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The heady optimism that gave birth to the region's first economic development entity is finally beginning to produce results
 Photo by Martha Busse |
Two summers ago, Bartlet Durand walked into Metcalfe’s Sentry and pitched what he calls a “crazy idea.” His farm near Black Earth had organic beef, and he needed a place to sell it; Tim Metcalfe had customers who wanted local product. Metcalfe went for it.
“That was a fairly cutting-edge market arrangement, even though it was pretty much the way things were done fifty years ago,” Durand says. “In today’s market it was pretty bold.”
The bold move paid off. Durand now sells his beef and cheese in Metcalfe’s stores in Milwaukee and Madison, and sales were strong enough to allow him to purchase his own retail meat market in Black Earth.
But not every local farmer has the time or energy—not to mention chutzpah—to walk in and cold-call a grocer. “The farmers are not necessarily salespeople,” says Metcalfe. “They’re producers.”
For that matter, not every grocer would listen or respond to a pitch from a local producer. “There is demand for organic and local food, meats in particular,” Durand says. “But (grocers) are constrained by budget or by training that they don’t want to pay for it.”
Locally grown beef is, after all, more expensive. “When you’re talking about people who just want their hamburger for $2 a pound and not a penny more, we’re going to have problems,” Durand says. “You can’t just replace nationally distributed commodity beef with local products at the same price.” But enough consumers are willing to pay the premium, says Metcalfe; it’s just a matter of connecting the growers to the grocers.
Enter Thrive—the new regional economic development group that shares a president with the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce—and its aptly named “Growers to Grocers” program. When we last met Thrive (“Drama in Dane,” February 2006), it was called, simply, Regional Economic Development Entity, or REDE (pronounced like “ready”). It grew out of the Collaboration Council, a large group of business and civic leaders with the nebulous goal of fostering regional cooperation. The economy does not respect municipal boundaries, the thinking was; there’s no need for competition for businesses and jobs between Madison and Middleton or Sauk County and Rock County, since people and their dollars don’t stop at the city or county line.
Former Chamber exec Rafael Carbonell was named REDE’s executive VP. He and those around him were full of hope and great ideas. They recruited business owners and leaders. They began work on a boomerang initiative to lure ex-pat Madisonians back to take high-end jobs based on a Wisconsin Alumni Association study that found sixty-one percent of UW grads would consider returning. And they cast a pretty wide net across the counties of Iowa, Columbia, Sauk, Green, Dodge, Jefferson, Rock and Dane.
Fast-forward three years. The boomerang project, once dubbed Badger Boomerang, is now Badger Career Network Alerts. The Growers to Grocers program is up and running. And the REDE has a name—Thrive, conceived with the assistance of local branding wizard Marsha Lindsay—a website at thrivehere.org, a staff of nine, and $2.6 million raised (eighty percent from private sources).
“One thing people have to remember,” says Carbonell, “is that when we were launching REDE, we were starting a new business, essentially. It was getting off the ground the infrastructure that would allow us to do this type of work long-term. In our first year we were doing exactly that. Building infrastructure, creating capacity, putting us in a position to go from planning to doing.” Carbonell says development of Thrive and boosting the regional economy is “a marathon, not a sprint.” That’s a phrase you hear a lot when talking to people involved in the effort.
Growers to Grocers is the first real planning-to-doing leap. Under the leadership of Thrive’s director of agricultural initiatives, Greg Lawless, the program seeks to hook up local agriculture producers with local customers—first groceries, then scaled up to restaurants, caterers, anybody who buys food. In some ways, the motivation behind a local food effort is a no-brainer, especially for a group whose charter is to buoy the economy of the region.
“The product tends to be bigger, fresher and lasts longer,” says Metcalfe. And then there’s the economic impact. “It’s your neighbor that’s growing it,” says Durand. “And that neighbor will turn around and take that money and buy shoes or whatever from you.”
“Every dollar that’s spent in a community circulates three times before it leaves,” says Heather Hilleren, founder of GreenLeaf Market and hired by Thrive to connect the growers to the grocers. “By buying local food, you’ve just boosted the local economy three times.”
And, of course, it’s greener; the carbon footprint of transport from Sauk City or Horicon is a lot smaller than from California or Florida. And there are significant challenges that Thrive can help address. For example, even as agriculture becomes a truly high-tech venture, getting product to market remains stubbornly analog.
“Right now, farmers are bringing in paper price sheets, and then if (grocers) see something they want to buy, they have to play phone tag and when they get ahold of the farmer the price might be different,” Hilleren says. “They want to buy local product; it’s just time-consuming and difficult.”
Hilleren started GLM to overcome this problem, building a website Carbonell calls “a mix between eBay and Match.com for agriculture.” In a nutshell, greenleafmarket.com allows producers to post what they have available and buyers to shop and place orders. Earlier this year, Thrive’s Lawless connected the corners of the producer-grocer-website triangle. “Greg was working with a grocer in the area and wanted us to come along for input,” says Hilleren. “When we showed the grocer what we were doing, he said, ‘Oh, yes, this is the only way we’re going to buy local.’”
The model is new and untested, and the early going has been slow. Metcalfe’s and Baraboo-based Pierce’s, which has five locations in four counties, including a store on Madison’s north side, just made their first major GLM-facilitated purchase, from the Fennimore Auction, in late October. About a week later, GLM announced its official launch out of beta-test phase. And in early November, Spring Green-based Renaissance Farm and Madison’s RP’s Pastas used GLM to create a line of locally-produced frozen foods, now available at Metcalfe’s.
“Getting the word out ... in the midst of the growing season was difficult,” says Lawless. “This fall was very much a pilot stage, jumping in to see where the problems are.”
The problems are not minor, say beef producer Durand and grocer Metcalfe. First, there’s distribution. “A lot of (farmers) don’t know how to get (product) to us,” says Metcalfe. “They know how to grow it, they know how to get it to a farmers’ market, but they don’t have the ability to get it to three or four stores, or even one store, in a given market.” Thrive could potentially help producers team up to help each other, Metcalfe says, though it hasn’t addressed that concern directly yet.
And then there’s seasonality, especially with vegetables. People who need lettuce in April or tomatoes in January are going to have issues. “It’s inherent in eating locally,” says Durand. “It is what it is.”
Durand sees a focus on meats, cheeses and other dairy products as a way to get past this problem, since you can produce both year-round, and both are easy to preserve. “That’s where the opportunities are in local markets,” he says. “I’m building my whole business model on that.”
Even vegetable farms can bolster themselves with beef. “Every farm I know of out here has room for one to ten steers,” Durand says.
One of Thrive’s main goals, says Carbonell, is to “create connections that wouldn’t happen naturally.” And that’s what they’ve begun to do with Growers to Grocers, says Hilleren. “Thrive really made the introductions to people that wouldn’t have happened,” she says. “They know who to contact, they have the resources. Some organizations do research. Thrive actually works to grow the economy. They do what they say they’re going to do.”
Thrive has also begun to forge those connections in other areas of the economy. Early on, its leaders identified three industry sectors—biotechnology, agriculture and health care—and hired a specialist to head up efforts in each one. Each interviewed more than a hundred people before beginning to lay the groundwork for programs. The biotech and health care professionals expressed a desire to find UW grads who had wandered off to the coasts and lure them back to take newly created jobs.
“There hadn’t been enough energy to make it happen, although people in both sectors felt it was a good idea,” says John Biondi, chair of Thrive’s board. “By Thrive coming in and looking out over both of those sectors, and looking out over more than Madison and Dane County, we’re hoping to pull that together and make something happen.” And it worked—focusing on a common need of different economic sectors led directly to the Badger Career Network Alerts.
Carbonell says the three sectors Thrive zeroed in on are simply a measure of the particular strengths of this region. “We have human capital, we have natural resources infrastructure, we have a lot of know-how around those ... those are the direct intersection of our vision, which is, how do you grow the region’s economy in ways that preserve and enhance your quality of life? Ag, biotech and health care all can be grown and preserve quality of life at the same time. They’re not conflicting.”
Neither do any of them conflict with manufacturing, that old mainstay of the Wisconsin economy—depending on how you define “manufacturing.”
“In some ways manufacturing is not really an economic sector,” Biondi says, but rather a means to an end. “The notion of manufacturing, building things, is not foreign to this model. We’re not looking at a GM, assembly-line model of manufacturing.” Rather, we’re looking at manufacturing of biofuels, medical devices, lab equipment, platform technologies, pharmaceuticals and so on. And the overlaps between the sectors create even more manufacturing opportunities. Biotech and agriculture, for example, overlap “to create a whole new economic sector,” he says, which is where his own company, C5-6 Technologies, exists as it seeks to turn agricultural feedstocks into the kind of sugars that will form the basis of biofuels.
Another set of connections that Thrive hopes to forge will come between cities and counties, and between those cities and counties and the private sector. At September’s World Stem Cell Summit held in Madison, Thrive worked with Madison, Middleton and Fitchburg, and the two big utilities MG&E and Alliant Energy, to put together an impressive presence. The Madison region booth stood alongside presentations from California, Scotland, England, New Jersey and other states and regions.
Putting together a snazzy trade show booth is one thing. It’s quite another, though, to collaborate on real economic growth. One such effort is the nascent Regional Economic Development Professionals Network, a program to pool resources and share wisdom between various local and county officials as well as chambers of commerce. The result is a first-ever set of protocols, shared between Thrive, cities, counties and private groups, on how to deal with new businesses that inquire about locating in a particular location.
“Prior to this effort, we did not have those protocols,” Carbonell says. “The goal is for a company to land in a particular community. If it can’t be in that community, keep it in the county. If it can’t be in that county, keep it in the region.”
Those protocols are developed and in place, but are, like many other Thrive initiatives, so new that they haven’t yet led to a “big get.” Which is OK for now, Carbonell says, since Thrive is very deliberate in its focus on growing existing businesses and helping entrepreneurs here start businesses rather than recruiting businesses from somewhere else.
“If you ask Thrive, how many businesses did you recruit? That’s not the question we’re asking,” he says, using the example of the Growers to Grocers program. “The metric here is, what was the increase in revenue from regionally produced foods? You can measure that from the grower’s side and from the grocer’s side.”
One of the principal challenges is pulling together a region of great geographic and lifestyle diversity without appearing to force counties to bow at the altar of almighty Madison.
“Very clearly we need to market ourselves as a region, and Madison will always be the brand name of that region,” says Madison mayor Dave Cieslewicz.
“If someone from far away asks you where you’re from, you say, ‘the Madison area,’” even if you’re from anywhere within the eight-county region, Carbonell contends. But Mineral Point is as close to Dubuque as it is to Madison, and the eastern reaches of Dodge and Jefferson counties are almost in the Milwaukee suburbs. Plenty of people are ambivalent to bourgeois Madison, and a few might even actively resist the association.
“I don’t know about active resistance,” says Biondi, who lives in rural Iowa County. “Maybe there is, and I just haven’t encountered it. There’s certainly some skepticism that anything like Thrive is going to be very Madison-centric.”
Biondi sees that in his neighbors. “On one side of me I’ve got an ex-dairy farmer and a dairy farmer. Their families have been there all their lives. I would say although one or both of those guys might know of my Thrive connection, it doesn’t mean anything to them. The notion that some economic development group is going to make a difference in their lives is pretty foreign to them.”
But also among his neighbors is a longtime county board member who wants to make the most of a positive relationship with Dane County and an organic farmer working on a cooperative effort similar to Growers to Grocers. Iowa County Board chairman Mark Masters doesn’t see a problem and says if there is one, we need to work through it and drag people along, if necessary.
“There are a lot of strong ties to Madison,” says Masters, whose county is home to Lands’ End, where plenty of Madisonians go to work every day. “We’re exchanging population bases every day.”
Similarly, and perhaps surprisingly, Sauk County is a net importer of workers, says Karna Hanna, executive director of the Sauk County Economic Development Corporation. “It’s not all just about Dane County,” says Hanna, noting that Pierce’s, one of the two groceries participating in the Growers to Grocers pilot, is headquartered in Baraboo.
Thrive chair Biondi sees the potential for a synergy between the city mice and country mice. “We certainly acknowledge the fact that the university is a great engine for creating this intellectual capital. What we’re trying to do is make sure that intellectual capital doesn’t get mired down here in Madison, that it gets spread throughout the region. This movement toward a bio-economy really plays into the ag base that we have in much of the rest of the region. There are a lot of natural forces that will help take some of this intellectual capital and make sure that it gets situated throughout the region and creates jobs throughout the region.”
Two things emerge on which everyone seems to agree: a regional approach is necessary, and it isn’t going to happen overnight. “People, in their habits, are regional,” says Carbonell. “What we’re trying to do is acknowledge that. Let’s make sure our strategies and approaches mirror our own behaviors. You’ll live one place, work in another place, and go for entertainment somewhere else.”
Besides that, says Masters, “boundaries are like sand dunes—always shifting.” A long-term approach must ignore, to some extent, political lines. But even those who’d like things to develop more quickly are showing patience.
“Part of our strategy is that we’re not a recruitment group. We’re not trying to recruit new businesses here,” says Biondi. “We firmly believe that the intellectual capital to build businesses is already here. Our job is to create an environment that takes that intellectual capital and leverages it throughout the region. Fundamentally, that’s an acknowledgment that this is a marathon, not a sprint.”
There’s that phrase again. Cliché or not, though, it’s true; early on in the process, Thrive officials visited a similar group in Denver that had already been at work for thirty years. A truly regional approach, Thrive leaders say, simply takes time. “We’re not out to shrink the focus,” says Biondi. “We’re out to expand the focus. That doesn’t happen in one year or two years. It takes time.”
“Each county brings something different to the table,” says Carbonell, and pooling those resources will, ideally, help everyone—even those farmers with their heads down.
Which leads to the other cliché you run into if you talk about Thrive very much: the rising tide, they say, floats all boats.
And Thrive leadership will probably admit, it’s not they who will rise that tide; it’s the business owners, farmers, researchers and others spread across south-central Wisconsin. It’s the people like Bartlet Durand, whom grocery owner Tim Metcalfe calls a “consensus, bring-them-together kind of guy.” It’s the entrepreneurs who take matters into their own hands, who take the tools that Thrive offers and build something that’ll last.
“It’ll take a few of those kind of guys,” Metcalfe says. “They’re all in it together. They’ll figure it out.”
Robert Chappell is a writer based in Mt. Horeb.
| Madison Magazine - December 2008 |
