Marc Gunther

Ted Turner's Montana Adventure

The highlight of my trip to Montana last weekend was a visit to the Flying D, Ted Turner's ranch. It's a breathtakingly beautiful place, and an interesting one, too, because Turner is raising American bison, protecting the environment and trying (and mostly succeeding) at making money. (Not that he needs it.) Probably having more fun, too, than he did in the last few years at Time Warner. Below is a picture of Russ Miller, who manages Turner's ranches, and a few bison. Yes, he looks a little like Ted. I wrote about Turner's ranch today in my CNNMoney column. Here's how the column began:

Bozeman, Montana --"I don't want to own every ranch," Ted Turner once said. "I just want to own the ranch next door."

This is the kind of thinking that has made Turner, the restless 67-year-old cable television billionaire, the largest private landowner in America. Turner, the former vice chairman of Time Warner, who left the company's board in May, owns 15 ranches in seven states, covering 1.9 million acres. That's 3,000 square miles - bigger than Delaware or Rhode Island.

A visit to one of those ranches - the 113,000-acre Flying D ranch in southwestern Montana - demonstrates that the Turner ranches stand out not only because of their size, but because of the values that drive them.

You can read the the column here.

The 'Story' of Wheat Montana

When Dean Folkvord finished high school in 1978, his father Dale bought a wheat farm near Three Forks, Montana. Their only plan was to sell wheat. Since then, they have built a company Wheat Montana,, that sells wheat, mills flour, bakes bread and operates eight casual restaurants. Their story illustrates how farmers can make a direct connection to consumers, and thereby create an alternative to conventional, commodity agriculture—which isn’t working well in much of the rural west.

The conventional agricultural model still dominates, of course. It’s based on feeding the most people, at the least cost, with commodity products, grown with lots of chemical inputs. It drives down prices paid to farmers, and it’s one reason why Montana is a poor state—45th in the nation in household income.

Folkvord, 46, has blazed a different trail. Wheat Montana, as he explains it, does more than sell wheat, flour and bread—it tells a story, and helps to forge a link between the consumer and the family farm. (A picture of his family adorns Montana Wheat’s bread and flour packages.) Most farmers, when business is good, expand “horizontally” by buying more land. By contrast, Folkvord has expanded “vertically” up the value chain, capturing a bigger share of the prices people pay for food. As a result, his company today employs about 190 people, and provides work for another 100 or so through suppliers and partners.

This past weekend, I’ve been learning a little about agriculture, mining, land use and conservation issues in the west at a conference in beautiful Big Sky, Montana, sponsored by PERC (The Property and Environment Research Center), an NGO that promotes market-based solutions to enviromental problems. Disclosure: PERC paid the expense of reporters who attended the event. More about PERC in a posting later this week.

Folkvord came upon his business model by necessity. He wasn’t making enough money as a wheat farmer in the early 1990s, and so built a bakery. “We really didn’t want to get into the bread business, but we felt it was something we had to do,” he says. The same goes for his first bakery and deli, which he opened, with trepidation, right by the farm; he and his dad figured they’d sell sandwiches to local farmers and ranchers, as well as a few travelers driving by on nearby I-90. “People showed up from Seattle and Minneapolis and they wanted expresso,” he says. “All I knew about expresso was that I didn’t like it,” he says. He ordered expresso machines from Bozeman and learned how to make lattes. “We realized, wow, there’s something going on here and all of a sudden we were in the food business,” he says.

Today, Wheat Montana has eight retail outlets—bakeries and delis—around the state, and Folkvord’s looking to expand to Washington state and eventually California. “It plugs into a trend out there in America where we might be getting tired of fast, fried food and people want foods that’s fresh and good for you,” he says. (Although the popular cinnamon rolls aren’t exactly slimming.) He sells fresh bread in five states, with wheat varieties being his big seller. Wal-Mart’s the biggest seller of his flour. And he ships wheat kernels to specialty bakeries around America, including Spring Mill Bakery near my home in Bethesda, Md.

Interestingly, Folkvord’s products are not organic. His farm gets only about 12 inches of rainfall a year, the growing season is short and it’s at an altitude of more than 5,000 feet. Half his land lays idle each year to replenish the soil, he’s got weed problems and he says it wouildn’t be practical to go organic (although other Montana farmers grow lots of organic wheat). Instead, he has his flour and bread tested by a third-party to make sure they contain no artificial chemical. and markets them as “chemical free,” GMO free and “better than organic.” Yes, there’s some pressure to go organic, but he stands behind the healthfulness of his break and says, “We’re Norwegian and bull-headed and we’re not going to change.”

Recently the Folkvord family sold a big stake in Wheat Montana to outside investors. They are looking for capital and expertise to get national distribution for their products and for the chain of deli. “The Big Sky’s the limit,” says Folkvord. Does this mean they are no longer a family farm? We could argue about the family farm but you can drive to Three Forks and see the wheat fields for yourself. Just try to find the ‘farm’ where Pepperidge Farm grows its wheat.

Revolution Foods

Childhood obesity's a serious problem. One in three children and adolescents in America are either obese or at serious risk of becoming obese, according to a new report from the Institute of Medicine. Like most big problems, this one creates a business opportunity. Which is where Revolution Foods comes in.

A northern California startup, Revolution Foods provides healthy food for school lunches and nutrition education to four charter schools serving poor children in Oakland, Ca. The business is the brainchild of Kristin Groos Richmond, a 31-year-old newly-minted MBA from Berkeley who spent her last year of business school writing a business plan, forging a strategic partnership with Whole Foods and running a 10-week pilot program at a local school. Kristin and co-founder Kirsten Tobey, another Berkeley MBA, secured startup funding from the Bay Area Equity Fund, a venture capital fund managed by J.P. Morgan, that "seeks to invest in companies that can deliver market-rate venture capital returns while enabling social and environmental improvement in the San Francisco Bay Area's low and moderate income neighborhoods."

Although Revolution Foods is just getting started, Kristin's excited by what she's seen. By email, she says, "We've had great results so far with parents, teachers, and kids writing in about the healthier, mostly organic foods we are offering each day. Everything is fresh and seasonal."

Interestingly, both Kristin and Kirsten worked for NGOs -- Kristin helped start a school in East Africa, Kirsten worked at Earthjustice and a UN hunger program -- before going to b-school and becoming social enterpreneurs. Now they're running a company with a powerful idea behind it. They're part of a new wave of socially conscious MBAs who, I believe, are going to rock the world of business in the years ahead.

Can fast food be 'good' food?

I've always enjoyed eating at Chipotle, but only after hearing a radio ad mentioning "sustainable agriculture" did I learn that this was a different kind of fast food chain. Turns out that founder and CEO Steve Ells is a classically-trained chef with big ambitions, not just for his business but for a revolution in American agriculture. So I wrote about Chipotle today in my CNNMoney column.

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- People have integrity. Good companies operate with integrity. But can food possess integrity?

Absolutely, says Steve Ells, the founder and chief executive of Chipotle Mexican Grill, the rapidly expanding fast-food chain.

"Food with integrity," Ells says, "is driving our growth and profitability."

McBlogging

When I wrote a long story about McDonald’s and corporate responsibility for FORTUNE in 2003, my colleague at the time, Joe Nocera, said that the most responsible thing for McDonald’s to do would be to shut down. He was kidding, but he was expressing a view of Mickey D’s shared by liberal elites. What other U.S. corporation has been the target of two Hollywood movies in recent years—Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me and Fox Searchlight’s upcoming Fast Food Nation?

The truth is, McDonald’s takes CSR seriously. It offers healthy choices in its restaurants, has worked with environmentalists for more than a decade around issues ranging from packaging to sustainable fisheries, does lots of charitable work, etc. The company is far from perfect—there’s a raging and very complicated controversy about its ties to exploited migrant workers who pick tomatoes in Florida, and giving away Hummer toys in Happy Meals isn’t exactly green practice. But there’s no doubt in my mind that Bob Langert, who runs the corporate responsibility operation at McDonald's, is one of the people inside corporate America who is changing things for the better.

Bob and a colleague, Catherine Adams, have been writing a blog for McDonald’s, and it’s worth a look. It’s an effort by the company to be more transparent and open. Some of what Bob writes strikes me as spin—he defends the Hummer giveaway by saying it’s just a toy—but he also offers insight into the tensions that face a company that’s trying to change its business to meet the rising expectations of consumers and critics. Fitting the blog-writing into his schedule isn’t easy, Bob tells me via email, but he says he’s enjoying the writing.

I am always thinking about my next blog, and the next one. I wish we had more comments, more dialogue, but there is a fair amount of blog activity outside my own blog on what I write, so I think that is good.

Corporate blogging's catching on. I think that before too long, any company that wants to connect with its many stakeholders will have one. The challenge will be to make them authentic--and not just spin.

The Small Mart Revolution

My CNN Money column this week was prompted by Michael Shuman's new book, The Small-Mart Revolution, which is about small companies that are joining forces to challenge big business, with the help of consumers, community groups and national nonprofits like BALLE. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Shuman is a smart guy whose politics can't be pigeonholed. He has worked in the trenches, helping to promote local community development in Maine and western New York.

I'd love to visit Bellingham, Washington, where a local network called Sustainable Connections is thriving. Here's picture of their Harvest Dinner, where hundreds of townspeople get together to enjoy all-local, fresh food. (Click on it and you'll see everyone eating apples!) Food and energy are two industries that could be dramatically "localized," Shuman says.

Nevertheless, I'm not persuaded by Shuman's argument that small businesses are always, or almost always, better for the world than chain stores or big companies. I am, for example, writing this post from a Starbucks in Washington, D.C. Good coffee, good Internet connection, good employer, good practices in buying coffee beans from the global south.

Of course, I couldn't agree more with Shuman's broader point--that we should use our power as consumers, workers and investors to change business for the better. You can read the column here.

Is Family Farming the New Bubble?

Most of us have a soft spot in our hearts for the family farm. Whenever I drive past a roadside farm stand, I'm tempted to stop. Lately, I've been buying more fruits and vegetables at farmers' markets, and next year I plan to become part of a CSA--a community-supported agriculture project that links a group of buyers to a local farm.

It turns out that lots of people are buying more local food. As North Carolina farmer and writer Tom Philpott reports in Grist, an online environmental magazine, the number of farmers' markets has grown by 79% in the last eight years. Community supported agriculture is also booming.

Supermarkets are taking notice. My local Whole Foods now showcases corn and peaches from Maryland and Virginia farms. Even Wal-Mart is talking about reducing "food-miles"--it makes no sense for a supercenter in Ohio to buy peaches from Georgia, when lots of great peaches are locally grown. As Philpott writes, "the phrase 'local is the new organic' has become commonplace."

That's the good news. The bad news is that small farms are losing money, despite the growth of farmers markets and CSAs. Philpott writes:

Aside from the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, I can think of no great boom in American history built more on enthusiasm, and less on profit.

You can read the rest of his column here. Grist, by the way, is a fun read--not something you hear often about environmental websites.

Good food

I've eaten in a number of fine restaurants and some good hotels this summer, but the best meals I had came from elsewhere. While reporting on Wal-Mart and sustainable fishing in Alaska, I enjoyed a sockeye salmon that had been caught a few hours earlier and grilled by the crew of a fishing boat in Kodiak Bay. During a weekend of hiking in Vermont, my daughter, Sarah, and I stopped at a farmer's market and bought some freshly-made goat cheese, fresh-baked bread and a just picked local tomato that made up a fabulous lunch, eaten atop Bromley Mountain. And last week, a friend gave me his weekly share of the produce of a local farmer--tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, basil, yellow squash and some other vegetables--that became a pasta and vegetable dinner. What all these meals had in common, besides the fact that they were fresh and delicious, was their transparency--it was easy to connect dinner to the farm, or the fishing boat.

These meals came to mind because I've just finished The Omivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan. It's one of the most eye-opening, thought-provoking books that I've read in years. Pollan begins with a simple question: What should we have for dinner? He explores the possibilities in more than 400 immensely satisfying pages. One of the many keen observations in the book is this--mass industrial agriculture, among its other problems, leaves us profoundly disconnected from the people and places that produce our food. (Often for good reason, as Pollan's visits to a corn farm and cattle ranch reveal.) "In the industrial food economy," he writes, "virtually the only information that travels along the food chain linking producer and consumer is price." Read this book--you won't regret it. I hope to return to the topic of good food in this blog, and in my writing at CNNMoney.