Here we are. My first free idea. This one is for the seed industry, and it’s a moneymaker. I call it Foodscaping 101.
Fade in. A movement toward locally grown produce is sweeping the nation, motivated in part by the volume of greenhouse gases released shipping food from where it’s grown to where it’s eaten. Growing locally shortens the distance food travels, shrinking its carbon footprint.
And for those who think a cold winter disproves global warming, remember that those freight costs are passed on to you, the consumer. Without them, food will be cheaper.
You may recall Michelle Obama planting a garden at the White House with local school children. She sets a wonderful example, so why don’t all students have the same opportunity as those attending the school invited to the White House?
Simple. There’s no money. Our school system is borderline bankrupt. Nation-wide, schools are firing teachers and cutting programs, not adding them.
This is where Big Seed saves the day. Seed sellers will donate to schools all necessary supplies to teach a new program: Foodscaping 101.
They’ll even create a website, let’s call it Foodscaping101.org, complete with child-targeting lesson plans and instructional videos on every home gardening topic possible. It will be teachers’ primary teaching tool.
But why does Big Seed care about children? See if you can glean the answer from this story: When I was young boy, I once came home from Sunday school demanding a feather. I needed it to clean the house in preparation for Passover. The very next day, my family switched to a less religious synagogue. The point is: kids are lemmings. I didn’t ask why it had to be a feather because I would have done anything they said.
Teach kids to garden at school, and they will pester their parents to garden at home. That’s why this isn’t a moral endeavor for Big Seed; it’s a sound marketing strategy: teach a boy to garden, then sell him the seeds.
Parents can buy a Starter Farm from Foodscaping101.org, but will they? It’s easy to find out. With the website up, the program’s profitability can be tested with only a handful of schools.
That’s when the media will get wind of it, and the free publicity will close the sale. The debate over private industry’s role in education will ignite. The talking heads will yammer on about the slippery slope to Lucky Strike Middle School. All the while, they’ll be talking about Foodscaping 101. Schools will be begging for their own programs.
So if the government can’t afford to teach our children to garden, I say Big Seed should fill the void. Capitalism will provide.
Until next week,
--
Jonathan Rozen
Hmm, I wonder if there's a collective action problem there - "Big Seed" isn't a single entity, and any seed company that invests resources in your proposal isn't guaranteed to personally reap the returns. Even if the idea is sufficiently lucrative that individual seed companies can expect enough revenue from their share new home garden sales to offset the cost of their investment, why would any one seed company pay up for the investment when they could just do nothing in the hopes that another company will make the same investment and they can just free ride off the increased sales?
ReplyDeleteOne solution is an industry-wide trade organization that would enforce participation by all big seed companies. But it would be difficult to reach an equitable agreement since each company would stand to profit at different levels based on their market share. You could require investments proporitional to market share, but you'd still have a holdout problem, where the last company to sign on to the organization would have an incentive to say, "you know what, guys, I'm gonna pass - you guys go have your little agreement without me and I'll reap the benefits, unless of course you substantially lower my required investment."
Another solution, since this is a market failure, would be to go outside the market, and just have the government finance this and fund it through a tax on big seed. If the whole idea is actually net profitable to big seed, they shouldn't object or lobby too hard against it, since ultimately they stand to gain more in increased sales than they would lose in sales tax.
One last problem you face is that there's probably a lot of overlap between big seed and big agriculture (think of Monsanto, for example). Since you're proposal probably hurts big agriculture more than it profits big seed, big seed's only going to be on board if they're sufficiently indepedent from big agriculture.
Either way, interesting idea.
The opportunity is for Big Seed, but the industry does not need to act collectively for this to work. One seed seller could easily create this program alone (parkseed.com is a good example).
ReplyDeleteIf a collective of seed suppliers is created, suppliers can be assigned schools. That way, individual companies can be given all sales generated from their schools.
It should be difficult for a non-participating seed supplier to profit from this program, if only because orders placed through Foodscaping101.org will only be filled by participating suppliers.