Whole Foods pledges greater support of small farms
Whole Foods supports local farms

WASHINGTON, June 30 (Reuters) - The CEO of supermarket chain Whole Foods Market Inc. (WFMI.O: Quote, Profile, Research), responding to a critic in an online war of words, has pledged to add $10 million to his company's annual budget for supporting locally grown food.

John Mackey, who co-founded the chain that has fueled organic foods' popularity in the United States, said it would make long-term, low-interest loans to small farms, especially producers of grass-fed beef and organic pasture-based eggs.

"We believe this financial assistance of $10 million per year can make a very significant difference in helping local agriculture grow and flourish across the United States and in parts of Canada and the UK as well," Mackey wrote in a letter posted on the Austin, Texas-based company's Web site on Thursday.

Mackey said some Whole Foods outlets would use parts of their parking lots on Sundays to host open-air markets for nearby farms and would redouble efforts to buy from local producers.
The letter was part of a public argument with Michael Pollan, a food writer who recently published "The Omnivore's Dilemma."

Pollan, a professor at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, has said Whole Foods has sacrificed some of the ideals of organic farming while boosting the industry. The Web site also posted Pollan's original letter to Mackey.

"After visiting a great many large organic farms to research my book, many of them your suppliers, it seems to me undeniable that organic agriculture has industrialized over the past few years, and that Whole Foods has played a part in that process -- for good and for ill," Pollan wrote.

Mackey responded that 22 percent of the food Whole Foods sells comes from large corporate farms and that it does business with more than 2,400 independent farms.