A hundred years ago when you went to market, all the produce, meats and dairy products you were buying had one thing in common: they were locally grown. As the twentieth century drew to a close, that had all radically changed. Instead of helping local economies to produce better and more, buyers for big grocery retailers turned to where they could obtain products cheaply, and many local growers were either forced out of business or compelled to eke out what business they could from people, restaurants or organizations that still purchased local products.
Today, however, due in part to growing publicity about the economic importance and the nutrient and taste qualities of buying from local growers, there are individuals and communities that are finding ways to revivify a style of life thousands of years old yet still very relevant.
One such organization is the non-profit conservation group Ecotrust, of Portland, Oregon. Ecotrust has many roles, including ecological innovation, creating green economic opportunity, and connecting green organizations throughout the world. But in terms of their own local agriculture, for close to ten years they have been facilitating the growth of and a return to locally produced food for their entire region.
“Our Food & Farms program began with connecting chefs to local sources of produce and food,” Deborah Kane, vice president Food & Farms, for Ecotrust, told Organic Connections. “Today, the program is ten years old and has expanded to be much broader. It is very focused on creating a robust food economy in the region that we work in, which is northern California up into Alaska. We have three primary projects: one, the publication of a quarterly magazine called Edible Portland; another known as FoodHub, which is an online connection between local buyers and growers; and a third, focused on improving the quality of school food in our region.”
Farm to School
Lately there has been tremendous attention on the food being fed to children in schools, as it shapes their bodily health and dietary habits for the future. Ecotrust’s Food & Farms program has taken on this problem quite seriously, with an eye to sourcing school food locally as well.
“The sky’s the limit, I have to say, with regard to the farm-to-school initiative,” Kane said. “We got involved with it four or five years ago in the large public school district of Portland. The district consists of about 82 different schools and serves around 20,000 meals a day.”
The district itself decided to try an experiment and created a scratch kitchen (a kitchen that creates meals from scratch). One elementary school was chosen, a local chef was brought in and a robust garden planted.
The Food & Farms program got involved almost right away. “We were brought in early on to do an analysis and evaluation of how cooking from scratch changed the school cafeteria,” Kane explained. “We did an analysis of student participation rates to see whether or not scratch would mean more moms and dads sending lunch money. We evaluated profit and loss to help the district understand the cost impact of cooking from scratch. We even went so far as to analyze nutritional content of the meals made from scratch versus meals that were being served in the other district locations.
“We started with that one school and we’re, as much as anything, staying focused on providing the data and the evaluation to make the case for better school food. But our work quickly grew to include serving as a benevolent broker or matchmaker in helping regional producers find points of entry with schools across the state, not just in Portland. So before we knew it we were more engaged than we’ve ever been in the past.”
However, schools are limited in what they can purchase in terms of food, by both budgetary and policy constraints—so Ecotrust’s Food & Farms got to work on that as well. On the state level, they were able to get three farm-to-school bills passed. One created a full-time farm-to-school position within the Oregon Department of Agriculture, and the next established a corollary position within the Oregon Department of Education. The third bill dealt with ensuring that school personnel were educated on working with local products.
“In the process of getting these three bills passed, we became the first state in the nation to have dedicated positions in both the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Education,” Kane said. “That really put Oregon on the map. And then shortly thereafter we became the western lead agency for the national Farm to School Network, which is to say that we are coordinating now and supporting farm-to-school activities in eight states. There’s never been more interest, opportunity and momentum to improve the school food landscape. You’ve got Michelle Obama making it an absolute priority, and the Child Nutrition Program at the federal level is being reauthorized. There’s no lack of opportunity for getting more regional products into the schools.”
Click on any image above to see a larger version.
Because budgets have been a problem, the Food & Farms program has also been working hard to obtain state funding for school means, in addition to what is provided by the federal government.
For Oregon, the project has certainly been successful. According to farmtoschool.org, a site that tracks farm-to-school efforts in schools, 53 schools in Oregon now have some kind of farm-to-school program.
FoodHub
Food & Farms’ FoodHub is a Web initiative that is an online directory and marketplace for regional food buyers and sellers to connect and do business.
As a result of extensive market research on what was desired by both buyers and sellers, the system instituted is quite detailed, as Kane illustrates in an example. “You could be a food buyer, type in the word raspberries and immediately get a list of all the raspberry producers within a sixty-mile radius of your operation. And then you could say that you want to see the ones that are on a particular truck route, or just the ones that deliver direct, or just the ones that have liability insurance, or just the organic ones. You can keep filtering and filtering and filtering until you really find what you are looking for.”
There is even a feature that allows a producer to advertise a special for the day, or a buyer to state exactly what he or she is looking for in relation to particular menu days.
While the site does not cater only to organic, sustainable producers, it does offer the capability to inform buyers and sellers on the benefits of a producer’s specific product. “FoodHub is open to producers of various sizes using different production practices, so there are definitely some producers that are not organic,” remarked Kane. “But because sellers do list their particular practices, we have a tremendous opportunity within the site itself to educate both buyers and sellers about various methods, about ways in which they could make different choices in their procurement.”
The same is true for the farm-to-school program, as support for state policy could not be obtained for local programs from both Democrats and Republicans if strict “organic only” guidelines were in place. But this, too, is an evolution in progress. “There is a lot of interest from the Oregon Department of Education and other advocacy groups in organics, and it may not be required by law, but again we have a tremendous opportunity now to educate school food service structures and others about the benefits of organic as it relates to children,” Kane said.
Taking Local to the Next Level
Ecotrust’s Food & Farms program plans to continue efforts in their region to build locally based agricultural economies, and eventually to extend the successes of their program nationwide.
Many areas with local producers could take a lesson from this well-organized program, to get more locally grown products back into their food systems. It would lead to vastly improved health across the country—both bodily and economically.
To find out more about Ecotrust’s Food & Farms program, visit www.ecotrust.org.
loading...
loading...
