Bringing Back Locally Grown Produce

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.