North Carolina Tackles Going Local and Sustainable

“Prior to our begin­nings in 1994, there were a lot of envi­ron­men­tal issues emerg­ing in the state around con­fine­ment hog oper­a­tions,” Dr. Nancy Creamer, CEFS direc­tor at North Carolina State University, told Organic Connections. “There was con­sid­er­able push­back from envi­ron­men­tal groups and sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture groups. The uni­ver­sity then pulled together a siz­able task force made up of peo­ple from dif­fer­ent parts of the community—conventional ag, sus­tain­able ag, organic ag, envi­ron­men­tal­ists and busi­ness lead­ers. The num­ber one rec­om­men­da­tion that came out of that task force was to develop a research sta­tion that was focused on sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture and organic agri­cul­ture. And so that’s how CEFS got started.”

The result­ing facility—Cherry Farm near Goldsboro, North Carolina—is today a nexus of research and a broad range of hands-on train­ing in organic and sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture. “The Department of Agriculture funds the basic oper­a­tion of the farm,” Dr. Creamer explained. “There are staff there that run the dairy, trac­tors and equip­ment. The uni­ver­sity fac­ulty and some of our part­ners write research grants to do projects there. Over the years we’ve devel­oped a lot of really great research funded mostly through USDA, but also EPA and some other sources.

“The farm is 2,000 acres, of which about 1,000 are till­able. We have 100 cer­ti­fied acres of organic pro­duc­tion. We have a pas­tured dairy that’s doing research on tran­si­tion­ing to organic, and a pas­tured beef oper­a­tion. All of those units draw in researchers and grad­u­ate stu­dents. We also do an intern­ship pro­gram there, so stu­dents come from all over the country—and the world, really—in the sum­mer for two months. They live there and learn about sus­tain­able and organic agri­cul­ture. We have a farm appren­tice pro­gram too, and then we do a lot of exten­sion out­reach and train­ing from there as well.”

Dr. Creamer her­self comes by this work hon­estly, hav­ing been in agri­cul­ture her entire life. Raised on a chicken farm in Hemet, California, she went on to attain a master’s degree and worked at the University of California Davis Student Farm, man­ag­ing the farm and the sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture pro­gram. After obtain­ing a PhD at Ohio State University, she took her present position—and is very much ded­i­cated to its mis­sion. “I think there are many ways in which farm­ing sys­tems have a major impact on the envi­ron­ment,” she said. “There is plenty of poten­tial to shift our farm­ing prac­tices to be more envi­ron­men­tally sus­tain­able, espe­cially now there’s a resur­gence in inter­est; and I think that rebuild­ing our local food region­ally across the coun­try is a really impor­tant thing to do from a long-term sus­tain­abil­ity and food-security stand­point, so it’s great to see the pub­lic inter­est in it.”

CEFS’s work has now gone far beyond the research facil­ity. “We’re asked to give talks all over the state about what we are doing and the impact that it can have on eco­nom­ics, health, envi­ron­ment, land preser­va­tion and farm­ers,” Dr. Creamer con­tin­ued. “County gov­ern­ments have seen this as a real job cre­ator in their com­mu­ni­ties. With obe­sity trends, peo­ple are look­ing at fresh food con­ven­tions in a way that they haven’t in a long time.

“We have also estab­lished a leg­is­lated sus­tain­able local foods advi­sory coun­cil, and it is work­ing to address all kinds of issues around the food sys­tem, includ­ing rais­ing pub­lic aware­ness. We insti­tuted a big ini­tia­tive across the state that resulted in the pub­li­ca­tion of a hundred-page guide on what the state and pri­vate entre­pre­neurs could do to move for­ward local food systems.”

Instead of tar­get­ing con­ven­tional agri­cul­ture as an enemy, CEFS has been work­ing to show farm­ers the many advan­tages of cre­at­ing local food systems—and bring­ing them on board. “We’ve really been very for­tu­nate in this state; a lot of us are com­ing together around local food,” Dr. Creamer remarked. “We’re build­ing bridges with con­ven­tional agri­cul­ture. There are many things we all agree on—profitability for farm­ers, keep­ing farm­ers on the land, and bring­ing young peo­ple into agri­cul­ture, to name a few. One way to accom­plish these things is to shorten the chain and get more profit, which means local food sys­tems. Now the North Carolina Farm Bureau has part­nered with us on what we call our `10 Percent Campaign,’ in which we are work­ing with indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions, get­ting them to com­mit 10 per­cent of their food dol­lars to local food. That would mean 3.5 mil­lion dol­lars every year that stays in the state. The Farm Bureau put that cam­paign in the cen­ter­fold of their mag­a­zine, which went to 60,000 peo­ple across the state.”

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Dr. Creamer and her team have dis­cov­ered that to make local sys­tems work in North Carolina, a whole new infra­struc­ture needs to be cre­ated. “We found that there was a huge demand devel­op­ing for local food, and we had farm­ers inter­ested, but there was all this infra­struc­ture in the mid­dle that was kind of bro­ken,” she said. “For exam­ple, we were work­ing with a num­ber of envi­ron­men­tal groups who wanted pork pro­duc­tion changed. We part­nered with them so they would be will­ing to buy pork prod­ucts that were com­ing off of farms that met their envi­ron­men­tal ethic. Sierra Club in the state had 17,000 mem­bers; thus it could be a big mar­ket and they could help pull pro­duc­tion in the way they wanted, cre­at­ing mar­ket demand instead of fol­low­ing reg­u­la­tory or law­suit routes.

“So we had a mar­ket and many farm­ers who were inter­ested, but there was really almost no place to get pork slaugh­tered, processed and pack­aged in a way that we could sell it locally. It’s the same for fruits and vegetables—we don’t have pro­cess­ing. If you wanted to put a salad bar in every school here in North Carolina, you couldn’t do it. The schools don’t have kitchens; there’s nowhere to bag and cut and wash let­tuce, carrots—it’s all just miss­ing. So that’s why we started work­ing on this, and that’s where there is a lot of job cre­ation potential.”

In estab­lish­ing local food sys­tems, it is appar­ent that the only way to go is up. “There’s much to do,” Dr. Creamer con­cluded. “We have new projects we started this year with begin­ning farm­ers, and set­ting up a net­work of incu­ba­tor farms across the state, part­ner­ing with county gov­ern­ments and munic­i­pal­i­ties. We wrote a grant to work with a major gro­cery store chain here in the state, and are also work­ing with our major mil­i­tary base, Fort Bragg, get­ting local food sup­ply teams into those venues. We’re start­ing to work more with the health com­mu­nity because they see local foods as a real answer to some of the food-related ill­nesses such as dia­betes and obe­sity. So I think we’ll have many more and stronger part­ner­ships with those that see how to address such issues with a local food system.”

For more infor­ma­tion on CEFS, visit www.cefs.ncsu.edu.