Ground Level Category Archive: Local Food
Can ag feed the world without destroying it? Looking for the Minnesota answer
Posted at 11:30 AM on April 9, 2012
by Dave Peters
(3 Comments)
Filed under: Hunger, Local Food, Rural, Water quality
If you've heard Jon Foley on MPR News talk shows or seen him give presentations at the University of Minnesota or elsewhere, you've seen him work pretty hard at looking for a middle ground.
He directs the Institute on the Environment at the U and one of his main arguments is that the world needs to look at agriculture in a different way. It's huge greenhouse gas emitter; it's a huge consumer of the world's water; it's rapidly changing land use everywhere. But it's not going away and it in fact has to provide more food for more people in coming decades. How does the world accomplish that? As Foley puts it, how do we feed the world without destroying it?
What brings this to mind is that a 17-minute TED talk he gave a couple years ago went up on the national TED home page this month. It's worth a look.
Undoubtedly there are responses to Foley's question that could be taken up at a variety of international and national forums. But, given the reporting we've done here on local food, cleaner water, hunger and other Minnesota community issues, seeing the talk made me wonder how people on the ground in Minnesota might address them. Locally, not globally.
So, what can people on the ground in Minnesota do to address the dual demand on modern agriculture -- feed the world but don't wreck it? If you have an answer, add a comment.
(Disclosure: One of my daughters works at the Institute.)
Bemidji commercial kitchen launches
Posted at 9:00 AM on March 27, 2012
by Jennifer Vogel
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Economic Development, Local Food
People in the Bemidji area wishing to turn local fruits and vegetables into raspberry jam, salsa or spinach pie for public sale now have a state-certified kitchen in which to do it. Harmony Co-op just opened its spanking new commercial kitchen, which is available to the public at an hourly rate.
The kitchen was almost three years in the works. I wrote about it last September, when the room still had exposed wiring and unpainted drywall. Harmony produce manager Lisa Weiskopf championed the kitchen along with Simone Senogles of the Bemidji-based Indigenous Environmental Network. They have big plans for the facility, including improving local eating habits and strengthening the regional "foodshed."
It's modeled on a similar facility in north Minneapolis called Kindred Kitchen and will come with all sorts of assistance for food entrepreneurs like help writing business plans, developing marketing strategies and meeting safe food handling standards.
According to Weiskopf, Harmony has already hosted a ServSafe workshop that was attended by 20 people, some of whom plan to make products in the kitchen. One person will bake gluten-free chocolate hazelnut tortes, while two others will bake bread to sell at a farmers market. Harmony is also working out a lease with a fledgling local micro-brewer, which MPR News' Tom Robertson reported on here.
In addition, the kitchen will host public cooking and nutrition classes, some centered on Native American foods. Bemidji is near three Indian reservations, where obesity rates are high.
More on farm-to-school: Minneapolis kids to get grass-fed hot dogs
Posted at 11:15 AM on March 21, 2012
by Dave Peters
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Filed under: Local Food
Add Minneapolis kids to those getting a taste of locally grown grass-fed beef for school lunch this spring, says Bertrand Weber, the school district's nutrition director.
The city's schools will try all-natural, nitrate-free hot dogs from Thousand Hills Cattle Company in Cannon Falls in April and May. Also in May, the school cooks will offer a meal of sloppy joes made from ground turkey the district is buying from Ferndale Market, also in Cannon Falls. In the fall, they may even try other cuts of beef from Thousand Hills.
The efforts are part of a growing movement to serve local food in school lunch programs, which I wrote about yesterday -- "The numbers are out again and they're up again."
If you're wondering how cash-strapped school lunch programs can buy gourmet meat, here's how Weber explains it:
Yes, the hot dogs cost a little more than those from standard sources. But not as much more as you might expect because the district is buying meat that the company has in excess. For the same reason, the district next fall might buy cuts that school cooks could turn into ethnic dishes involving shredded beef and stir fry.
And Weber says he's saving money with the turkey for similar reasons. Ferndale's typical non-holiday turkey market is for white meat. By taking ground turkey made from excess dark meat like legs and thighs, Weber pays $1.64 per pound for what he can turn into sloppy joes. Usually he has to pay $2.47 for commodity ground beef for that purpose.
Farm-to-school food: Beyond apples to grass-fed hot dogs
Posted at 10:39 AM on March 20, 2012
by Dave Peters
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Filed under: Local Food
Every year, the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy surveys Minnesota schools to measure how much local food schools are providing to students.
The numbers are out again and they're up again.
First of all, in 2011, 145 of the state's 333 districts offer at least some food from local farms in their lunch programs. That's up 18 percent from a year earlier and represents districts enrolling two-thirds of the state's students. The total value of local food in schools in 2011 was $1.3 million, double from a year earlier.
But the most interesting part of IATP's report shows the breadth of products offered in schools increasing. More than 10 districts used 27 different local food items.
Apples are the gateway fruit that lots of districts start with, said Joanne Berkenkamp, IATP's local foods program director. But more schools are moving beyond fruits and vegetables to grains and even proteins.
Providers like Thousand Hills Cattle Co. in Cannon Falls, which markets gourmet steaks in upscale grocery stores like Kowalski's Markets, are finding schools a good outlet for cheaper meat cuts they have in excess, Berkenkamp said.
In the Hopkins School District, food service director Barb Mechura said the lunch program dropped hot dogs a few years ago out of concern over nitrates in the meat. The availability of Thousand Hills' grass-fed hot dogs let them to re-introduce the popular item and, especially after cooks learned to deal with their tendency to dry out more, students love them, Mechura said.
Another trend the latest survey found was an increasing number of relationships between schools and farms. Mechura backed that up, too. She said she likes to deal with local producers. "It's become quite normal."
You can find background on the farm-to-school effort and local foods more generally on this Ground Level page.
Local brewers discuss money, regulations and pairings with stout
Posted at 2:00 PM on March 8, 2012
by Jennifer Vogel
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Economic Development, Local Food, Northern Minnesota
Today, MPR's Ground Level project and Minnesota Today hosted a lively chat among brewers, brew suppliers and beer fans on the current state of beer in Minnesota. The discussion lasted for an hour and a half and ran the gamut, from how local ingredients impact the flavor of microbrews to regulations that get in the way to how to build a customer base.
Guests included Tim Nelson from Fitger's in Duluth, Dan Schwarz from Lift Bridge in Stillwater and Julia Herz from the Brewers Association in Boulder, Colorado. But we had many more people participate.
When asked why the beer industry is thriving here when other industries are struggling, Tina Hanke from Bemidji Brewing had this to say: "Craft beer is an affordable 'luxury' item--even in a bad economy, folks are willing to pay the $5 that gets you a great pint."
Participants also discussed how to build a successful brewery. Start-up money is key and usually comes from savings or friends and family. Sweat equity was mentioned, too. Good beer is the primary ingredient, though. Carey Matthews from Summit Brewing summed up the formula this way: "Great local products, real people behind them, and affordable prices."
Partway through the chat, food writer Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl chimed in and prompted a wave of suggested beer and food pairings, like chocolate porters with dessert and bacon with brown ales.
The discussion was part of our "One Job at a Time" series on entrepreneurship. Here it is, in its entirety.
What do you want to know about running a brewery in Minnesota?
Posted at 11:18 AM on March 7, 2012
by Jennifer Vogel
(2 Comments)
Filed under: Economic Development, Local Food, Northern Minnesota
If you've been following the explosion of new microbreweries and taprooms in Minnesota, you know that the beer culture here is changing radically. Not only are new entrepreneurial opportunities coming to the fore, but some think we're developing our own hop-heavy "north coast style."
Tomorrow between 11:30 and 1:00, MPR will host an online chat on about where our blossoming microbrew culture is headed, as part of our One Job at a Time project on entrepreneurism.
The chat will include Tim Nelson from Fitger's in Duluth, Dan Schwarz from Lift Bridge in Stillwater, Julia Herz from the Brewers Association in Boulder, Colorado, and local food writer Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl.
We've invited many local microbrewers to participate and we hope you'll join us, too. You can find the chat tomorrow by following this link.
Do you have questions you'd like us to ask or topics we should explore? Feel free to post them here.
Minneapolis art students share ideas with a small city
Posted at 2:45 PM on March 1, 2012
by Dave Peters
(2 Comments)
Filed under: Community Development, Economic Development, Local Food, Rural, Young people
MONTEVIDEO -- Last Saturday at the community center here, a handful of students from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) presented ideas aimed at revitalizing the local economy and culture through arts, broadly defined.
An arts-based economy is emerging in western Minnesota, in the Upper Minnesota River Valley. I wrote a story about it that will run next Tuesday as part of Ground Level's One Job at a Time project.
Meeting with some four dozen residents, including potters and organic farmers, the MCAD students tossed out ideas that included enlisting young documentarians to make a short film establishing a narrative for the region, opening a restaurant with local foods and furnishings and formalizing an internship program where MCAD students would earn credits for working with local artisans.
The students were part of the school's new Rural Arts Initiative, funded by the Bush Foundation, which seeks to lay fresh, problem-solving eyes on the Montevideo area and also the Iron Range. The students spend a little time in each location and return to present creative suggestions, along the way gaining a feel for real-world problems. (Full disclosure: Ground Level receives support from the Bush Foundation.)
"We are not coming in to save people through art or design," said class professor Bernard Canniffe, who chairs MCAD's design department. "I think artists and designers do more damage than good in these things. 'Oh look, we're going to create a mural.' It's like God almighty, really? That's all we can do? Or create a papier-mache donkey standing on its head that symbolizes hope in Montevideo? Many times that's what these things become, padded resume builders for designers or artists. It doesn't accomplish anything. This is something different."
Canniffe, who is from South Wales, said the goal is to "create innovation" and hopefully establish a long-term relationship with the community. "Art can assess and create," he said. "That's what art and design can do, look at things quickly and assess them really quickly."
"The next ground-breaking initiatives or ideas are going to come out of the Midwest and not the coasts," he said. "Pick any subject that's affecting the world now. It could be globalization, population densities, entrepreneurism, agriculture, cultural ethnicity, Christian versus Muslim identification. All these things are happening in one shape or form in Minnesota or Iowa."
Aside from one audience member who thought it paternalistic to have student documentarians from elsewhere tell the region's story, the response to the presentation was largely positive. Attendees seemed to appreciate the opportunity to exploit young talent and energy and perhaps draw a student or two to stay. "Out of the creativity phase, hopefully something comes and clicks and becomes a new model," said Patrick Moore, of Clean Up the River Environment, based in Montevideo.
Moore is one of those people who make things happen in a community and he facilitated the student presentation. "I'm hoping that the economic development of western Minnesota can grow. I love the towns and the people and the river. I want people to live in this landscape. I don't want it to be inhabited by robots and machines. I want people in these communities to thrive and raise kids and create art and music and plays."
"It's about building a new society in the shell of the old," he said.
Bemidji and Minnesota's local food map
Posted at 8:30 AM on September 28, 2011
by Dave Peters
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
When you think about where the local food movement is strongest in Minnesota, the first region that comes to mind is the southeastern part of the state.
Abundant rain and a terrain of hills and valleys are conducive to small farms that can make a go of produce, as opposed to, say, corn and soybeans.
And to the west, around the university town of Morris, there's a dedicated bunch of residents pursuing greenhouses, local energy production and the like.
It might be time to add Bemidji to the list. Jennifer Vogel has reported an interesting story there on the effort to help the local food movement with its scale problem. A food co-op is building an incubator kitchen to let local entrepreneurs try out recipes and business plans to market processed produce to local consumers.
And if this piques your interest, check out the rest of Ground Level's local food coverage on our "Local Food: What's Next?" page.
The Bemidji experiment is particularly enlightening in connection with the large American Indian population and the attendant high rates of diabetes and other disease. Enhancing the local food industry and helping it get into schools and other institutions is one way people are addressing those issues.
The kitchen won't open until spring, but next year it might be a good idea to try out one of the chocolate hazelnut tortes that baker Cheryl Larson Krystosek plans to make in a newly rented oven.
Ground Level adds Minnesota hunger to coverage
Posted at 10:25 AM on June 3, 2011
by Dave Peters
(1 Comments)
Filed under: Hunger, Local Food
One out of 10 Minnesotans struggles sometimes to find adequate food.
These are not the emaciated, starving we sometimes see in news coverage from around the world, but people the federal government classifies as "food insecure." That can mean skipped meals, not knowing how to pay for the next trip to the grocery store, cheap calories.
By a number of measures, more Minnesotans are falling into this category -- more tell surveyors they have difficulty finding meals, more use food stamps, more use food shelves.
So for several months, MPR News reporter Julie Siple has been exploring the contours of this issue. She's covered food waste, missed meals, the changing face of food shelves, how school lunch programs address the problem in summer. And she's written about the people taking action to make a difference.
Ground Level has pulled this archive of stories together and added background material, data and a collection of additional resources to learn more. It's a one-stop shop of sorts and is the latest in a collection of topic pages we're building to help Minnesotans learn about challenges in their communities and find avenues to take action.
Are tight school budgets really an obstacle to farm-to-school success?
Posted at 3:26 PM on May 31, 2011
by Dave Peters
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
One of the supposed obstacles to expanding the farm-to-school effort that gets local food into the school lunchroom is the tight budgets that school food programs operate under.
But a survey this spring of 67 Minnesota food producers interested in the school market indicates this may not be the problem some have thought. Everyone who responded to the survey by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy said he or she had gotten a fair price from schools; 83 percent said prices schools paid were about the same as those paid by other customers.
That was probably the biggest surprise in the survey, said the IATP's JoAnne Berkenkamp. Taking the temperature of food producers is the flip side of another survey the organization has been taking annually for three years, tracking the number of schools buying from local suppliers. The latest of those surveys counted 123 schools in the state with some kind of local produce program last year.
Taken together, the projects show that the two sides of the equation are looking for information about the other. Schools want to know what's available when; growers in the latest survey identified as one of their challenges schools' demand for specific quantities at specific dates.
"You've got two communities of people trying to connect with each other," Berkenkamp said. "Farmers are looking for a sign from the market."
One third of the growers identified guaranteeing a set amount of produce on a specific date as a challenge, more than any other challenge cited. And more than 80 percent said they wanted more information about what schools want specifically.
The teachable moments apparently get right down to what kind of potato works. One grower said one school was more flexible with different sizes of red potatoes than it was with russet potatoes.
You can find the whole survey here and you can learn more about the challenges to the local food movement at our Ground Level topic page.
No goats, but Minneapolis moves to allow commercial gardens
Posted at 8:38 AM on April 8, 2011
by Dave Peters
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
Those interested in local food, take note: Minneapolis officials have sidestepped the goat issue for now but nonetheless have taken a step toward allowing commercial farms in the city.
As MPR News reporter Madeleine Baran writes, the city's zoning and planning committee on Thursday approved a plan that would let city land owners turn vacant lots into commercial gardens.
The plan, similar to those adopted elsewhere, has more steps to go, but the committee stripped out a recommendation to consider how to handle proposals to raise goats in the city. It sounds like some on the council are worried about rural smells in the urban landscape, but proponents think it will be a boon to making more good food available.
Immigrant farmers try to get beyond farmers markets
Posted at 6:00 AM on January 7, 2011
by Nancy Lebens
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
The summer farmers markets overflowing with tomatoes, greens and raspberries are just memories in our frigid winter minds. But some farmers who farm part time are using the winter to figure out how to make more money and maybe secure a profit.
Farmers May Lee and her daughter Mhonpaj plan to talk with possible new customers, including a few school districts in the coming months. They'll also spend the time investigating how to build season-extending hoop houses.
The Lees grow 150 varieties of organic vegetables with some Hmong herbs as well.
They branched out to CSAs two years ago, selling 10 shares last year. The Lees also supplied Chisago City schools, Surdyks and managed to give away 10,000 pounds of produce to food shelves.
Meanwhile Mhonpaj works two jobs, including one as a Hmong interpreter at Hennepin County Medical Center. She says she's like most Hmong children who help elders with farming: full-time farming may be appealing but too risky if you have to give up jobs with health benefits.
Immigrant farmers have been a presence in Minnesota farmers markets for many years, but they have been less involved in other areas of the local food movement. The Lees are an example of how barriers may be starting to fall.
You can learn more about them in my Ground Level storyhere and on MPR News' Morning Edition today. For a lot more on local foods, check out our topic page, Local Food: What's Next?
Worldwatch: Up to 10 percent of U.S. diet is local food
Posted at 11:10 AM on December 22, 2010
by Dave Peters
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
The portion of our diets that comes from local food could be getting as high as 10 percent nationally, says Brian Halweil, a senior fellow at the Worldwatch Institute.
Official estimates have been more like 3 to 5 percent but efforts by restaurants and big grocers have pushed the number higher, he thinks.
Halweil was on MPR News' Midmorning program today, along with a couple of Minnesota local food experts, Kathy Draeger from the University of Minnesota and Glen Hill from the the Minnesota Food Association.
You can listen to the conversation here:
It ranged from how the definition of local food includes some non-geographic characteristics to why local food often costs more than what is produced through the big agriculture commodity industry. (Check out Ground Level's coverage of those issues and more.)
But Halweil's international perspective was enlightening. More countries are realizing benefits, particularly from farm-to-school programs, he said. National governments in Africa are committing money to help farmers grow food for schools and, as a result, several million children are being fed.
It's still a small effort compared to the food shipments many countries are dependent on, he said, but "it's growing rapdily."
Halweil noted the rising demand for local food and the beginnings of both consumer education about eating seasonally and farmer efforts to extend seasons with low-cost greenhouses.
But, he said, huge gaps in the production and distribution systems for local food remain, and he suggested that the issue becomes yet one more infrastructure question that government could get involved with.
By the way, reporter Nancy Lebens has a piece scheduled for broadcast this afternoon on All Things Considered about how the new food safety bill contains a controversial amendment exempting small farmers from some of its provisions.
Food safety bill passes with exemption for small farms
Posted at 8:00 AM on December 22, 2010
by Nancy Lebens
(4 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
The Food Safety Modernization Act passed by the U.S. House Tuesday strengthens government oversight of food processing facilities and farms, but a controversial part of the bill exempts small farms from most safety oversight.
The exemption means the farmers who sell at farmers markets or to restaurants and sell less than $500,000 a year do not have to adhere to the same new safety regulations as larger farmers under the new food safety bill.
That provision doesn't make Apple Valley farmer Gary Pahl very happy. He says to be safety certified under the USDA's Good Agricultural Practices or GAP is costly. He has one employee whose sole job is working on GAP. Pahl talked about the food safety bill in an interview last month:
I'm not too fond of what they came up with the $500,000 cap. Being as we're a mid size farm, it puts us at a disadvantage since we have to be GAP certified and a smaller grower doesn't have to be GAP certified.If I were writing that bill I would put those dollars toward educating, make a standardized GAP program for everybody, whether you be a small scale farmer or a large scale farmer, so everybody's food and packages are traceable back to the farm field that it was picked in.
Tracing food back to the source is key in case of recalls. The new food safety bill gives the Food and Drug Administration more power to force recalls when food poisoning outbreaks occur. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nationally 48 million people are sickened by tainted food every year.
Joellen Feirtag is a food safety specialist at the University of Minnesota Extension. She teaches farmers and food processors how to handle food safely. She says all farmers should have some safety training, no matter how much food they sell.
If you're going to expand and make these farms community farms or larger then more issues come up as you make things bigger.You should be concerned about anybody who makes food and is giving it to the consumer. So there's no difference, it's the same food safety risk.
But some argue that customers can hold farmers accountable for the quality of their food without making it harder on small producers. John Mesko is a farmer and executive director of the Sustainable Farming Association of Minnesota. He says small farms can lose their exemption from safety regulations if they sell tainted food.
And that's really what the bill is saying. We're going to give you this right to exercise some freedom of operation if you're a small operator, but if there's a problem, we reserve the right to take that right away from you and I think that's really what it is.
Mesko notes that farmers who are not exempt and want to make a living farming will still find a way to meet safety regulations, despite the increase in paperwork and expense.
Even with the exemption, however, small producers are under some pressure from such buyers and grocery chains to ensure that their food is safe by, for example, obtaining GAP certification.
Hunting for food chain champions
Posted at 8:30 AM on December 21, 2010
by Dave Peters
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
Jim Barham is looking for food chain champions.
Doesn't sound too sexy, but he's convinced that as demand for local food rises and bottlenecks form in the aggregation and distribution of produce, people with imagination, relationships with retailers and growers, and good business models -- food chain champions -- can make a big difference.
Barham is an economist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., compiling a study on how "food hubs" are playing an increasing role in bringing local food to consumers. He's identified some 60 to 90 around the country and is looking for more. I posted something last week on some preliminary information he put out, and Monday we chatted on the phone.
The champions he seeks can operate in a variety of ways, Barham said. Some "pull" local food into the market, connecting with growers and leveraging relationships with grocers. Others organize around the farmers themselves and "push" food into the distribution system. Without them, local food will have trouble meeting the demand.
In the Twin Cities, the Wedge Co-op-owned Co-op Partners Warehouse is an example of an organization pulling food into the market and distributing it to co-ops and others. Big River in Marine on St. Croix is more on the pushing end, although as a non-profit, it has found distribution can detract from its central mission of training immigrant farmers.
As often as not, these successful food hubs spring from a person, a champion, who becomes a driver of change.
As I pointed out last week, Barham has looked at this phenomenon across the country and identified a concentration of food hubs in the area where Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin converge. That's due, he says, to the fact that the land is suited for small farms and to the proximity of population centers like the Twin Cities, Madison and Milwaukee.
Look for a fuller report from the USDA on local food distribution in March and then a full food-hub study in September.
How one small-scale farmer cobbles a business together
Posted at 9:35 AM on December 20, 2010
by Nancy Lebens
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
In his ideal work life, Moses Momanyi would farm full time. He says he has clients for his lettuce and peppers: Chipotle and Chisago Lakes school district. He also sells direct to consumers through mini markets around Minneapolis. All this on about two acres of land at the Minnesota Food Association's farm at Wilder Forest in Marine-on-St. Croix and another parcel across the St. Croix river in Wisconsin.
Since he only cleared $10,000 during the latest growing season, he found he needed a job come winter, a common situation for even long-time farmers in the U.S. Once a farmer in Kenya, Momanyi feels a strong connection to the lifestyle, and he's an example of how some immigrant farmers are trying to scale up in the local food movement. But where to expand?
Through a seminar, he met a farmer who had land to rent with hoophouses, unheated greenhouses where crops grow in the soil. The ability to extend the season is critical for Moses Momanyi because he sells to schools who don't need produce in the summer. He can stretch his growing season by two, even three weeks in both spring and fall with hoophouses. And his new land is five acres instead of the two 1-acre parcels he had before.
The catch? Momanyi's new land is in Amery, Wis., a two-hour drive from his established customers in Minneapolis. He still wants to sell at mini farmers markets in the city three times a week.
While he juggles the financial complications of his current situation, Momanyi hopes to add new clients. He says he's talking with the Washington County Public Schools and Hastings school district to see if he can sell vegetables to them. Kathy Burrill directs food service at Chisago Lakes school district. She says the district bought 45 pounds of produce from Momanyi.
We purchased field greens, baby lettuce and baby spinach from Mr. Momanyi. We were very pleased with the quality of the produce. It was well received by our staff and students, and I hope to purchase from him again next year.
For another look at how mini markets worked in Minneapolis and more about Moses Momanyi, check out this story from this summer by MPR's Madeleine Baran.
Is local on your grocery receipt?
Posted at 8:30 AM on December 16, 2010
by Nancy Lebens
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
It may be if you're buying from a co-op.
Seward Co-op in Minneapolis made a big announcement this fall announcing P6. It's Seward's way of letting customers know how much of what they buy is local or grown or made by a small producer or produced by a nonprofit cooperative business.
If a product meets two out of three criteria, it's designated P6, with stickers or signs. And the receipt will say what percentage of purchases fall in the P6 category.
Seward is one of seven stores nationally that founded P6. It's a way for Seward to brand food as local before the definition becomes too hazy to be useful, says Tom Vogel, marketing and member services manager.
Some of the other elements that cooperatives have been focusing on for the last 30-40 years, including local, were being co-opted by other institutions, by conventional big box retailers and were really diluting the brand. We had seen this happen with organic and were beginning to see this with fair trade. And the value of local was being diminished.
Vogel says it's possible to buy a P6 item that is not considered local, but fits the other criteria of coming from a small producer or nonprofit cooperative. Coffee, for example.
At River Market Community Co-Op in Stillwater, fresh basil grown in Willernie, Minn., sits on the produce shelf. Once a shopper buys the basil, or any other locally grown product the cash register calculates the percentage of local products and indicates that percentage on the receipt. It's very much like the P6 system, but only for locally grown or made.
River Market General Manager Mead Stone says the co-op started noting local on receipts at the end of April this year, and they've been adding items to the system ever since. Stone says "local" means anything raised or made within a five-state region. At his store, that ranges from vegetables to cheese to handmade soap.
If River Market's customers have noticed the local notation on their receipts, Stone hasn't heard it. River Market isn't quiet about its local effort, however. Signs in the store urge shoppers to buy local products, which bear green stickers with a big "L". Some signs describe the people behind the product.
River Market and Seward Co-op are trying to add more local products for reasons that have more to do with community than market share. Both Stone and Vogel say their buyers are looking for more farmers to boost the local offerings even higher.
Map shows local food scaling up in SE Minnesota
Posted at 9:52 AM on December 15, 2010
by Dave Peters
(1 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
I've been hunting for ways to measure the local food movement in Minnesota and just found a new one on a U.S. Department of Agriculture map.
Coordinated food hubs identified by the US Department of Agriculture.
In a USDA blog post, researcher Jim Barham writes about the value of regional food hubs in helping the local food movement reach scale. He defines a regional food hub as "a centrally located facility with a business management structure facilitating the aggregation, storage, processing, distribution, and/or marketing of locally/regionally produced food products." In other words, a coordinating middleman helping growers find markets and markets find growers.
The blog links to a slideshow with more detail, including mentions of a couple Minnesota examples -- the Co-op Partners Warehouse operated by the Wedge food co-op in Minneapolis and the non-profit Big River Foods operation run by the Minnesota Food Association in Marine on St. Croix.
But what caught my eye was the map of "coordinated regional food hubs" for the nation. The greatest concentration in the country is centered on the Upper Mississippi River valley, mostly between the Twin Cities and the Iowa-Wisconsin border. Barham cautions that he hasn't finished compiling the list.
The map is a great indicator of, among other things, how geology rules. The unglaciated, rolling region cut by streams is conducive to small farms good at vegetables and orchards, as opposed to the flat prairies of southern and western Minnesota where corn and soybeans rule.
But it also shows where the organization of the local food movement has strength in Minnesota. I've got a request out to Barham to talk about his research and will update here when I hear more. UPDATE: See here for a post after talking with Barham.
Local growers seek markets, food safety
Posted at 11:54 AM on December 13, 2010
by Dave Peters
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
If you missed reporter Nancy Lebens' piece on the air Friday about increasing demand for local food in Minnesota grocery stores, she has more on the topic this afternoon on All Things Considered.
The local food movement is changing some of the marketing and distribution networks for how food gets to the store. As growers scale up to meet demand or try to break into markets new to them, they increasingly are getting pressure from big retailers to give them exclusive supply arrangements and to take steps to meet food safety guidelines.
It's not as simple as showing up at the Saturday farmers market anymore, and you can hear from growers both veteran and new about how they navigate.
Listen for Nancy this afternoon, and you can read more here. You can also visit Ground Level's local food topic page for a lot more.
Basil, Walmart and exclusivity -- the local food movement gets complicated
Posted at 3:33 PM on December 10, 2010
by Dave Peters
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
Locally grown carrots are touted in the produce section at Byerly's in St. Louis Park.
The aromas of hydroponic basil are wafting through a Baldwin, Wis., greenhouse this winter.
Walmart is making farmers pack lettuce into crates that can go directly into store displays with minimum processing and sorting.
Grocery stores are touting to consumers their farmer suppliers at the same time they push those suppliers to lock into exclusive agreements. Food producers are pushing back, asking for volume guarantees.
The local food movement, increasingly apparent to a broader spectrum of consumers, is getting complicated.
MPR News reporter Nancy Lebens is delivering Ground Level's latest exploration of this changing scene this afternoon on All Things Considered. I'll link to the audio when it's available but you can read an expanded version of that piece here.
And you can find a trove of local food information at our Ground Level topic page.
Play with your food -- on a map.
Posted at 1:46 PM on December 6, 2010
by Dave Peters
(1 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
I ordered a meal last week from Danny Schwartzman at the Common Roots Cafe in Minneapolis -- baked mac and cheese with a beer and roast chicken with a glass of white wine. Since the order and the delivery were all via email, I haven't actually eaten anything.
But, with Schwarzman's help, I did make a couple of pretty cool maps with a new analytical tool called Sourcemap from the Civic Media Lab at MIT. For those interested in food miles, carbon footprint and how the local food movement might affect everything from the economy to health, the maps can be pretty instructive. That's especially true if others join in and start creating their own maps. I would love to hear how people might make use of something like this.
Sourcemap was created to make it easier to see where the ingredients of something -- anything, from your laptop to a bottle of water to a piece of Ikea furniture -- come from. Anybody can create a map and make it available to the world. It seemed to me that Ground Level's focus on local food in the past month or so made it an ideal topic for practice.
Since Schwarzman already uses his restaurant's web site to display how much local food he uses, I figured he'd be game for this, and he was. He referred me to his menu last Thursday and I ordered a starter and an entre. He then told me where he got everything, from the chicken to the pepper.
Here's the mac and cheese starter (with a glass of Surly beer). Since this is a new project, the map isn't displaying well for everybody. You pretty much need a browser other than Internet Explorer unless you have version 9. If you can't see it well, you can try here to see the original at Sourcemap. But your best bet is to look at it in Firefox, Safari or Chrome.
Click on the numbers and the plus sign for more information, or click on the headline, which will take you to the original map on Sourcemap. You can shift the map and zoom in like you would on any Google map.
The map instantly gives you an appreciation for how something simple actually can be quite complicated. The first question might be about those supply lines to California. They don't call Gilroy the garlic capital of the world for nothing.
Schwarzman makes a couple points. First, part of the stress he puts on food sourcing is organic, not just local. Second, he measures his portion of local by dollar volume, not simply by counting all ingredients equally. So flavorings and spices might come from far away while the main ingredients like Durham wheat macaroni and Iowa and Wisconsin cheese are closer to home.
Next, the main course, roast chicken with white wine. Again, if it's not displaying for you, go here.
Again, many of the main ingredients are close to home, but this time the spice sources take you around the world. Not much black pepper grows in Minnesota. A little salt and olive oil from Italy, bay leaf from Turkey show how tough it is to be totally local. Correct me if I'm wrong. But again, a little closer scrutiny shows you the big items are from nearby.
What about the California carrots? Schwarzman says he working on getting a greater local supply and on storage space.
The chicken map also uses an additional feature of Sourcemap, which is to show how far the food traveled and to try to figure out the carbon footprint of a product. You have to click through to the original map for this. The chicken dinner involves 47,000 miles when you count the pepper and the olive oil and the bay leaf. That's both instructive and a caution about how much faith you might want to put in a simple number.
The carbon footprint data are clearly a work in progress at MIT. I used those estimates of carbon dioxide emissions for ingredients that Sourcemap included in its database. If it didn't have a value, I didn't plug one in. For the weight of each item, Schwarzman provided the numbers.
And that is the beauty of the program. Anybody can make one of these for a restaurant meal, your favorite dinner at home, the supply lines to a farmers market or to the produce or meat and seafood sections at Cub. The Common Roots examples are interesting in their own right, but would be far more informative in comparison with others.
I encourage people to give it a try, and if you do, drop me line so I can link to your work. Once you have the information, a map like these takes just a few minutes to create.
Local food goes to school, but how does it get there?
Posted at 10:31 AM on December 3, 2010
by Nancy Lebens
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
A farmer has squash, a school wants to serve it. That's only one part of the logistics involved in getting more locally-grown fresh food to cafeteria trays. A farmer may not have refrigerated trucks to get the produce to schools, or the time to deliver just a part of her harvest across the county.
When a farmer decides to scale up, distribution challenges can stand in the way. People active in farm-to-school efforts say that's a big piece of the puzzle. Stephanie Heim, farm to school coordinator, University of Minnesota Extension says it's tough for some school districts to obtain enough locally grown food from smaller farms.
We're finding that across the state the aggregation piece and the processing piece is huge. Schools are having a hard time getting the quantities that they need. A school is not going to work with 25 different farmers to get the carrots or the produce that they need. And so they're really looking to local distributors to see if they can provide the quantities that are needed and still really provide benefit to the farmer.
Heim points out that the larger school districts in the Twin Cities have used St. Paul- based Bix Produce to supply locally grown fruits and vegetables. Shakopee food service director Debbie Ross says Bix sells her district squash that's already been cut up, which helps her small staff prep for the 6,500 students in her district.
In Bemidji, Harmony Natural Food Co-op, the Indigenous Environmental Network
and the Red Lake Schools are trying to solve the distribution conundrum. They're researching the possibility of a community kitchen that might process locally grown food, which will make it easier for school cooks to turn into nutritious meals.
Greg Reynolds of Riverbend Farm says it should be up to the farmer to get produce to the schools. Barb Mechura, food service director of Hopkins Public Schools and Kris Diller, food service director of Orono Schools agreed saying they might be able to move food within the district, but not from farm to schools.
Reynolds, Mechura and Diller described their experiences in farm to school before dozens of school food service people, farmers and others gathered at a workshop in Chanhassen Thursday. The workshop was funded by the USDA and hosted by the Crow Wing chapter of the Sustainable Farming Association. Other organizations involved included the University of Minnesota Extension, Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, University of Minnesota Extension, Statewide Health Improvement Program, Renewing the Countryside, University of Minnesota Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships.
You can read an account of the day or listen to my Ground Level report by going here.
Small farms that sell direct to consumer get exemption in food safety bill
Posted at 10:04 AM on November 30, 2010
by Nancy Lebens
(2 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
Smaller farms that make most of their income from selling direct to consumers through community supported agriculture (CSA) shares or farm stands will not have to abide by new stricter food safety standards, if a newly passed Senate bill also passes the House.
The food safety bill that passed the Senate 73 -25 this morning has been under scrutiny from some local-food proponents worried that it would place a great burden on small producers. But the bill now carries an amendment proposed by Montana Democrat Jon Tester that exempts farmers who make less than $500,000 a year selling food within a 275-mile radius direct to consumers, restaurants and grocery stores. The exemption doesn't cover sales to brokers and processors.
Advocates of the bill say food will be safer because the FDA will have broader powers to recall tainted food and demand more accountability. Small producers might be subject to FDA action, too, if the federal agency finds a farm's produce has sickened customers.
John Mesko, a farmer and executive director of the Sustainable Farming Association of Minnesota, says small farmers already are concerned with customers' health and wouldn't be able to stay in business if they had to do more paperwork. He says state regulations already restrict farmers from processing their food, which can include skinning and bagging carrots for sale.
We see that exchange of product with customers as a relationship between two people. All farmers in direct marketing are concerned about their customers. They become a part of your family. They are an important part of your income. You want them to stay healthy.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that thousands of people die from foodborne illness every year. Joellen Feirtag, professor and food safety specialist at the University of Minnesota Extension says although small producers aren't usually the source of repeated tainted food issues, they should be required to take food safety classes.
You should be concerned about anybody who prepares food and gives to the consumer. It's the same risk. If you're going to expand and make these farms community farms or larger, then more issues come up as you make things bigger. The handling is different if I have a row of lettuce, now I have a whole community garden worth of lettuce.
The bill does not change U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations, which cover meat and poultry. The FDA does not cover all of that industry.
Another wrinkle is the House may opt to let the bill die rather than accept changes made in the Senate.
For more: food safety expert Mike Osterholm today told Morning Edition's Cathy Wurzer the small-producer exemption is a mistake. Listen to the interview.
Remember turkey carcass composition?
Posted at 2:59 PM on November 24, 2010
by Dave Peters
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
If you want to appreciate the changes in what we find interesting about food, check out this 1987 MPR News report from the turkey-eating front.
MPR News project manager/producer Marc Sanchez dug it out of the archives this week and it's clear we've gone through an attitude adjustment in the past 23 years.
These days we're all about free-range, natural, local and sustainability. Back then, as the interview with a University of Minnesota food specialist shows, "genetic selection" and "carcass composition" were in vogue.
It's been a while since I've heard anybody talk with pride about how researchers know better than turkeys what they should eat and how much faster turkeys get big every year.
Harvest Thyme Bistro at 1 year
Posted at 1:00 PM on November 26, 2010
by Dave Peters
(1 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
As of today, the Harvest Thyme Bistro in Wadena has been serving up local food to patrons for a year, educating residents about local eggs, Swiss chard and squash-wild rice salads.
Shari and Derek Olson run the restaurant, hold classes and cultivate local farmers all in the name of spreading the local-food gospel. Check out reporter Nancy Lebens' story about the Bistro.
You can find more on the local food movement in Minnesota on the Ground Level local food topic page.
USDA's 'Amber Waves' looks at local food
Posted at 9:54 AM on November 23, 2010
by Dave Peters
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
Amber Waves, the quarterly magazine the U.S. Department of Agriculture puts out on the economics of food and farming, focuses on local food in its December issue.
Drawing heavily from a long report the department's Economic Research Service put out in May, it hits some of the themes we've been focusing on here at Ground Level:
Interest is growing in local food, although it remains a small part of the overall food economy. The definition of "local" varies substantially and for many people includes factors unrelated to distance.
The Amber Waves piece traces the historical arc of local food, noting that a century ago almost all our food was "local" and that processing meant canning, dehydrating, salting, or smoking. Refrigeration and transportation improvements after World War 2 changed everything. A reaction to that change started in the late 1960s and now is enjoying a surge of participation.
Here's one piece of evidence, showing the faster-than-average increase in the sales of produce by farmers directly to consumers:
The magazine also includes a piece on the University of Minnesota-led research on food supply chains that we've written about here before.
Finding a local-food Thanksgiving
Posted at 2:34 PM on November 22, 2010
by Nancy Lebens
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
One way to learn the breadth of local food offering in your stores or nearby farms is to set a personal challenge: every ingredient for your Thanksgiving meal grown or raised as close by as you can, ideally from identifiable farmers.
Thanksgiving may be the best holiday to try this. Liz McMann, community affairs manager at St. Paul's Mississippi Market says going local should not be a problem:
You know when you think about the roots of the holiday, and that it's a celebration of the harvest and family and friends, I think it makes sense to find a way to support your local community and give thanks for those farmers that work year round for us and so often don't get the thanks they deserve for feeding us.
If you live in a big city suburb as I do, you're not going to find too many nearby farmers raising turkeys. Make that no nearby farmers raising turkeys. But you can find Minnesota-raised birds from a number of sources. Two co-ops I checked, Mississippi Market and the Wedge Co-op in Minneapolis sell turkeys from Kadejan family farm in Glenwood that raises chickens as well. The Wedge also sells frozen certified organic turkeys from the Larry Schultz' farm in Owatonna. Both co-ops plan to have enough turkeys to sell through Wednesday, the busiest shopping day.
Though some farms have sold out of turkeys for the holiday season, you might find a few that still have birds to sell. Cannon Falls' Ferndale Market has both fresh and frozen turkeys, though a pre-order for fresh is recommended. Farmer John Peterson says his birds are free range and antibiotic free.
A good list of turkey farmers who sell direct to the public are on the Minnesota Grown website. Minnesota Grown has a long list of other foods to search as well. Paul Hugunin of Minnesota Grown says you can find sources for ingredients like honey, maple syrup, flour, eggs and butter there as well.
If you're not buying direct from the source, buying local can be trickier. Cub Foods carries some local produce, like tomatoes from Bushel Boy in Owatonna, but unless the product carries farm or state of origin, you won't know exactly where it comes from.
Upscale Lunds & Byerly's stores feature signs that say "Eat Local, locally sourced" on produce. Some signs indicate Minnesota Grown specifically. The Byerly's I visited in Roseville had Minnesota grown red potatoes, green cabbage, yellow onions, watercress and fresh herbs. I also saw locally-grown squash and chestnuts. And in one case the story of the farmer, with name and location was displayed alongside the produce: the herbs from Dehn's Garden in Andover.
One of the recurring questions we have as we report Ground Level's local food project is how do you define local? Community affairs managers from both the Wedge and Mississippi Market say it's food produced or distributed from within five Upper Midwest states: Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, North and South Dakota. Produce manager Rick Steigerwald at Lunds & Byerly's says his company defines local as food produced within the same region specified by the co-ops.
Is there any Thanksgiving food that's tough to find if you're just looking in Minnesota? Hugunin from Minnesota Grown says cranberries are not normally grown here. But Wisconsin cranberries are fairly easy to find. And if you favor cinnamon and nutmeg in your pumpkin pie, you're not going to find a farmer growing and selling either of those things in the Upper Midwest climate.
Good response for our local food page
Posted at 3:49 PM on November 17, 2010
by Dave Peters
(1 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
Thanks to the folks who wrote in response to the launch of our local food topic page. The ideas and suggestions are more than welcome.
Just to share, here are a few of the miscellaneous things that floated in:
--Danny Schwartzman at Common Roots Cafe pointed to the local food coverage in Foodservice News, particularly an editorial taking up the challenges of a growing movement.
--Joyce Hoelting, assistant director for community vitality at University of Minnesota Extension, reminded me of a study by extension's Ryan Pesch, arguing that farm-to-school programs can substantially benefit local farm economies.
--Annalisa Hultberg, formerly of the Heartland Food Network, said she thinks more can be done in bringing Hmong and African farmers into school and other markets.
--Another reader asked for an RSS feed for the food topic page. Happy to oblige. Click here.
Meanwhile, Michael Caputo, my colleague here at MPR News has a good local food conversation going at his Insight Now site, focusing on cost.
One commenter suggested this morning that local governments could help create demand by establishing buy-local policies for their cafeterias.
As it turns out, I was just talking to Andy Wright at Co-op Partners Warehouse, a Twin Cities distributor of organic food. His job is to push the market into institutions like that -- colleges and corporations and high schools.
In his view, resistance from institutional buyers isn't related to price so much as it is to lack of incentive to break from existing suppliers. "To change anything is a big deal," he said.
All the feedback and conversation reinforces our sense that the interest in local foods is high but that there are a lot of challenges and complications surrounding the question of expansion.
Local food, local economies
Posted at 3:13 PM on November 16, 2010
by Nancy Lebens
(3 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
Ground Level is turning our attention to sustainable local agriculture and what the trend to more consumption of local food might mean for people in Minnesota.
We've launched a topic page here. One highlight you'll find is a video on a couple in Milan, Minn., who have extended the season with a greenhouse to feed 20 families with vegetables through the winter and who are looking to extend operations to include more producers.
We also have a piece I produced on an effort in the Brainerd area to get producers and chefs together. You can hear that shortly on All Things Considered, as well.
The page includes a "white paper" backgrounder explaining many of the issues involved in local foods and lots of links for more information.
Future stories will look at how a new restaurant in Wadena is trying to change the way people eat, why it's sometimes hard for farmers to find new markets for produce and the move to organize in co-ops for marketing and paying for processing equipment.
As always, we ask for your help, too. How do you define sustainable? Or local? Has the recession forced you to re-think how much you buy more expensive organics? Are we looking at a real change, or a boutique choice for the people who can afford to make it?
Meantime, we'll be adding links and short profiles of Minnesotans who make their living growing, distributing, selling and talking about fresh food.
Tell us about people we should include in this "Up Close" feature.
What exactly is a "local" chicken?
Posted at 12:12 PM on November 11, 2010
by Dave Peters
(2 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
After he read the Ground Level post Tuesday about measuring restaurants by how much locally grown food they serve, Scott Pampuch spent the evening looking at purchasing records for his Corner Table restaurant in south Minneapolis.
Last year, his food was 78 percent local, he told me Wednesday. This year so far, it's maybe 85 or 90 percent. That's by dollars. If he measures by volume, he puts the number even higher. That's the result, he said, of letting his network of farmers essentially determine his menu by virtue of what they make available. If you eat at the Corner Table in August, for example, you can't avoid tomatoes and corn.
But more interesting -- and I kind of hoped the discussion would get here -- he offered his own definition of "local food."
As far as distance goes, Pampuch puts it at 100 or 120 miles from his restaurant. That wraps in suppliers down by Winona and Rushford. (The Common Roots Cafe website, which I cited in the earlier post, defines "local" at a 250-mile radius. The U.S. Department of Agriculture not long ago defined "local" as within 400 miles or within the same state.)
But the real nub of the argument is the part of the definition that has nothing to do with distance.
To Pampuch, "local" food means food that is grown by a farmer with a diversity of products. A monoculture of organic red peppers doesn't necessarily count. It means food grown with an awareness of topsoil and land management practices. Mother Nature land management, as he puts it, not Monsanto. It means food grown by someone aware of having a good pay structure for workers.
I think of this as the Gold'n Plump question. Is a chicken from a Minnesota farm local if you buy it from Gold'n Plump, a large corporation but one that touts the Minnesota and Wisconsin family farmers it gets chickens from and the natural techniques it insists they use? What if you buy it from the local food section at Wal-Mart?
If you define "local" with miles, you get one answer. If you define it by using other characteristics that have more to do with ownership and farming practice and the length of the supply chain from farmer to consumer, you can get another.
It's not simply a question of semantics. As the local food movement gets bigger, scaling up and looking for efficient ways to deliver more products to more places, how it defines itself could affect everything from prices in the grocery store to why people get into farming.
As Ground Level explores the local food movement further -- we'll be on the MPR News air with some reporting in coming days, and we plan to launch an online local food topic page soon -- I would love to hear other ideas about how "local" gets defined.
One small step for measuring local food
Posted at 9:13 AM on November 9, 2010
by Dave Peters
(1 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
I mentioned here a few days ago my quest to find ways of measuring the local food movement. Counting farmers markets is one thing; getting a handle on overall economic impact is another.
Danny Schwartzman doesn't have that answer, but he does like numbers. Since he opened Common Roots Cafe four years ago at 26th and Lyndale in Minneapolis, he's been plugging his invoices into spreadsheets, categorizing and tracking his sources for steak, onions, coffee, beer and everything else the cafe serves.
So Schwartzman can tell you, for example, that in October, 53 percent of the food he served was "local." By that he means that about four-fifths of the "local" was grown within 250 miles of Minneapolis; another small portion was processed within that radius (mainly beer); and a little bit more came from Organic Valley Cooperative Midwest Dairy Pool, a network of dairy suppliers that spreads beyond the 250-mile radius.
He can also tell you that local percentage has been pretty steady, fluctuating between 47 percent and 64 percent, typically in response to the changing seasons.
And, you can find all this and more for yourself at the Common Roots website.
Schwartzman considers the numbers a form of accountability, a promise, as he puts it, that he's using local onions in a dish, not just local shallots sprinkled on top.
It would be interesting to know whether any other Minnesota restaurants could produce the same set of numbers and whether those percentages have been changing.
Trying to live longer in Morrison County: Residents think Blue Zones
Posted at 7:30 AM on November 8, 2010
by Nancy Leasman
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Aging, Local Food, Todd County
Blue Zones were identified by a team led by Dan Buettner as pockets around the world where people are living significantly longer than most areas of the world. "We found people who reach age 100 at 10 times greater than in the United States, where people suffer a fraction of the rate of heart disease and cancer than we do and where people are getting the extra 10 years that we're missing," said Buettner.
Buettner has identified nine behaviors common to people in all of the Blue Zones. The Vitality Project, an outreach program developed from research in the Blue Zones and sponsored by AARP and the United Health Foundation, is taking this information to interested communities.
Bob Graham, who has been involved in that effort in Albert Lea, came to Pierz and Little Falls recently, and as a result, 20 Morrison County residents are considering how they can get involved. Since a few folks from Todd County also attended Graham's presentation in Little Falls, there may be developments here, too.
The nine Blue Zones behaviors include: move, know your purpose in life, down shift, the 80 percent rule (stop eating when you're 80 percent full), plant power (eat more vegetables), red wine, belong to a healthy social network, beliefs, your tribe (make family a priority).
Albert Lea was chosen in 2008 as the first pilot city in the world to collectively try to live longer and better by applying the nine behaviors. According to The Vitality Project 2009 , restaurants in Albert Lea changed their menus to offer more healthy choices. Schools implemented seven wellness policy changes to reduce snack foods and increase activity. Businesses changed their environment and policies to encourage healthier behaviors. Volunteers planted 70 community garden plots. Biking and hiking paths were connected throughout the community to encourage more walking social groups called Walking Moais. Kids also walked more with a project called a Walking School Bus in which the kids walked the last mile to school every day under the supervision of parent and senior volunteers.
Graham, Albert Lea's community development director, offered additional tips at the Pierz and Little Falls gatherings: make good foods visible in the refrigerator, don't eat family style which encourages over-eating (dish up a plate in the kitchen and dine in the dining room), change social networks to associate with other like-minded health enthusiasts, make your community convenient for walking.
Participants in Albert Lea lost an average of three pounds each, employers reported a 21 percent drop in absenteeism, and city employees experienced a 49 percent decrease in health care costs.
While folks in the Blue Zones naturally live a healthy lifestyle that results in long lives, the Vitality Project believes that anyone can make the necessary changes to lead a Blue Zone life.
The Morrison County residents have formed a task force that is considering whether to bring the Blue Zones challenge to their community.
Here's a message from the Blue Zone team. If you're interested in what's happening in the Blue Zones, those long-lived pockets around the world, check out Buettner's excellent talk about the Blue Zone lifestyle. You can sign up for updates, too.
"Dan Buettner was invited to participate in the prestigious TED speaker series this past year. CNN found his presentation so valuable, they've showcased it on their web site, along with an essay by Dan.
"You can view the presentation at this link.
"If you are interested in booking Dan for your next professional event, please contact Amy Tomczyk at amy@bluezones.com."
The challenge of measuring local food
Posted at 7:30 AM on November 3, 2010
by Dave Peters
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
If you talk to people around Minnesota about what they're doing to make their communities better, it usually doesn't take very long before the topic of food comes up. Local food.
Community gardens, farmer co-ops, new specialty crops, food-buying clubs, restaurant purchases, fresh food rural or urban grocery stores -- all form the grist of a vibrant conversation that has many facets and varies substantially from one part of the state to another.
That, of course, makes it a good topic for Ground Level. I've been blogging about it here occasionally and now reporter Nancy Lebens, who has been contributing to our "cities in crisis" coverage, is spending time on the topic. Check back in coming weeks as we build a topic page you can use to learn more and connect with others.
In the meantime, I wanted to pass along a comment I got last week from one of the people I've been talking to on the topic. I've been looking for numbers, ways to measure the size and growth of this "movement," trying to get a handle on it as an economic force and what the challenges are as people try to take it up a notch.
Those numbers aren't impossible to find and they do help explain some of the phenomenon people are seeing. But at every turn I've run across the intangible and unquantifiable as well.
Joan Stockinger, an analyst at Cooperative Development Services in St. Paul, expressed it well in an email:
It seems to me that one of the underlying and deepest drivers for local food, is the desire of people involved to re-envigorate a local and regional culture that connects us more deeply and more often in our daily lives. Food has always played this role in human history. And within that _ a desire to be connected across the things that divide our complex society _ class, occupation, urban/rural, ethnic groups, etc.
The challenge is that producing healthy and sustainably grown food, on a local or regional level, almost always costs more than production in our highly industrialized system, with its many externalized costs and distorting subsidies. The organic/sustainable producers are voluntarily incorporating costs that the industrial system externalizes.So to transform the culture of food, into something that is more healthy, environmentally sustainable and provides a meaningful shared experience, we will have to pay something more for our food. We will have to get over the idea that cheap is always better.
What are the contours of this story that Ground Level should focus on, both quantifiable and intangible? I would love to hear from the people working on this either via a comment on this blog or by email.
Farm-to-school food: Who's going to chop the rutabagas?
Posted at 9:30 AM on October 29, 2010
by Dave Peters
(1 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
A vegetable grower near Litchfield telephoned Annette Hendrickx Derouin this week to ask her if she wanted some fresh potatoes, carrots and rutabagas.
Since Derouin runs the food and nutrition services for Willmar's public schools in central Minnesota and since she is a relentless proponent of getting local food into school lunchrooms, the call might have made her day.
It didn't. The program she runs doesn't have the wherewithal to chop or otherwise process the vegetables before serving them to students. She called for help from St. Paul schools, which runs a large farm-to-school project, only to learn that the food processor they use isn't an option for outstate Minnesota. So she had to pass.
"There's no way I can cut enough rutabaga sticks for 1,800 kids," she says.
Derouin mentioned the incident Wednesday morning at a forum put on by the Minnesota Food and Nutrition Network, illustrating one of the obstacles to expanding a growing effort in the state to get local food into schools.
Willmar is one of four schools to receive a $15,000 legislative appropriation to expand the farm-to-school idea in the state. Three of the four essentially reported in Wednesday (Moorhead, where orchards have been planted on school grounds, couldn't make it because of the weather.)
In Minneapolis, the Nawayee Center School on Bloomington Avenue, which serves a heavily Native American student body, the money resulted in turning a pollution-laden empty lot into a set of raised garden beds. Students tend, harvest and then eat and preserve the produce. Next steps include growing tomatoes hydroponically.
At Pine Point on the White Earth Indian Reservation, students mark monthly themes to focus on locally grown food -- the "three sisters" of corn, beans and squash one month, wild rice another, fish another.
In Willmar, Derouin has for several years been introducing a great variety of food produced in the area -- apples, sweet corn, cheese, honey and more -- to students.
Some of the value, of course, is in the local economy, but the school folks all stressed the cultural connection students are making to the land and food around them. And they say more kids eat lunch when those connections are made.
When I asked Derouin about obstacles to expansion, she mentioned price (local growers' prices often are higher than schools' normal sources) and the time it can take to find new growers to fill the demand (the school's supplier of bison hot dogs almost ran out last year). Then she mentioned the call this week as a big one, the inability to process food that is available.
Maybe she can use the potatoes whole in a baked potato bar, she allowed. But carrots and rutabagas, she can't deal with.
"I just don't have hours of labor to process food."
University of Minnesota Extension and a number of organizations -- state, local, non-profit -- are working on farm-to-school efforts around Minnesota, and the conversations about them are growing. (Find out more here.) And you can imagine possible solutions to Derouin's problem this week -- money for schools to add labor costs, for example, or coordination of districts to create a big enough market for a private processor.
It's not clear where the Legislature being elected Tuesday might want to take the effort beyond the four pilot schools, but if it wants to do something more, a good step might be to address the rutabaga chopping question.
Little by little, Todd County adds local food production
Posted at 9:11 AM on October 26, 2010
by Nancy Leasman
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food, Todd County
Dave Peters' October 18 post on Local Food, Global Hunger, reported on a panel discussion at the University of Minnesota. Their conclusion: "The world's food producers are, by and large, small landholders, and they will be the keys to solving hunger shortages, through using better seed and finding better practices. That may be a quite different question than selling beef or potatoes to the affluent at a downtown Minneapolis farmers market. But somehow it seems that local might answer a bigger question than we thought."
With the emphasis on local food producers, I've been looking at a variety of forms of local food production: three raised beds as part of a school's summer recreation program, a school-initiated community garden, a community-based plotted garden, a community-based program growing food for a food shelf and the Amish Country Co-op.
After hearing a presentation by the Farm of Plenty from Randall, Vickie Thompson, coordinator of Verndale's summer recreation program, was inspired to create a garden growing activity for the kids in grades K-6. The school's shop class built three raised beds adjacent to the school's parking lot. With donated seeds and plants as well as a grant from SHIP (Statewide Health Improvement Program) the kids learned about growing everything from beans to pumpkins. Wadena County U of M Extension educator Donna Anderson visited the program twice a week for most of the summer to teach the kids about nutrition and how to eat both raw and cooked produce from the garden. The kids were excited about growing food and got extra exercise by toting gallon jugs of water to regularly water their garden.
Though Bertha's school initiated their community garden project, they took an entirely different approach. Jean Shaw served as the mover and shaker after talking with SHIP's Katherine Mackedanz, who told her about the funding that was available to start a community garden. Shaw's plans were big because plenty of school property was sitting right there ready to till.
She thought an acre would be about right. After walking the football field to get a better idea of how big an acre is, she opted for a half acre for the first year. Shaw enlisted the help of her family, master gardeners, community members, the local garden club, classes in the school and the after school childcare kids to plant and care for the garden.
Produce grown in the garden was used in classes, to augment school snacks. Some of the 1,500 peppers harvested, along with tomatoes and onions, were cooked up into salsa. Yukon Gold potatoes awaited distribution while turnips and brussel sprouts awaited harvest in mid October. Workers took vegetables home and the school kids learned about nutrition and food preparation from the garden project.
Long Prairie's community garden took a more traditional tack with 15 equal sized plots, each with its own water spigot, rented out to individuals and groups. The $25 fee covered the cost of water, fertilizer, mowing around the plots and clean-up. The initial effort of getting agreement from the church that owned the property, plotting out and digging the soil, and installing the irrigation was undertaken by interested individuals and the local Economic Development Authority. A SHIP grant, cash donations and in-kind support funded the project. The gardens were planted and harvested according to individual preferences. The Long Prairie Elementary School and St. Mary's School each had a plot of their own. Students worked in the gardens and teachers took produce back to the classrooms to use as they wanted.
"We wanted to offer a canning class but that didn't happen," said Lyle Danielson of the EDA. "Some of the gardeners may have frozen or canned what they grew but probably most of it was for summer time use. It isn't just about the food. It's about building community, too; people getting to know each other including the four Hispanic families that had plots."
Putting picnic tables in the area was a friendly gesture to encourage visiting among the gardeners. A small open-sided shed to be built next year will offer shade and shelter for picnics.
The Soul Patch, a community garden in Little Falls, was initiated by Erik Warner in 2009. A parcel of empty land sat next door to the Morrison County Food Shelf. Warner decided it was the perfect place for a garden to grow food for distribution through the food shelf. The land was owned by the Bethel Lutheran Church which agreed to allow the parcel to be used for a garden. Warner, his family and everyone he could encourage to get involved helped with the garden. Gardeners harvested 2,009 pounds of produce the first year and 2,026 pounds this growing season. The U of M Extension Service offered classes on how to use the different kinds of food as they matured. Flyers distributed at the food shelf promoted the classes to those who received the food. (See a tip sheet for starting a similar project)
The Amish Country Co-op at Bertha markets produce grown in separate farms of the Amish Community. Longtime experienced gardeners, the Amish generally marketed their produce from roadside displays. Moving them into a building made the shopping experience better for both producers and shoppers. The food is grown locally and delivered to the co-op throughout the day during the growing season.
Farmers markets throughout the area offer additional shopping options. It's difficult to ascertain precisely what portion of food eaten in the county is produced here. Certainly all of the new gardens impact food needs in the area. It's clear from the examples above, though, that one person can make a difference. Individual efforts may indeed be the key to solving food shortages.
Local food, global hunger
Posted at 1:27 PM on October 18, 2010
by Dave Peters
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
I wasn't sure a panel at the University of Minnesota this afternoon was going to be of much use for me as Ground Level begins to explore the growing local food movement in Minnesota. After all, the title of the panel was "Sustainably Feeding the World" and it featured the leaders of three international food research organizations from three continents.
But it's useful, as Minnesota communities talk about farmers markets, community gardens, farm-to-school programs and buying local at the supermarket or the co-op, to be reminded of the global challenge.
It's huge.
The three researchers -- Carlos Seré, who leads the International Livestock Research Institute, based in Nairobi, Kenya; Shenggen Fan, of the International Food Policy Research Institute, based in Washington, D;C., and Ruben Echeverria, of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, based in Cali, Colombia -- painted the picture pretty simply:
In 40 years, when the world's population is expected to plateau, there will be 9 billion mouths in the world. Given that more than a billion people are considered hungry right now, the assumption is that we'll need to produce more food, maybe 70 percent more.
Making the problem harder are a variety of challenges -- water shortages, global warming, rising standards of living in developing countries that will raise demand for food.
What came clear from all three of the research directors was that much of the answer will depend on small producers.
The world's food producers are, by and large, small landholders, and they will be the keys to solving hunger shortages, through using better seed and finding better practices. That may be a quite different question than selling beef or potatoes to the affluent at a downtown Minneapolis farmers market. But somehow it seems that local might answer a bigger question than we thought.
A good customer keeps pig farmers in business
Posted at 10:03 AM on October 18, 2010
by Nancy Lebens
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
Tom Nuessmeier tends his Berkshire cross pigs on his small farm near LeSueur, Minn.
Tim and Tom Nuessmeier are able to do more than farm as a hobby on 200 acres near LeSueur, Minn., thanks to their Berkshire cross pigs and a long time customer who places a premium on sustainably raised hogs.
San Francisco-based Niman Ranch Inc. has been buying the Nuessmeier's pigs since 2000. The meat is processed in Iowa and then distributed throughout the country, to 7,000 restaurants, according to the company's website.
As a result, it's difficult to label what the Nuessmeiers do as part of the growing "local food" movement, but they are an example of how the nation's small food producers are looking for ways to sustain their operations amid big agriculture.
Beyond the marketing of premium meat, Niman Ranch wants to help farmers who operate on a smaller scale stay in business, especially those who operate "heritage farms." Tom and Tim Nuessmeier are the fifth generation to farm their land.
Beyond the philosophy, there are specific requirements all Niman farmers have to meet. They must raise pigs without antibiotics, in deep-bedded pens and as vegetarians. Fewer hogs are raised on the same amount of land than some of the Nuessmeier's neighbors might use.
Certified organic is not a requirement, however. Niman Ranch says the reason is cost:
This would raise the cost of production of our meat by as much as 50%, depending on the grain market. There is currently a shortage of organic grain in this country, making feeding only organic feeds particularly difficult. We believe a better use of those limited organic grains would be direct human consumption.
The Nuessmeiers also grow organic oats, alfalfa and barley, most of which they sell. Tom Nuessmeier says being organic doesn't seem to be a huge selling point to their mail order customers as well as Niman Ranch. The Nuessmeier brothers philosophically believe organic is best and find that choice fits their business plan. Tom Nuessmeier said:
From that point of what sustainable means some of it is economic choices. The margins are so tight and the inputs are so expensive.. Unless you have a sizable amount of acreage, it's difficult to make a living in the commodities market. We're philosophically attuned to the sustainable practice..but it's economic as well.
Food, schools and a psychological boost
Posted at 12:36 PM on October 11, 2010
by Dave Peters
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
Just as I finished reading the New York Times Magazine column by Christine Muhlke on how writing about food really consists of writing about communities, I got a call from JoAnne Berkenkamp.
Berkenkamp directs local foods programs for the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and we were talking about farm-to-school programs that encourage the use of local fruits, vegetables and other produce in school nutrition programs.
It's a fledgling movement that seems to be gaining traction, Berkenkamp said. Two years ago an IATP survey found fewer than 30 districts in Minnesota with a program. Last year there were 69. The next survey is expected to find more than 100, she said.
The dollars aren't huge -- the average district with a program spends around $5,000 a year only. But Berkenkamp gave three reasons for growth: 1) school people want to help the local economy, 2) they're finding local food a good way to educate students, and 3) schools that get together with local food producers are seeing "a psychological boost in terms of communities getting involved."
That last reason was exactly the point Muhlke was making in her piece Sunday, I think. She set out two years ago to write about farmers and food artisans and realized she wound up writing about the varied and complicated networks of people involved in a movement -- from community gardens to schools to food-buying clubs.
People connect with each other via food. Whether you call it building a community or getting a psychological boost, there is more and more of it going on.
It's a topic we intend to explore more fully in coming weeks on Ground Level, so stay tuned.
A chart local foodies should see
Posted at 3:28 PM on October 6, 2010
by Dave Peters
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
A couple months ago I posted a piece on some food research done by economists at the University of Minnesota looking at several ways beef gets to the consumer in the Twin Cities.
The work fit well with one of the topics Ground Level is taking a look at -- how some communities are trying to enhance their use of local food.
One conclusion was that neither a farmer selling his meat at a farmers' market in downtown Minneapolis nor the system by which Kowalski's gets its all natural beef from Kansas City to its supermarket on Grand Avenue in St. Paul was the most efficient in terms of how much fuel it takes to get the beef into the consumer's hands.
Instead, by quite a margin, more efficient was the regional distribution operation run by Thousand Hills Cattle Co. in Cannon Falls, which buys from several dozen beef producers and delivers to a number of grocers and restaurants.
But that study, done for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, was only part of a rather elegant and rigorous piece of work by a number of economists around the country, coordinated by the U's Professor Robert King. Today those people got together on campus and talked about their findings.
There was lots of discussion about some important issues. Is the demand for increasing food safety hurting small local food producers? What does "local" mean when it comes to food? Will private grocery chains worried about safety put greater restraints on local producers than state and federal regulators?
But I was stuck back on the food miles - fuel efficiency question because when you look at all the cases the study conducted, the conclusion was stark. Researchers looked at beef in Minnesota, blueberries in the Pacific Northwest, mixed greens in Sacramento, milk in Washington, D.C., and apples in New York and measured three supply systems for getting each one to market.
Check out where the green triangles fall on this chart, provided by Gigi DeGiacomo, research fellow in the U's Department of Applied Economics.
That cluster down in the left corner shows that, as a group, the intermediate means of getting to market - collecting produce from a number of suppliers and distributing to a regional group of buyers -- was the most efficient.
The blue diamonds represent mainstream grocery supply chains. As you might expect, there are a lot of food miles involved in some cases. The diamond on the far right represents Washington applies sold in New York, for example. High on food miles and not so good on efficiency either.
Also as you might expect, the red squares representing direct farmer-to-consumer sales are far to the left, meaning they involve few food miles to get to market. But they don't always have economies of scale that allow fuel efficiency getting to market.
The intermediate supply chains that gain economies of scale by combining products from a number of producers and getting them to a variety of local markets clearly, as a group, outperformed the others in this study on that score.
One of the rationales for doing the study was to identify what obstacles there are to expanding the use of local foods. People offer lots of reasons to expand local food choices, from perceived health benefits to boosting the local economy. And there's a lot to debate about whether local food delivers on those promises.
That cluster of green triangles in the corner provides a big clue that reducing the debate to one of food miles probably is a mistake.
Want a market for local food? Provide a tax credit
Posted at 4:13 PM on August 16, 2010
by Dave Peters
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
When you realize that black-dirt, farm-belt Iowa imports 90 percent of its food, it dawns on you that maybe there really ought to be a better way to produce food and move it around. Rob Marqusee thinks he's found one: Give a tax credit to grocery stores that buy local food.
Marqusee is the economic development director for Woodbury County, Iowa, which is home to Sioux City. That's right across the rushing Missouri River from South Sioux City, Nebraska, where the Midwest Rural Assembly is being held this week to examine the idea of rural prosperity in Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa and Nebraska.
Marqusee's title is a position usually associated with finding big employers, enticing capital investments, generating jobs. But at a session of the assembly this afternoon, it was clear he's driven by the notion that social well-being is part of economic development, too. And that leads him to conclude that small food producers are getting the short end of the economic development stick.
He says his county sends a half billion dollars a year elsewhere to pay for food and for seed, fertilizer and other inputs to farming. To counter that he's tried a couple local ideas in the past -- a property tax rebate for farmland converted to organic farming, a local food-use incentive.
But now he's trying to encourage the Iowa Legislature to test out a bill that would give a 20 percent tax credit to any grocery store or food distributor buying food grown in Iowa.
One of the problems with the local food movement is maintaining a consistent supply of products. And one obstacle, Marqusee reasons, is the inability of small-food producers to find the money to invest.
But what if the farmer were armed with a supply agreement with a big grocery chain or a food distributor to buy lots of his produce? That agreement would be required for the grocer to get the tax credit, under his plan, and could in turn let the farmer expand to meet the demand.
"The tax credit creates the market," Marqusee enthused this afternoon. He'd start with fruits and vegetables but sees the potential for meat and dairy, too.
Farmers markets, where farmers sell directly to consumers, are great, but they aren't going to create the size of demand that sustainable food needs to make the next step, he says. "By creating the market, you create the production."
Marqusee said Idaho is considering a similar idea. And Maryland has passed a related idea to attack the problem of food deserts in cities.
You can find his proposed legislation for Iowa at www.woodburyorganics.com.
Food miles, Kowalski's and that steak on your plate
Posted at 9:54 AM on July 19, 2010
by Dave Peters
(9 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
Food miles are one thing. The amount of fuel used per pound of produce is something else.
In other words, that steak you bought at the farmers' market from the family operation down the road might have taken more fuel to get to you than the rib-eye from a steer slaughtered in Kansas.
That's one of the interesting findings in a report produced last month for the U.S. Department of Agriculture by eight economists and academics, including several from the University of Minnesota.
Prompted by increasing interest in local foods and sustainable food networks, the authors of the report for the USDA's Economic Research Service set out to get a better handle on the many intricate ways food actually gets from farm to consumer. We did some reporting on the local food producers' co-op in Todd County earlier this year as one example of producers looking for new ways to connect with consumers.
The rationale of the economists' study was that a better understanding of these supply chains might help more local food producers figure out ways to meet a growing demand.
"One of the issues is going to be how can we really scale it up so more people can get access,'' says Rob King, professor of applied economics at the University and first author on the report.
The researchers created a set of case studies looking at blueberries in Portland, Ore.; milk in Washington, D.C.; salad greens in Sacramento; apples in New York and beef in the Twin Cities.
If you want to understand the complications involved in getting a piece of meat, whether you buy it at Kowalski's, the farmers' market or a restaurant, read the report. The beef discussion starts on page 35.
It compares three supply chains: Kowalski's on Grand Avenue in St. Paul; the SunShineHarvest Farm, which sells directly to consumers at a couple farmers' markets in Minneapolis; and Thousand Hills Cattle Comany, which buys from a number of producers and sells to supermarkets, restaurants and institutions.
The differences among the three are many, in terms of how much money the farmer gets to keep, how much extra work he does to sell directly to the consumer, how much information the consumer gets about the provenance of the beef, how much farmer-consumer connection there is and, of course, the road trip that any given piece of meat takes before landing on your plate.
Long story short: The steak in the Kowaksi's case may have started on a Montana farm as a calf and then been moved to southwestern Minnesota for finishing, taken to Kansas for slaughter by a company Kowalski's works closely with, boxed and trucked to a St. Michael, Minn., distribution center and finally distributed to stores.
That's maybe 1,645 food miles, the researchers conclude.
At the other end of the spectrum is SunShineHarvest, a family operation near Northfield. The typical supply path: the family buys a neighbor's calf, raises and finishes it, takes it to New Prague, Minn., for slaughter and freezing and then sells it to you at the farmers' market. That's 75 food miles.
But wait. SunShineHarvest is driving a pickup truck that carries three animals at a time. In the Kowalski supply chain, semi-trailers are hauling 40 to 55 cattle at a time and then 45,000 pounds of fresh meat.
The result, the study concludes, is that the direct sales chain uses 2.18 gallons of fuel to get 100 pounds of meat to market. The traditional mainstream supply chain uses less, an average of 1.92 gallons per 100 pounds of meat.
As it turns out, what the researchers call the intermediate supply chain -- Thousand Hills buying from regional producers, processing in Cannon Falls, Minn., and selling regionally -- scores much better on this measure than both other chains. Meat in that system travels 300 miles but is hauled in greater quantity than in the direct supply chain. So its system uses only 0.69 gallons per 100 pounds of meat.
The authors are cautious in drawing large conclusions, pointing to the many factors involved in evaluating local foods and the need for further studies. It's interesting to note that in four of their case studies -- apples, salad greens, milk and beef -- what they dubbed the intermediate supply chain used the least amount of fuel to get a given amount of produce to market.
That suggests that as interest in local foods grows, there's room for improvement and efficiency in the distribution network.
"How can we aggregate products from multiple producers and then get some transportation efficiencies," King asks.
Look for a lot more research in this area in the near future. King wrote about local foods going mainstream in Choices magazine. And the notion of "agriculture of the middle" is attracting researchers as well.
Playing with your food (numbers)
Posted at 7:30 AM on July 1, 2010
by Dave Peters
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food, Todd County
There are about 2,400 people in Todd County for every grocery store. In nearby Wadena County, there are about 2,200 people for each grocery store. For most of the rest of rural Minnesota, the figures are about the same. Or lower -- in Red Lake County, there are only 1,366 residents for each store.
Meanwhile, Hennepin County has almost 5,600 residents for each grocery store. Ramsey County is about the same and in suburban Dakota County the number is twice that.
Think about what that looks like if you're a grocer. A couple thousand potential customers doesn't let you offer as much consumer choice as five or 10 thousand.
One possible solution would be to create a bigger store and draw customers from a bigger area, essentially outcompeting some of the stores in your county. Might work, might create jobs.
But here's another set of numbers to think about. In Todd County, 394 households are more than a mile from a grocery store and have no car. That's more than 4 percent of the county's households. Same in Wadena County. In Red Lake it's almost 7 percent. In the Twin Cities, it's 1 or 2 percent.
Building the bigger store and reducing competitors seems likely to swell the number of people who have a hard time finding good food.
You can find these numbers and a whole bunch more on the U.S. Department of Agriculture's food atlas.
The notion of food deserts, places where people don't have easy access to good food, often has an urban feel to it -- inner city neighborhoods abandoned by the big food stores -- but the USDA figures make it seem more rural, at least in Minnesota. (The national map you can build shows high percentages of car-less households far from grocery stores in the rural South, Appalachia, and the Indian Country of South Dakota, Arizona and New Mexico.)
They also lend impetus to those folks trying to encourage the growth of local foods and the strengthening of networks that can generate a reliable supply and consumption. I hope we can get into that more in the future here at Ground Level, but in the meantime, the food atlas is a good place to poke around.
Farms and suburbs collide in Agriburbia
Posted at 2:43 PM on June 25, 2010
by Brooke Walsh
(0 Comments)
Filed under: Baldwin Township, Local Food
When Colorado developers Quint and Jenny Redmond set out to create more sustainable suburbs, they uncovered one big obstacle -- the carbon footprint being left in the wake of transporting food to suburbs.
So they came up with a development in which food is grown locally that they call Agriburbia.
The idea of a development that devotes its green space to farming food for its residents may sound a little odd, but what if it could work?
Farmstead, an Agriburbia being developed in North Carolina, acts as a good case study to explain how these communities function.
Like many developments, Farmstead incorporates a variety of housing types -- from single family residences to town homes -- a playground, watershed and green space. But Farmstead's playground is in the middle of an orchard of fruit trees, and its green spaces, including backyards upon resident request, are mixed vegetable and fruit farms.
Instead of hiring landscapers, housing association funds pay farmers to tend the land. The food is then sold at an on-site farmer's market and the profit returns to the HOA. Residents who choose to dedicate some of their yard to farming can either consume the produce, or apply the money earned from its sale to their HOA fees.
The houses are designed to be energy-efficient and are required to contain root cellars for storing harvested food.
This kind of development not only provides locally-sourced food for its residents, but also allows for unique learning experiences for both children and adults -- such as opportunities to help on farms and the ability to see first hand where their food comes from farm-to-table.
When you consider that even urbanites are starting to turn their Twin Cities yards into farms, with organizations like Backyard Harvest's guidance, it becomes hard not to see Baldwin's open space as a possible local food source.
What do you think? Is Baldwin township a good place for Agriburbia?
Local foods: Beyond the farmers market
Posted at 11:35 AM on June 15, 2010
by Dave Peters
(1 Comments)
Filed under: Local Food
Farmers markets have popped up everywhere -- from the granddaddies in downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul to new mini-markets Minneapolis has started up to get into under-served neighborhoods. And "CSA" has entered the vocabulary as shorthand (community-supported agriculture) for consumers buying an agreed-upon amount of produce, eggs, meat etc. directly from a farmer.
Reporter Stephanie Hemphill's piece today on a Duluth effort by Seeds of Success to turn vacant lots into gardens that grow produce for city restaurants is another example of the growing sustainable, local food movement.
But it's a movement in which success is spotty and, even where it has worked, people are finding obstacles to take it to the next level. I've had conversations with two people in the past few days that illustrate this.
Kathy Draeger, statewide director for the University of Minnesota's regional sustainable development partnerships, is putting the finishing touches on a proposal for a five-year, $5 million project to look at local foods in Minnesota, Iowa and the Dakotas. The project, if accepted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, would identify best practices and help figure out what works where.
"The local foods movements are spread all over the U.S. and everybody's starting from scratch," Draeger said. "What works in Milwaukee is not going to work in Hallock, Minnesota."
Look at the fruit and vegetable sections in small town grocery stores in western Minnesota and the Dakotas, she suggests. The local food movement clearly hasn't hit there and, ironically, people living on some of the nation's best soil aren't getting the advantage of food that could grow on that land.
Local foods have fared well on the other side of the state in southeastern Minnesota, partly because the topography is conducive to smaller farmers. Winona County's officials have identified local food as a top priority and have taken steps to encourage entrepreneurship and to organize marketing for .
But even there, taking the next step is problematic, says Linda Grover of the county's economic development authority. When it comes to selling local foods to schools and other institutions and retail grocers, "there are so many obstacles and barriers on both sides."
Farm-to-school efforts have seen some success, but institutional buyers need consistent supply and quality and good prices. Producers need reliable means of distributing their goods and getting them to market. There's a good opportunity for an entrepreneur in the distribution business, Grover says.
Draeger notes a certain irony in the effort to scale local foods up to bigger regional operations. How long will it be before it becomes what it is trying to replace? "There is some scaling up that needs to be done, but there are places that are nowhere near that."
As MPR News continues to develop Ground Level's focus, local and sustainable food is one of the issues -- like renewable energy, broadband access, immigration, growth, rural aging and others -- that lend themselves to coverage at the very local level but that add up to significant statewide and national ideas.
As I told people at the Center for Small Towns symposium in Morris last week, a bunch of people around Minnesota are working toward a "new normal" as waves of political, economic and environmental change sweep past. Ground Level is becoming an effort to chronicle that. I invite your ideas and contributions.
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