Wherever in Santa Barbara County you reside, chances are you love where you live.

Any drive from town to town, be it Lompoc to Santa Ynez, Santa Maria to New Cuyama, or Guadalupe to Santa Barbara, will bring you mountain ranges, river valleys, coastal sunsets, stunning terrain and epic sunsets, complete with year-round near-perfect weather.

Another aspect of most drives around our area will have one passing by what may seem like endless agricultural fields growing an astounding variety of crops.

Along with its amazing beauty, Santa Barbara County is a major player in food production.

In 2023, Santa Barbara ranked second out of California’s 58 counties for growth and sales of broccoli and strawberries, and 12th in the state for overall agricultural production, putting out crops valued at $1.8 billion.

Our Golden State growers provide one third of the nation’s vegetables and more than three-quarters of its fruits and nuts.

California’s nearly 80,000 growers, which are less than 4% of total farms in the United States, produce enough to represent a whopping 13% of the entire country’s total agricultural production.

We really got it growing on around here.

While thousands of us drive past this abundance daily, how many of us know where the food we eat — whether out or at home — comes from?

How does a savvy shopper concerned with eating healthy and combating climate change make an informed choice they can feel good about?

One oversimplified “solution” I have espoused is to Eat Local!

Wikipedia defines local food as food that is produced within a short distance of where it is consumed, often accompanied by a social structure and supply chain different from the large-scale supermarket system.

Simple, right? Not so much.

When we dig for a deeper understanding, try to filter out the virtue signaling and look through a lens of equitable access and actual impacts, the definition gets more layered and not nearly so black and white.

Richard Kipling, in a recent article, “What is Local Food and Why Does it Matter,” for the Sustainable Food Trust, excellently summarizes the nuance that exists within this complex system.

Simply reducing the number of miles our food travels may not have the drastic effect previously believed.

Food production is responsible for one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. So it is a natural assumption that reducing the distance it travels will have great impact, and indeed, transport does lead to emissions.

However, recent studies show that “eating locally would only have a significant impact if transport was responsible for a large share of food’s final carbon footprint. For most foods, this is not the case.”

Many other factors contribute to significant greenhouse gas emissions in our food’s actual production, with the current consensus supporting that the kinds of food we eat and how they are grown should be of equal or greater consideration than just where they are grown and how far they travel.

The amount of resources expended to grow the food is of great impact.

Intensified agricultural production degrades soils and ecosystems, driving down the productive capacity of land and necessitating even more intensive food production to keep pace with demand.

The cost of resource investment needed to produce food varies significantly, as well.

Picture the time and resources (land, feed, water, etc.) needed to raise cattle for beef production versus keeping chickens for eggs.

Compare the resources needed for raising delicate raspberries in a temperature-controlled greenhouse in the winter versus harvesting within their natural warmer (albeit shorter) growing season.

As a society, we have grown so accustomed to having nearly any food at our fingertips any day of the year. The global food system was built to accommodate this convenience, with often little regard to the impacts.

A truth many of us may find surprising is that while an average grocery store may have food from local growers, there is a strong possibility that that food has commuted much farther than we do before it was placed on those shelves, even if it was grown down the street.

Often, food is harvested, packed onto a truck and driven to a local processing facility where it is then packaged, cooled and treated to extend freshness, slow ripening and inhibit sprouting.

From processing it is often then trucked to another larger processing facility (from Santa Barbara County to Los Angeles or Long Beach, most commonly), where it is transferred to its retail destinations supply chain.

From here that can mean being loaded onto a shipping truck bound to Indiana, a container destined for international flight or cargo ship transport, or a grocery store truck headed right back to the 805.

Transporting ingredients and food products accounts for nearly one-fifth of all carbon emissions in the food system — a much bigger slice of the emissions pie than previously thought, according to the first comprehensive estimate of the industry’s global carbon footprint by the Ratio Institute.

Last year, the Farmers Market Coalition stated that in 2023 an everyday piece of produce purchased in a grocery store travels an average of 1,500 miles within the United States.

This extensive supply chain has developed to ship the food all over the world in order to meet consumer demand for fresh produce on every continent.

People in the Midwest, where summer is too hot and winter too cold to grow strawberries, regularly enjoy the delicious berries grown year-round in Santa Barbara County.

Canada and Mexico are the top two countries to which our county exports goods, receiving 11,438 tons of cucumbers and 7,097 tons of lettuce in 2023, respectively.

This shipping across our continent may come as no surprise, but did you know that the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — more than 8,000 miles away — are also in the top five exports in tons shipped?

More than 90 million pounds of agricultural goods were shipped around the world last year alone, just from Santa Barbara County growers. Ours is truly a significant player in our global food system.

This massive food system tends to operate the same whether that food is destined to board a plane to the Middle East or be sold at an average retail chain grocery store.

The global food chain is necessary; we do not begrudge the Canadians their cucumbers, nor the Kuwaitis their berries.

Most places are not as perfectly suited to agriculture as the Central Coast but still deserve nutritious abundance and variety.

But the global food chain is fallible. In Santa Barbara County, we have directly witnessed this.

In 2018, after the deadly Montecito flash flooding and debris flows closed Highway 101, transport trucks were unable to make standard deliveries, resulting in empty shelves at grocery stores.

Two years later, the COVID-19 pandemic brought catastrophe to the food supply chain at every level.

Farmers growing thousands of tons of produce to fill orders from every level of business, from processing facilities to school districts and food retailers, had contracts canceled.

Faced with a total loss and no other options to sell their product or even the possibility of getting it shipped elsewhere, millions of pounds of food rotted in fields.

What does all this mean for us, the general population that lives down the street or over the hill from those verdant fields?

It means we have options — so many, in fact, that choosing can feel overwhelming.

• We have a plethora of grocery stores of every size, from Costco to Whole Foods to your neighborhood carniceria.
• We have a respectable amount of farmers markets with hundreds of farmers selling direct to consumers. One is available somewhere in Santa Barbara County nearly every day of the week, with many communities working to add more in the North County.
• We have wonderful farm stands on many roadsides, farms selling community supported agriculture subscriptions (CSAs) and offering delivery.
• We have an elite selection of restaurants whose chefs recognize, celebrate and do utterly magical things with locally grown produce.
• We have an abundance of local food.

Considering all of these things, I will ask again: How does a savvy shopper concerned with eating healthy and combating climate change make an informed choice he or she can feel good about?

• We can empower ourselves to make informed choices. There is food available to us that does not participate in the global food system.
• We can lessen our reliance on and participation in the larger food system just by choosing food that hasn’t traveled a great distance.
• We can lessen our food’s resource usage even further by then shopping with growers that are using sustainable land management, responsible water usage, minimal packaging and, in general, working toward reducing negative environmental impacts like biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions, nonrenewable energy use and single-use plastic consumption.
• Cutting back on meat consumption and sourcing it from responsible stewards of animals and land is also a choice that can reduce negative impacts.

On a hyperlocal level — where we at Lompoc’s Route One Farmers Market focus — we have the potential to strengthen our local food economy and develop a local food system that can operate completely outside of the global food system.

By investing in and maintaining the local food solutions Route One has built, we create capacity and empower our community to have the freedom to make the local, sustainable choice the easy choice.

This will have great health, economic and potentially lifesaving benefits to citizens of the Lompoc Valley and be a roadmap to other communities looking to build a sustainable future and do the same.

When our community chooses to support local farmers, food businesses, farmers markets, CSAs, et al., the investment empowers us to continue this important work and makes all the difference in our ability to innovate with careful consideration to local needs and continue to serve our community.

While so much of the food grown here may be consumed elsewhere, we are lucky enough to live in this beautiful and abundant land and have the power to make choices that support our diverse and growing local food system.

I challenge you to add something locally grown to your plate this week, and maybe I’ll see you at the farmers market.