Just listened to a very informative annual member meeting presented by the leadership of our national farmers market advocate, the Farmers Market Coalition as they shared the work done over the last year, outlined priorities for 2014/2015 and answered questions from the membership.
Here is the link to the recording of the meeting:
LINK
If you are not a member of this excellent organization, do consider it: everyone can be members, not just farmers market organizations:
Join here
In case some of us forget from time to time that what we are fighting for is local sovereignty in order to save, rebuild or create our own healthy systems, and that environmental justice MUST be included into our scope of work, this may help:
COME HELL OR HIGH WATER: The Battle for Turkey Creek – TRAILER (1 MIN.) from Leah on Vimeo.
Derrick often recites a warning that his mother gave him when he began fighting to protect his community of Turkey Creek: “There might not be any bottom to this.” A dozen years later, her words hold special meaning for both of us. My film documents what seems like an unrelenting assault on this historic African American community on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, and it continues to this day. When I began filming, the precious place of Derrick’s childhood memories and family oral history was being overrun by urban sprawl, and then came Hurricane Katrina, and then the BP oil disaster.
SIGN UP to host a screening on April 29th or within 30 days following the premiere broadcast.
ACCESS THE FILM by finding your broadcast on a local station, or watch when it streams for free online through American ReFramed. If you are streaming it online, be sure to test your connection.
I found as good description as any of governance in the column linked below:
“.. “managing, steering and guiding of public affairs by governing procedures and institutions in a democratic manner’…
And it shows partly why, within markets, the tension between the entrepreneurial activity and the public good role of markets is exactly why collaborative processes are necessary (italics added):
“These include the diverse goals, priorities, and values of the members of the chain, networks across sectors and scales, power relationships among many different players in the chains, and other factors. There also must be flexibility in order to negotiate accommodations to different priorities. In order to enhance their viability, new and established food supply chains need to think about utilizing open governance processes as they start up and scale up.
These are also called reflexive processes, in which people engage to discuss tensions regarding group objectives, recognize contradictions, and deal with differences in a respectful way (see DuPuis &Goodman, 2005; Hassanein…”
I look forward to this measurement workshop, which I plan on attending. It is open to the public and the cost is very reasonable, so anyone in the Baltimore area might want to join or look at their other opportunities. I am currently involved in a few evaluation projects, at implementation (market) level and at the creation level-at least one with the Farmers Market Coalition. I hope to announce another of those projects soon on this blog (meaning as soon as the funder is ready to announce!). In the meantime, I hope many of you saw the announcement we made about the FMC/Knight Foundation Farmers Market Metrics Prototype project which is rolling merrily along:
Agrarian Reform
Defense of territory
Agro-ecology
Local food systems
“World-wide, peasants, pastoralists, fisher-folk and other small-scale food producers
provide some 70% percent of the food consumed by humanity, even though we
probably only hold a quarter of all farm land. In Africa, we women farmers do about
70% of farm work, and we grow about 80% of the food. Peasants, and especially
peasant women, feed today’s world”
viacampesina.org/downloads/pdf/en/Elizabeth-The Hague-ISS-25 January 2014.pdf.
A bow to the hardworking people working on school lunch programs across America that made this top 10: Chef Ann Cooper, Alice Waters/Edible Schoolyard Project,and my pal Donna Cavato (along with April Neujean!) who fought mightily to create the New Orleans version right after Katrina, and the many other unsung heroes working to reconfigure this beast in systems large and small, public and private.
10 Best School Lunches in America (Slideshow) | Slideshow | The Daily Meal.
“The glitches in North Carolina mark another example of government technology gone awry, turning a program created to sustain millions of people through hard times into a new aggravation. The high-profile failure of the federal health care exchange last fall illustrated what many low-income people have encountered for years: faulty computer systems and websites that prevent them from receiving public assistance on time.
In North Carolina, the fix was simple: In August, caseworkers found that their computers stopped crashing if they switched browsers from Internet Explorer to Google Chrome.
But the backlog kept growing. By the end of last year, more than 30,000 families in North Carolina had waited more than a month to receive food stamps — a violation of federal rules that require routine applications be processed within 30 days. About one third of those families had waited three months or more.”
How A Government Computer Glitch Forced Thousands Of Families To Go Hungry.
Recently, I was working on a piece for The Nature of Cities blog, and wanted to re-read something that Wendell Berry had said about the agrarian culture; I found the 2002 Orion Magazine essay in which he reflects on the 25th year of publication of The Unsettling of America. I think the paragraph below is enormously descriptive of the tension that those of us involved in creating an alternative agrarian world work and live in:
To the corporate and political and academic servants of global industrialism, the small family farm and the small farming community are not known, not imaginable, and therefore unthinkable, except as damaging stereotypes. The people of “the cutting edge” in science, business, education, and politics have no patience with the local love, local loyalty, and local knowledge that make people truly native to their places and therefore good caretakers of their places. This is why one of the primary principles in industrialism has always been to get the worker away from home. From the beginning it has been destructive of home employment and home economies. The economic function of the household has been increasingly the consumption of purchased goods. Under industrialism, the farm too has become increasingly consumptive, and farms fail as the costs of consumption overpower the income from production.
I might recommend that some of you utilize these suggestions within your market or grassroots food community efforts. Often, these type of collaborative public space efforts can extend the food community vibe into new arenas and into becoming a “beloved institution” beyond the hours of the bell or the garden fence.
A well done piece by a former farmers market manager and constant supporter of farms about the evolution of markets and healthy food alternatives.
In January 2011, when the Farm to Plate Strategic Plan was released, an economic analysis indicated that with every five percent increase in food production in the state, 1,700 new jobs would be created. Goal #1 of the Farm to Plate Strategic Plan is to increase Vermonters’ local food consumption from five to ten percent over ten years.
Love the article linked below; it’s an overview of incentives given to business to encourage healthy behaviors. For those of you that have heard my spiel on how the 1970s emergence of the farmers markets movement has focused on incentivizing behavior changes of all kinds with buying rewards (frequent shopper cards, raffles/giveaways), added social interaction (music or entertainment), knowledge increase (cooking demos) and so on you might see how the most recent addition of cash incentives for low-income citizens to find their way to us is simply another example of that strategy.
This article shows that many businesses are using the same strategy when adding benefits to their community and therefore, markets should see that they stand proudly as innovative leaders in incentivizing good health and wealth. AND markets should use this strategy in as many ways as they can to continue to increase everyone’s changes, including vendors, neighbors, and shoppers in every socioeconomic strata.
Giving Business the Incentive to Promote Healthy Lifestyles | Community Commons.
Here is a link to an excerpt on the politics of credit card systems. It illuminates how startups companies wanting to provide services face difficulties, including this:
Two pieces in the chain are particularly vulnerable to disruption: the makers of the actual hardware — basically card readers and registers — that are used to physically accept card payments at stores, and the hundreds of vendors known as merchant service providers, or MSPs, which set businesses up to accept credit cards.
The entire article (unfortunately you must pay to get it) speaks to some of the issues we are facing with MobileMarket et al in expanding technology to lower capacity markets and farmers. It also shows the need for the food movement to embed knowledge on card and currency issues so that we stay ahead or at least on the curve of changes, rather than being pawns of the very small set of multi-national players in technology and card processing. If, like me, you accessed the entire article (or others like it) and want to have a conversation, I’m interested in talking about these issues in more depth. Feel free to contact me…
Credit Card Payments Market Competition 2 – Business Insider.
an excerpt from another article on the subject raises many of the same questions:
“…with the global roll-out of mobile payment services comes uncertainty for both banks and consumers, and this is evident in the lack of standardization in mobile payments technology. Financial institutions are facing a major dilemma. When planning mobile payment services, they need to select one of the available technologies in the hope that it will become the dominant standard, or they risk being left behind.”
Helping Farmers Markets Grow 