers or is trucked 10 to 50 miles to the city's farmers' market. Some produce is sold to the city's school food service, which provides lunch daily to 25,000 children. The first food system is big, mainstream, conventional, concentrated, impersonal, global, energy and capital intensive, and unsustainable.