If Corby Kummer says it — and shocks himself by so doing — it must be true. Excerpt:

I started looking into how and why Walmart could be plausibly competing with Whole Foods, and found that its produce-buying had evolved beyond organics, to a virtually unknown program–one that could do more to encourage small and medium-size American farms than any number of well-meaning nonprofits, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign. Not even Fishman, who has been closely tracking Walmart’s sustainability efforts, had heard of it. “They do a lot of good things they don’t talk about,” he offered.
The program, which Walmart calls Heritage Agriculture, will encourage farms within a day’s drive of one of its warehouses to grow crops that now take days to arrive in trucks from states like Florida and California. In many cases the crops once flourished in the places where Walmart is encouraging their revival, but vanished because of Big Agriculture competition.

To his very great credit, Kummer, an apostle of Slow Food, says that after reporting this story, if he had a Wal-mart close to his house, he’d shop there. You really do need to read the piece to see why he reaches that conclusion — and how Wal-mart and its economic model is helping achieve lots of the goals of the Slow Food movement.