H-515, the Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets housekeeping bill, made it legal for farmers to facilitate on-farm slaughter, but not conduct it themselves. The limitations – and wording – of the rule are causing some frustration and confusion.
On-Farm Slaughter May Be Legal, But It's Complicated | Vermont Public Radio.
Sustainability is the balance of the positive and negative environmental, social and economic demands in any sector and across sectors. In the food work we do, regional systems have a better chance to address them together and yet we spend little time defining those demands. In that framework, local food systems by themselves can grow overly ‘muscular” and crowd out others nearby or focus on demand more than supply (or vice versa) or spend too much energy fighting to build systems for every process that could be shared instead.
In that important work, this blogger wrote a very good piece about the regional and sustainable approach to food that is worthwhile to share:
Those of us in rural areas – rich in agricultural resources – thus have an inescapable responsibility. As we do the necessary work of helping to overhaul the food system, we must consider what part we can play in feeding the populations of places like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. While it is surely tempting (and so much simpler) to focus inwardly and exclusively on how to feed merely ourselves, that is not, in the end, the way to build a better food system. It is essential to be actively promoting and supporting our local farm economies – and, at the same, we need to thinking more broadly.
Resiliency
There’s another strong reason why we need to think regionally as well as locally, one that undermines the notion that it would even be possible for any one town or small state to securely depend on its own agricultural resources. It has to do with things like weather and pests – those unavoidable factors that make farming inevitably risky and unpredictable. Factors which also threaten to make farming even more unpredictable as a result of climate change.
The Nature Conservancy is working to restore Half Moon Reef, an underwater oyster colony in the heart of Matagorda Bay, which is one of the most productive fisheries for blue crabs, oysters and shrimp in Texas.
The 45-acre Half Moon Reef will be the Conservancy’s first reef constructed from the ground up.
Goats for grazing is a super idea for the many open, untended sites we have in New Orleans and throughout the U.S. This is a simple fundraising idea for an New Orleans entrepreneur that wants to use goats to graze public and private green space. She has already been contracted to use goats on a park in the city (Brechtel Park) starting in 2014 and needs support to get her business prepared for the work ahead.
I see she also sees this as public art, which I’d have to hear more about to understand I guess, but the goat grazing is by itself an idea that I can certainly support. Maybe you can too?
…To comment further on the public art point, I’d rather this be seen chiefly as a serious farming and open space issue that helps urban people see that livestock can safely serve many roles in the larger natural survival loop, even in our ordered urban environment.
Be forewarned-if you know me, you are going to hear and see excerpts from this link many, many times in the future. An articulate and necessary interview with Mary Berry of the Berry Center (yes, daughter of our agrarian apostle* Wendell Berry) on the shortcomings (or pitfalls if you prefer) of our good food work so far. I think all of her points are spot on and all have potential actions to take to push forward.
In These Times
*Don’t worry-The term “apostle” is used here in the Classical Greek context of messenger. No idle idolatry intended.
YES.
I think this “less waste and more uses” of local food is exactly what it will take for a small store to re-imagine itself as a source of healthy food. To simply move itself into local sourcing through distributors is not going to be enough. Stores like the Saxapahaw grocery outside of Raleigh Durham are also taking the closed loop seriously and combining gourmet takeout and diverse food stuffs with nearby local sourcing so that even the scraps go back to the animals and compost heaps that supply their store.
I’m still not sure the business plan is completely figured out, but it will certainly help these stores bottom lines to be more waste conscious and to build nearby farms and cottage industries to supply their shelves.
A Grocery Store That Takes 'Local Food' to Its Logical Extreme – Bonnie Tsui – The Atlantic Cities.
Orion Magazine published a piece in this month’s issue by author Rowan Jacobsen that extols the virtues of the emerging food hub as the next welcome part of our movement.
Much of what is in this piece is spot on and well crafted to explain why the addition of local infrastructure and aggregation is quite necessary for many farmers and vital to the goal of building regional food systems. However, calling farmers markets “window dressing” as was done in this article shows an extremely abbreviated view of the role that grassroots, low-capital farmers markets play in this still-emerging food system.
When we talk about building more farms from an idea to full production, farmers markets are still the best place to give those new farmers the space and time to build their businesses while they watch their peers and learn from them, from shoppers and from other leaders that stop by. When attempting small amounts of new products that are not yet clear winners in the marketplace, where better to test those varieties but with diverse, ever-changing weekly populations such as those found in a market? When a local community wants to have healthier citizens, where else than a place that allows everyone to enter it just as they are and allows each participant time to get to their own version of local food awareness and civic engagement?
Achieving the moment where communities truly value local food production is a long strange trip and takes many seasons and a multitude of different organizing attempts to build even enough of those “early adopters” much less the early majority that will surely need to at least pass through tents on more than a few sunny days to begin to change their habits.
In case we have forgotten what the different market eras have done already:
The earliest markets that started in the 1970s brought small family growers and eager buyers together (mostly organized by farmers themselves) and did so using very little infrastructure or investment from outsiders. Many of those markets began because farmers were stymied by indirect buyers, even those buyers that worked on behalf of natural food stores and locally owned supermarkets. “Grow it to sell it” was a very powerful statement and maybe even a revolutionary one back then.
That era was followed by neighborhood leaders adding markets designed to invite a whole new group of community members (for example, senior citizens), and THAT was followed by small rural communities using farmers markets to revive their Main Streets and hold on to their towns.
Last but certainly not least, the public health community invited by markets to help bridge serious food access issues and pilot innovative programs has brought new energy to every market over the last decade and built partnerships that work tirelessly together in the halls of Congress and with other policymakers to show what local food can do, can accomplish where hospitals on wheels by themselves cannot. Each of these eras added an important piece to the food system movement and is still needed to curate it and don’t doubt it, future market eras will do more in areas not yet imagined. To paint the farmers market as “one size and one goal fits all” misses the continued evolution of this efficient and elegant mechanism.
To accomplish the big goals of behavior change for everyone (farmers, shoppers, policy makers etc), farmers markets have invited every food system idea into their midst, allowing never-ending tests in the only place that they were all really possible: the democratic town squares of food where personal yet collective transformation happens.
Can all farmers and buyers fit into markets? Of course not, nor were they meant to. But to speak anecdotally about sales at markets declining and there being “over saturation” when the entire community food system has reached (by most estimates) one to four percent of the population is shortsighted at best. Have sales declined for some farmers? Certainly. Maybe because serious infrastructure or rule changes were needed or maybe because markets needed some help along the way to manage their multiplying productions, help that mostly never came.
Let’s put it this way: the need for infrastructure is an argument that markets themselves have been making for a few decades, and in some cases, actually made happen for their farmers. It is not counter to the idea of the tented market in any way and when community infrastructure is added all producers will benefit. The need for capacity is also an argument that has been made by market organizers for decades; however, if it only comes at the sight of shiny new buildings and asking farmers to scale up-without eradicating the barriers that still exist for some of them-then has capacity help for them truly arrived?
The core truth is that the entire community food system remains immature. It is immature because it has not connected its networks and built collaborative communities of practice everywhere (using the terms of Meg Wheatley and Deb Frieze’s Emergence Theory)
All systems need appropriate stages of improvement to lift all in its rising tide. In order to work on economic, cultural and environmental levels, new leaders must be allowed to emerge and to connect. New ideas have to be allowed in alongside of those already present. Markets have needed help to make their case to newer and larger audiences for some time and see that food hubs can help make that happen. The business baseline of good food hubs is one that markets can learn from while sharing their community-building lessons in return.
Therefore, to style the farmers market field as a static anachronism is a dangerous idea to the health of the entire food system, without even recalling the very deep work done by its direct marketing sister-CSAs, which have certainly pushed forward the economic boundaries for intermediate farmers and allowed their infrastructure to grow.
Let me state it clearly: for farmers market communities, food hubs are welcome. (I wonder if the opposite is also true? And if not, why not?)
Food hubs will not replace the need for farmers markets in the case of many farmers and for many eaters; they will expand the idea for some of those farmers ready and willing to negotiate with wholesale concerns and most likely attract the farmers who were never deeply interested in retail sales or in introductory relationships with constantly changing buyers. The true hubs will stand alongside of markets and CSAs to share the responsibility of changing the way that all producers are valued. They will help encourage and expand needed investments and updates in food handling that do not ask small family farms to hand over their farm to large corporate interests.
The need to change the power structure and allow farmers to LEAD the negotiations over what price, product and types of appropriate growth that each farm needs is the goal for farmers markets, for CSAs and for food hubs too. With all respect to a favored author of mine, to separate us into what was and what is next is very wrong.
Check out the “Big Easy Peel” event, a satsuma-peeling event starting at 11:30am on Oct. 24th at the Washington Artillery Park across from Jackson Square! Dr. DeSalvo, the health commissioner of New Orleans, will be there to speak and endorse Food Day. There’s more information about the event here: We’re looking to invite as many people as possible, so please spread the word!
One of the activities that the group has done at the Sustainability Conference in Cleveland is to tell the story of both personal and municipal transformation through moments lived and remembered. This is the earliest time period (1969-1989) on the personal transformation wall. This is another idea that food organizers may want to use when working with communities. How wonderful to ask them to think about how and and when healthy regional food became important to them.
Here at the Cleveland Sustainability Summit looking through their “Sustainability Dashboard”:
Local Food Accomplishments for 2013 include:
Growhio planning a follow up summit in February of 2014 to identify critical gaps in the local food economy
Menu For The Future grants and courses have supported canning workshops and offered funding for activities at City Rising Farms in Hough.
Community Kitchen Incubator Forum held to celebrate the launch of many incubator and certified kitchens in the area.
Here is an interesting link that came to me through the smart people at Food Tank.
An online site to help farmers sell the produce at “come and get it” prices that is not sold through their marketing outlets.
40% of our food is wasted; 25% is wasted by the consumer. Great points to share with your community.
As a food system organizer and researcher, I try to find events to attend that draw together many different sectors and initiatives. Last year, this sustainability conference focused on Local Foods and was held in conjunction with the Projects For Public Spaces International Public Market Conference. I attended the PPS conference and as a result, saw a few of Cleveland’s excellent food initiatives and met the local folks working on the same things that many PPS attendees are working on in their areas. This year, I am going back to follow up on what I saw in that food system work in Northeast Ohio and also to sit and work with the folks who are at this conference to hear about their 2013 focus: their renewable energy and climate change work.
Cleveland’s “conscious capitalism” and renewable industries strategy is impressive and needs a deeper look. As someone who did consumer and environmental campaigns in that area in the 1980s and early 1990s, I want to see what has changed since my organizing days and how the food system work really fits in.
Summit 2013
Together, We’re Building a Thriving Green City on a Blue Lake
The 5th Annual Sustainable Cleveland 2019 Summit will be October 3-4 at Cleveland Public Auditorium in Downtown Cleveland. As we approach the halfway milestone of this ten-year initiative, we are charged with taking stock of our accomplishments and outcomes, gauging our progress, honoring the work of many, and charting the course for the next five years.
Summit Focus:
Summit 2013 will focus on the Year of Advanced and Renewable Energy and implementing Cleveland’s Climate Action Plan.
Keynote Speakers: The City of Cleveland is pleased to announce two dynamic keynote presenters during the Summit on the topics of Advanced and Renewable Energy, Climate Change and Conscious Capitalism.
John Montgomery, Author of Great from the Start, is a frequent speaker on sustainable business, benefit corporations and venture capital at such forums as the Future Salon, TEDx, and Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. John transforms public and private corporations for success in the new economic paradigm where corporations not only optimize profits for shareholders but also provide a material positive impact on society and the environment.
Chuck Kutscher, National Renewable Energy Lab, is a Principal Engineer and Group Manager in the Center for Electricity, Resources, and Building Systems Integration. His projects have included the design and construction of a solar cooling test laboratory; production of NREL’s solar industrial process heat design handbook; modeling of advanced power cycles and cooling systems for geothermal power plants; and development of transpired solar air collectors, which won an R&D 100 Award and a Popular Science “Best of What’s New” award. He is editor of the 200-page ASES report, Tackling Climate Change in the U.S., and writes a monthly column on climate change for SOLAR TODAY magazine. He recently received the 2008 Colorado Governor’s Excellence in Renewable Energy Individual Award.
2013 Sustainable Cleveland Summit Tickets, Cleveland – Eventbrite.
Helping Farmers Markets Grow 