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.
A fascinating view of the internal life of a market community.
The FM rule discussion starts on the audio at 15:00 minutes into the recording:
Definition of local (100-mile limit discussion)
Definition of market vendor
Mission statement discussion
Competition discussion
Too many rules?
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Meatonomics is the first book to add up the huge “externalized” costs that the animal food system imposes on taxpayers, animals and the environment, and it finds these costs total about $414 billion yearly. With yearly retail sales of around $250 billion, that means that for every $1 of product they sell, meat and dairy producers impose almost $2 in hidden costs on the rest of us. But if producers were forced to internalize these costs, a $4 Big Mac would cost about $11.
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.
(talk about needing more research like this!)
Using county-level data from the 2002 and 2007 U.S. Census of Agriculture, the team analyzed the link between direct farm sales — sales made directly from farmer to consumer — and total farm sales. When they examined the data on a national basis, they found a positive but not statistically significant relationship between the two. Goetz said that a different picture emerged when they looked at the data by region, as defined by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In some regions, direct sales seemed to complement total farm sales. For example, in New England, a $1 increase from the 2002 level of direct farm sales was associated with a $5 increase in total farm sales. That same $1 increase was associated with a $9 increase in overall farm sales in the Mid-Atlantic states of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. Yet, in other regions, local food sales appear to compete with total farm sales. In Southeastern U.S. counties, for example, direct sales were associated with a reduction in total farm sales. Next, to measure the impact of all agricultural sales on economic growth, the researchers used a statistical model to analyze how changes in farm sales per capita influenced changes in real personal income per capita — an indicator of economic growth. Again, the team performed this analysis using county-level data from 2002 to 2007.
Goetz said that by establishing that direct sales have a positive effect on total agricultural sales, which in turn have an effect on income growth, this study demonstrates that direct sales do indeed expand local economies at least in the Northeast U.S. He added that these results came as a bit of a surprise.
“When we set out to measure the economic impact of local food sales, we frankly didn’t expect to find one,” said Goetz. He explained that economists are generally skeptical that local sales can have impacts because such sales tend to recirculate money within a community rather than inject new money. “Injection of new money — money from outside of the community — is what many economic development practitioners think of as the fuel for economic growth. But to me, these findings provide quite robust evidence that even direct sales do have an effect on growth, in the Northeast U.S.”
A surprisingly well done article, even though it springs from what I consider an overdone and less than useful premise that I’ve seen before: a reporter using SNAP for a week. However, this one is has decent information and connects this issue to some larger issues, partially thanks to Daniel Bowman Simon.
The average amount that a family on food stamps gets per month is $133. That is $133 for 93 meals. For three meals a day, $133 breaks down to less than $1.50 per meal.
Luckily, the New York City Department of Human Resources’ website has guides available for SNAP participants, including a one that explains how to “Cut the Junk” and another with recipes for healthy and cheap meals on it. (Most of these are bean/chili based….)
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Daniel Bowman Simon is deep into SNAP, which is the focal point of his research at New York University’s Food Studies program. And he is frustrated. Seated in the Food Studies program’s fifth-floor conference room, he ticks off a list of grievances relating to the SNAP program and the Farm Bill, as well as the media’s coverage of the issue — framed as a contest between farm subsidies and SNAP benefits….————————————————————————————————————————————-
My mom posed a simple question: “Sarah, does SNAP feed people?”
“Yes,” I responded, “and it’s actually really efficient.” It’s true: SNAP has less than a 4 percent error rate, according to Riley — and sometimes that error is because of people who received less money than they should have. The program also has very low rates of fraud. The USDA just released a report saying that only 2.77 percent of errors in the programwere in the form of overpayment, which includes fraudulent applications.
“Food is one of the most cost effective forms of prevention,” Sarah Franklin explains. Obesity, cognitive abilities, and heart disease are all linked to eating habits. “Making sure that people have access to food is, in my mind, one of the most important and no-brainer policies,” she says. “The food stamp program, even though it’s not the perfect program — to make cuts to that program is idiotic.”
What I Learned from a Week on Food Stamps: Paul Ryan Couldn’t Be Any More Wrong | Alternet.
Thanks to Sanjay for sharing this; I have followed VEGGI’s emergence and believe that their efforts are one of the best examples of entrepreneurial farming combined with technology solutions and will benefit many farmers, rural and urban alike. The VEGGI cooperative and cooperatives like it are one of the best ways that small lot farmers can truly become economically sustainable and avoid the burnout of a one-farmer endeavor and how urban initiatives can learn quickly enough to benefit the region.
A Koi-Fueled Nursery in New Orleans Yields Tasty Profits – Wired Science.
As readers of this blog know, troubling issues remain with the adoption of wireless technology and appropriate systems for accepting cards at markets, whether at a central terminal or through individual terminals. This pot of money is welcome but may also create a divide for those states and networks that need some time and resources to study the efficacy of existing programs before expanding them anymore. In any case, I sincerely hope that this program will be about assisting networks to solve some of those problems and not just about expanding the number of machines available.
MarketLinkTM is a program of the National Association of Farmers Market Nutrition Programs (NAFMNP) launched in 2013 to connect farmers, markets, and consumers through technology. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) set a goal to increase the acceptance of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as Food Stamps) at farmers markets nationwide, and awarded a contract to NAFMNP to work towards this end.
MarketLink | Connecting farmers, markets & consumers through technology.
Since I’m back in Vermont for the 2014 Direct Marketing Conference, I decided to upload the Power Point from the 2013 Wholesome Wave convening that Erin Buckwalter of NOFA-VT and I gave about the 2013 Vermont Market Currency Report. I’ll add notes for each slide sometime in the next month or two but the data will still be helpful to many.
Market Benefit and Incentives PPT-Vermont 2013 – Helping Public Markets Grow.
The link to the excellent Growing For Markets site. In the January 2014 issue, I have an article where I share the latest news on SNAP at farmers markets. GFM is a great magazine for news and tips for market farmers and organizers. You can subscribe at different levels for print or online (which can include their excellent archives) or you can simply purchase a single issue.
From the conclusion:
A minority of funds went unused. Possible reasons for this gap include that tokens were lost, misplaced, or reserved for a future visit that did not occur. Regardless, a loss in purchasing power negatively affects the financial benefits provided by the incentive program, and means that SNAP participants have fewer funds to mitigate food insecurity. Future work should strive to better understand this problem in various communities and test innovative solutions to increase SNAP redemption rates. Additionally, further exploration will be helpful to determine what maximum amount of SNAP benefits
matched maximizes participation by SNAP customers. To better understand the health impacts on individuals who use SNAP incentives to purchase fresh produce, future research also should explore changes in consumption and other health behavior. Finally, examining the relationship between various implementation strategies and reported changes in consumers, vendors, and markets will help better identify promising practices for effective incentive programs. The cluster evaluation documented program innovations; influences of incentive programs on consumers, vendors, and markets; and lessons learned to inform a fragmented field of practice. The cluster program organizations are poised and ready to share what they are learning about effective program management, marketing, funding, capacity building, sustainability strategies, and achieving desired outcomes with fellow practitioners. After sharing program experiences, program implementation, and outcome data, and advancing ideas on how best to advance and implement solutions to food system issues of common concern through this cluster evaluation, the programs are exploring plans to launch an online “Learning Community” that would bring more program coherence to the field of practice and increase the field’s capacity to be more impactful.
The title of this piece was included in an end of year TomDispatch commentary, written by one of my favorite writers, Rebecca Solnit:
…Many seeds stay dormant far longer than that before some disturbance makes them germinate. Some trees bear fruit long after the people who have planted them have died, and one Massachusetts pear tree, planted by a Puritan in 1630, is still bearing fruit far sweeter than most of what those fundamentalists brought to this continent. Sometimes cause and effect are centuries apart; sometimes Martin Luther King’s arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice is so long few see its curve; sometimes hope lies not in looking forward but backward to study the line of that arc.
and near the end of her piece, this:
I don’t know what’s coming. I do know that, whatever it is, some of it will be terrible, but some of it will be miraculous, that term we reserve for the utterly unanticipated, the seeds we didn’t know the soil held….
I am going to adopt this as my new mantra (my friends and colleagues should get ready to hear it often) for the work that we are all doing in food, in recalibrating what health and wealth means in our communities and in demanding a civic (public) life that breeds empathy and justice.
Writer/activist/teacher Michael Harrington who used the metaphor of being a “long-distance runner” for community organizing and movement work would also say this in lectures:
“…you must recognize that the social vision to which you are committing yourself will never be fulfilled in your lifetime.”
Some of Harrington’s writing and the majority of Solnit’s is about how successful movements-when pulled apart and examined-are made up from a series of direct action moments and negotiations finally coming to fruition around a shared narrative of big or even scary ideas that will lead to societal transformation.
Yet Solnit’s content is most often written about the individual or about small groups using meandering/karmic ways to create this change, outside of the broken or simply too large formal structures that stopped responding to individual plights a long time ago. And that when it happens the right way, collectively and with heart-thumping goals attached (let’s say during the American Revolution or with the 18th and 19th century abolitionists or with the woman’s suffrage movement) it starts slowly with small groups of citizens and spreads to those governing us, not the other way around. And that it takes a while.
All of that is all very nice I hear some of you say. But what does this matter to my never-ending project list and non-stop funding crunch?
What I ask is while you take the time to read this, do examine your own way of working and ask yourself now (and later on too) if you are also caring for the seeds yet unseen. If you have the maturity to manage your or your organization’s relationships in your work like a long-distance runner does with his/her energy and time.
I don’t expect you to remember this post every time that you sit at your desk or head out to the community to work on food and justice. Just remember the title of this piece and remember my teacher Michael Harrington, pacing himself as best he could. He died long before he saw what he defined as success but I believe that he was genuinely glad the work outlived him. Not the injustice certainly but the connections and the ideas.
How could any of us expect to get it all done in our lifetime? My god, I hope many of the seeds and saplings that I have planted bear fruit 300 years after my passing, just like that long ago pear planter.
However you find your pace, I hope we can all find the energy and patience to stay on for the long seasons ahead, some with cloudy dusks with fallow ground and others with sunny days full of trees bearing fruit as far as the eye can see. If not, if you only want a win, to bring in a single crop, then throw it all in now by all means. We need those too. I suspect you will find more work to stick around, but if not, I will still salute your effort and your time. And I’ll come get you when the green shoots takes hold.
Solnit gets the last word:
A decade ago I began writing about hope, an orientation that has nothing to do with optimism. Optimism says that everything will be fine no matter what, just as pessimism says that it will be dismal no matter what. Hope is a sense of the grand mystery of it all, the knowledge that we don’t know how it will turn out, that anything is possible.
Helping Farmers Markets Grow 