Abundant Montana’s Local Food Club encourages members to track homegrown, foraged, and hunted food as part of their pledge to source 33 percent of their household food locally by 2033.
Abundant Montana’s Local Food Initiative Is Rolling Up Its Sleeves
By 2033, Abundant Montana wants one out of every three bites Montanans take to come from Montana soil. It’s an ambitious goal for a state that currently produces only 3 percent of its own food supply, but Executive Director Robin Kelson insists it’s not a pipe dream.
“This isn’t rocket science,” she says. “It’s just rolling up our sleeves and getting the job done.”
Walk into any grocery store in Montana and look around. With only a few exceptions, nearly everything on the shelves traveled hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles to get there. This isn’t because ranchers and farmers aren’t working hard to produce; it’s because of the way the food system is structured. A prime example is that as much as 98 percent of beef raised in Montana gets exported as live animals and is processed out of state. Unless you’re shopping direct-to-consumer or at a local co-op or farmers market, the produce is often grown in California or out of the country. In a state famous for its ranches and wide-open land, Montanans are eating less of their own food than ever before.
It hasn’t always been this way. In 1950, Montana produced 70 percent of the food Montanans consumed, according to a 2022 report produced by Missoula-based consulting firm Highland Economics for the Grow Montana Food Policy Coalition.
“As the interstate highway system made importing food into Montana easier and federal policies encouraged Montana farmers and ranchers to grow food for export—‘to feed the world’—Montana lost a lot of the processing infrastructure and knowledge that allows us to feed ourselves,” Kelson says. That infrastructure includes flour mills and meat processing facilities that were once readily accessible to most communities. “Getting to 33 percent by 2033 is really about solving the pinch points, because if we can rebuild the infrastructure and make it to 33 percent, we can increase our ability to be food self-reliant.”
“As the interstate highway system made importing food into Montana easier and federal policies encouraged Montana farmers and ranchers to grow food for export—‘to feed the world’—Montana lost a lot of the processing infrastructure and knowledge that allows us to feed ourselves.” —Robin Kelson, Abundant Montana
Kelson says all of this work was inspired in large part due to the disruption in the food system from the COVID pandemic, particularly in rural communities’ reliable access to food within the state. “The commitment is to really make ourselves resilient to the next disruption and build our ability to be self-reliant.”
Abundant Montana, a nonprofit based in Helena originally known as Alternative Energy Resources Organization (or AERO), has spent the last 30 years developing strong partnerships within the statewide food industry, and a year ago last December they launched the 33×33 Initiative as an effort to help Montanans achieve that 33 percent goal of Montana foods on Montana plates, a concept inspired by work being done by the New England Food System Planners Partnership.
Sammie McGowan, the director of communications and marketing at Abundant Montana, says the state is in a unique position to achieve the 33×33 goal. “Montana is a unicorn because of the large size of our state and therefore the availability of land and our relatively low population.”
The estimation that only 3 percent of the food Montanans eat was grown here comes from that same 2022 report produced by Highland Economics. Kelson says the report also determined that we only need 29,000 more acres of farmland to grow enough vegetables and fruits to cover the state’s production needs.
With the exception of co-ops and local grocers, much of the produce and meat on Montana’s grocery store shelves has traveled from outside of the state to get there. Abundant Montana aims to increase local food availability in large retailers, addressing what it calls the “convenience barrier” for consumers. The state needs only 29,000 additional acres of farmland to grow enough fruits and vegetables to meet production needs, but distribution and marketing challenges remain significant barriers for small-scale growers.
“We have it,” she says. “We just have to allocate it, and there are lots of ways to get to that 29,000. It’s not complicated, really. We, as a state and as the citizens of a state working on the 33×33 problem, need to help solve the marketing and distribution issues so that it isn’t all on a small farmer who’s growing fruits and vegetables to figure out how to distribute that food and get it into markets elsewhere in the state.”
Kelson says the barriers both consumers and producers are facing include everything from messaging by corporate marketing and the government that tells us “the best food is the cheapest food,” to the structure of our supply chains.
Another issue is access, McGowan adds. “Everyone gets all of their food in one place. If local food is not available in large grocery stores, which right now it pretty much isn’t, [then] it’s the convenience barrier.”
Pile all of that on top of the high cost of land in the state, and it’s no wonder that producers are struggling to increase their output. Based on 2022 data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, released in February 2024, Montana lost 2,782 farms between 2017 and 2022. “One thing I’ve learned is it’s not a one size fits all, as much as I’d really like it to be,” Kelson says. “So, it’s different in different regions of the state, as you might imagine.”
Abundant Montana hopes to dig into some of the barriers on October 23–24, when representatives from different food sectors will come to the table at the Third Governor’s Summit on Local Food & Agriculture to create a roadmap for the next seven years. Among the attendees, Kelson hopes to see producers, consumers, and members of the education, supply chain, and healthcare trades, to name a few. The goal is to bring together leaders from across these different sectors, all of whom are involved in
Montana’s food supply chain, to identify the barriers and find collaborative ways to solve them.
For individual Montanans wanting to participate in the 33×33 Initiative, Abundant Montana launched the Local Food Club last October. Members can join any time and pledge to work toward getting 33 percent of their household food from local sources, whether that’s purchased, grown, or hunted. The club currently has around 150 members who receive monthly emails with themed challenges, resources, and tracking tools to help them report on their progress.
McGowan says there is another piece to all of this that is not measurable and often isn’t discussed or acknowledged: It’s that knowing who grew your food, or growing your own food, is deeply satisfying.
“The joy and the practice of cooking and growing your own food is also something that people should consider,” she says. “It’s really lovely. To know the people who grow your food … you can’t really explain how powerful that is.”
For more information about Abundant Montana and its 33×33 Initiative, to sign up for the Local Food Club, or to learn about the Third Governor’s Summit on Local Food & Agriculture, visit abundantmontana.com/33×33.
