Bob Comis operates Stony Brook Farm in Schoharie New York where he and his wife pasture raise heritage breed pigs, lamb, goat and poultry. In his posts, Bob shares his thoughts on farming, regional food systems, and how it all could be better and different.

I noticed this morning that Megan McArdle at the Atlantic picked up my piece on regionalism. By calling me an “artisanal farmer” — without knowing, by the way, anything about me or my farming at all — she has raised an interesting question for me — In the lexicon of the local farm and food systems movement, where does artisanal end? Does it end somewhere long before production agriculture begins? If so, what is there at its end? Is artisanal a matter of style, technique, method, or culture, or is it simply a matter of scale, or simply of distribution?

I suspect to an ardent locavore, artisanal falls under a number of evaluative categories. In the local foods movement, so it seems to me, we have a prejudice for small, stylish (pastured, heritage, heirloom, micro-, etc.), culturally self-reflexive farms that, by definition market “locally,” however locally is defined.

Now that I raise 450 pigs per year, with plans to go up as high as 750 pigs, am I still an “artisanal farmer?” Is Jude Becker, of Becker Lane Organic Farm, who raises 6000 pigs per year, finishing batches of them on acorns for La Quercia hams, an “artisanal farmer” by right of the “craft” of his finishing technique? La Quercia claims to make “artisan cured meats…. Seeking out the best possible ingredients, produced responsibly…” (emphasis added). Is this “produced responsibly” the mark of the artisanal farmer? If a family owned and operated, well-managed factory farm is operated responsibly, does that make it an artisanal farm? Certainly not to the locavore, considering the uncertain (or very certain) radius of its distribution, its un-stylishness, and its commodified, presumably non-self-reflexive culture.

To that ardent locavore then, my farm and its 450 pigs fails the small test — I know this because in my arguments for scaled up local (regional) farms, I have been accused of “industrializing pasture based farming” and of arguing for the creation of “pasture-based CAFOs” — which would suggest that my farm, because of its scale, in spite of the fact that it is stylish and culturally self-reflexive, is not an artisanal farm.

If not, then what is it? Bracketing out the criticisms just mentioned above, which are extreme examples, most locavores, I suspect, while perhaps slightly troubled by it, would not lump my scaled up pasture based farm in with factory farms/industrial farms/production agriculture (take your pick, each one has its more or less pejorative connotations). They would, I suspect, drop me somewhere in the middle, in between artisan and factory, a middle, by the way that I am happy to inhabit — this middle, after all, being the middle way I hope we are able to cultivate through the creation of (local-)regional farm and food systems infrastructures.

But, what if I tell that locavore that I put my pigs in the oak woods every fall, finishing them on acorns? Or that I very carefully and meticulously plant pasture crops that I have chosen for the eating qualities that they add to the pork? Do these craft-based choices rescue my farm? Do they bring it back within the fold of the artisanal? Is scale definitive?

What if, instead of imagining what this hypothetical locavore thinks, I ask what I, myself, think about this question of the end of the artisanal farmer, I being, after all, the only person whose thoughts I have privileged access to?

I say simply that I think artisanal ends at the beginning of rich progress in the creation of (local-)regional farm and food systems, and that what is there at its end is a robust, durable, broad farm and food system capable of providing vast quantities of “ethically” and “sustainably” grown and raised food at prices more expensive, but more reasonably expensive, than industrial to a significant percentage of the population.

Artisanal farming is niche farming, and I do not want to remain a niche farmer. Although I should add that there is nothing wrong with niche farming or niche farmers, except that niches do not populations feed.

While I do hope that there is craft and not just a little bit of artistry on my farm and in my farming style and culture, I also hope that by its scale and its intent my farm is able to leap outside of the artisanal category, landing, as above, somewhere in the middle, well before production agriculture, and well after artisanal.

So, finally, what is at the end of artisanal farming? The future.