Wheat farmers in the Pacific Northwest export up to 90 percent of their harvest; most of it is used to make noodles in Asia. “We are taking this situation very seriously and have launched a formal investigation,” said Michael Firko, of the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, in a press release.

The issue of genetic engineering of crops has been in the news in Washington state, as I-522, a  GE labeling initiative moves forward to the November 2013 ballot. While the Washington Association of Wheat Growers has been dismissive of claims that labeling would affect farmers’ abilities to export wheat, a response to the announcement of the discovery of the GE wheat in Oregon emphasized the safety of the food, and sought understanding from trade partners as the investigation continues.

Farmers in the east side of Washington grow 2.5 million acres of wheat, much of it the soft white wheat aimed for Asian markets. West of the Cascades, other markets for wheat are being cultivated. Farmers in this area are poised to feed the informed eaters who want grains with more identity than the anonymous products of the state’s grain belt.

Washington State University’s Mount Vernon Research and Extension Station tests 40,000 varieties of wheat each year–none of them genetically engineered. When Stephen Jones, director of the station, was the winter wheat breeder for Washington State University in Pullman, from 1995-2007, he struggled openly with farmer interest in GE crops. He wouldn’t breed anything that took ownership away from farmers and put it in the hands of corporations.

While all seed breeding seeks to develop specific traits, genetic engineering works through gene transfer, and can cross species barriers, which classical plant breeding cannot. Another reason genetic plant breeding is favored is the speed at which desired traits can be grown out. Jones is content to work at the pace of plants.

Plants have been hybridizing without human intervention for millennia. Jones and other plant breeders use classical breeding methods, relying on pollen to achieve results just as their peers did in the 1800s, when hybridization first became a habit.

“We make a cross in a greenhouse, put a male with a female in a dialysis sleeve,” said Jones. “Two generations out we plant test plots.”

However, even hybrids are perceived by some consumers as bad. The lack of transparency about genetic modification is adding to consumer confusion about seed breeding in general. Wheat breeding is taking a big hit from misconceptions promoted in the book Wheat Belly, which attacks modern wheat hybrids, claiming they are addictive and make people fat.

These fears and other concerns about gluten are giving gluten-free products a fierce market presence. On the other side, there is a separate, small but strong movement to relocalize grains, and Jones is part of it.

Across the country, farmers are putting grains in ground that haven’t seen a flour mill or malthouse for nearly a century. Researchers like Jones are working to help farmers find varieties that grow well in these areas, and also serve the needs of bakers and brewers. Conferences on grains and bread–like the Kneading Conference West, which Jones helps organize–are driving the movement forward.

“If you look at Iowa, this is what’s wrong with agriculture,” he said in Vermont in March, showing a 2008 USDA map that highlighted wheat production with green dots. The state was nearly white. “One hundred years ago, Iowa would be bright green. Now it’s wall to wall corn and soybeans. Winter wheat avoids drought. Corn and soy do not.”

The Northern Grain Growers Association had invited him to speak on the topic of growing grains “out of place,” or beyond the regions where the commodity crop is generally produced–eastern Washington and Oregon, Montana, the Dakotas, and Kansas. Jones gave a similar presentation in Tacoma at the Cascadia Grains Conference in January.

In the last century, same as other parts of our food supply, grain production was centralized. A staple food became a commodity crop, and the farmer know-how, and equipment needed to grow grains regionally was lost.

The research station builds on what farmers in the Skagit Valley and elsewhere in western Washington do know–how to grow commodity grains–with a goal of creating a closed loop system to meet the needs of farms and eaters in a region, from animal feed to flour and malting barley.

“These aren’t wheat farmers, these are farmers who grow wheat,” Jones said at his office and labs. Wheat farmers in eastern Washington grow large acres of commodity grains and little else. Farmers in his part of the state can’t afford to grow grains as their main crop. The land is too valuable, and the income from wheat is too low. Still, every few years, tulip, vegetable and seed farmers grow grains to break disease cycles and build up organic matter in the soil.

Growing the same plants year after year courts pathogens and pests. Grains are in the grass family, offering a break from the problems invited by other families of plants. Each family has different biological foes, so rotations help plants handle problems like funguses and bugs. Grains also add organic matter to the soil. Adding value to the grains farmers grow in rotation boosts farm economies as well as soil. Keeping those grains at home is key to Jones for many reasons, and not just because local food is in right now.

“I do like to get beyond the cliché of local and heirloom,” he said, and get to the root of the matter, which is to keep farmers farming in an area facing heavy development pressure.

News of GE wheat may well serve this mission, as consumer interest in non-commodity non-GE wheat could rise. Meanwhile, wheat farmers will have to contend with the risk of cross-contamination from this errant wheat–and the inadequacies of a regulatory system unprepared to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

Photo by Shutterstock

Come October, the Berkeley Unified School District’s (BUSD) edible education efforts will lose $1.9 million of U.S. Department of Agriculture financing (administered through the Network for a Healthy California) for 14 school cooking and garden programs, from the preschool through high school level. Unless replacement income is found, such cuts would essentially gut the district program, considered a model around the country.

The community is gearing up to raise funds and awareness on many levels. A Change.org petition is gathering signatures in support of the campaign. Individual schools are writing grant proposals and holding plant sales, movie nights, and fun runs to support cooking and gardening instruction. Meanwhile,  a city-wide Dine Out event is slated for May 30, with prominent local food businesses and restaurants in the mix such as the Cheese Board, Comal, Gather, Ippuku, La Note, and Revival Bar + Kitchen, who are all donating a percentage of sales to the classroom campaign.

Read complete story on KQED’s Bay Area Bites.

Read other posts by Sarah Henry on KQED’s Bay Area Bites.

“The food community’s enthusiasm is as high as it can be anywhere,” said Josh Morganthau, the Community Lead for Good Eggs in Brooklyn. He explained that as soon as Good Eggs launched in San Francisco, it set up a forum on its Web site where customers could request Good Eggs in its region. The majority of eager responses from folks commenting from outside the Bay Area were from Brooklyn.

Similar to Etsy and hopeful of competing with FreshDirect, Good Eggs is an online hub featuring numerous “webstands” from food producers in a specific geographical region. The company curates this list of local producers for each city by approving of applications and seeking out those based on their seasonal and sustainable-minded approaches to making food. Once a business is deemed a “good egg,” they can set their own parameters for prices, offerings, and delivery options. Good Eggs in turns offers them user-friendly software to organize and manage the flow of sales.

The model serves as an extra point-of-sale for producers who are already making local drop-offs in their city. “There’s a long list of businesses who can jump in and use the Web stands right away,” said Morganthau. “Once we open up the distribution, it’ll open it up to a lot more producers.”

That’s right, Good Eggs is planning to warehouse and distribute its community of producers’ offerings itself in Brooklyn soon. The distribution arm of Good Eggs has recently been launched in the Bay Area as of this spring, allowing customers to order from multiple Web stands at a time and get their delivery all together. Good Eggs is hoping to replicate the distribution aspect of its business in Brooklyn by mid-summer of this year.

“We’re getting warehouse space and vehicles to dive into it,” said Morganthau.

In addition to his new responsibilities to accomplish this quest, Morganthau is the proud manager of a Good Eggs Web stand himself–that of his family’s farm. As the third generation heir to Fishkill Farms, in Fishkill, New York, Morganthau returned to his family business after getting a degree in fine arts at Yale. There, he helps maintain its sustainable growing practices as well as its reach to New York City-dwellers, distributing to restaurants and setting up camp at Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens greenmarket on Sundays.

Despite the high enthusiasm for locally-produced food in Brooklyn, the principals at Good Eggs are faced with challenges and competition in its new landscape. Real estate is costly, making local inventory-keeping a steeper investment, and the glut of traffic can slow down an economy based on one-click, instant gratification. And several other subscription-based or simply digital-based local food services have been spawned in New York City in the last few months. But Good Eggs is hopeful that the values of eating well and from one’s own neighbors will outweigh what convenience factors that they can offer to begin with.

“We’ll be featuring Liddabit Sweets and Provenance Meals soon and NYC Farm Chic Flowers is able to do a 100 percent local bouquet of flowers, delivered to you the next day,” said Morganthau, excitedly sharing some upcoming Brooklyn-based webstands. As of now, even without the distribution help that Good Eggs plans to provide their producers, the opportunity to sell through its site is “stimulating the local food economy,” he said.

And while most, if not all, of the Brooklyn-based producers currently selling their wares through Good Eggs also deliver to Manhattan and sometimes Queens, Brooklyn’s prescience as the headquarters for the mission is two-fold: More customers seek it there, and more producers are based there.

“We’re looking into commercial space in Greenpoint and Manhattan,” said Morganthau of the as-yet-determined storage hub for its producers. “That’s where so much of the exciting food production is happening and there’s more commercial warehouse space here anyway.”

The fruit is so soft, in fact, that it leaves a trail of juice when harvested and moved from the fields. This makes the Marshall difficult to ship and store, but oh-so-good to eat. But Indiana-based artist Leah Gauthier does not believe that the absence of the Marshall in grocery stores means we can’t enjoy it, and her strawberry project introduces a new philosophy of produce distribution.

The Marshall Strawberry was all but phased out in the 1960s, but there is a renewed sense of interest in not only reviving heirloom horticultural varietals, but in investing in improving the taste of fruits and vegetables. A focus on the strawberry in food publications (including Civil Eats) is proof of the popularity of this bright little fruit, and the extent to which we will go to make sure it remains in our food supply.

Strawberries have become a focal point for a wide intersection of food system discussions, many of them targeting health – the health of workers that handle strawberries, the health of the soil that grows them, and the nutrient content of the strawberries themselves.

For years methyl bromide was the chosen fumigant for strawberries, but as it was found to deplete the ozone layer, an international treaty required its phase out by 2005. Its replacement was methyl iodide, which quickly also became controversial. After a peer-reviewed study focused on the chemical indicated that as a neurotoxin it could cause thyroid cancer and brain damage, the Department of Pesticide Regulation published acceptable exposure levels that were 120 times higher than recommended by its own scientists in the study.

Pesticides used in conjunction with methyl iodide, like Chloropicrin, were found in the air near virtually all of the farming operations conducted by Driscoll’s, the largest strawberry distributor in the country. When the Tokyo-based Arysta LifeScience Corps. announced in March 2012 that it was withdrawing methyl iodide from the U.S. market, strawberry growers and eaters alike were shocked. It turns out the company was on the verge of losing a major lawsuit over the chemical.

However, strawberries are so delicate that they are especially vulnerable to pests and viruses. Without methyl iodide and other conventional pesticides, strawberry production needs to change course. A few small projects to revitalize the Marshall strawberry have come and gone since the species was first discovered in 1883. Gauthier has taken it upon herself to reintroduce the Marshall Strawberry to the public and present it as something new: a project integrating growing, eating, urban agriculture, and cultural identity.

In 2007, she requested a few plants from the USDA’s Germplasm Repository in Corvallis, Oregon, the site of the three remaining Marshall Strawberry plants. Those last plants have grown into the hundreds strawberry runners that Gauthier will be releasing this season. Her Marshall Strawberry Pop-Up Shop allows customers to purchase runners from the plants that she began reviving six years ago.

The delicacy of the strawberry, she explains, is both a blessing and a curse. While its fragility means it can never be shipped thousands of miles and sold a few weeks after being harvested, it also means that in order to enjoy the strawberry, it has to be eaten locally.

“It is truly a local agricultural product,” Gauthier says. “You really have to enjoy it where it is grown, which means a lot of people have to participate.” She aims to distribute the Marshall to growers and eaters who will in turn distribute even more runners to friends and family. The end goal, she says, is that her role in the project will become obsolete, and the Marshall will grow in numbers through an informal, grassroots network of strawberry lovers.

The unstructured distribution that Gauthier has established with the Marshall offers an alternative to the supermarket model. While she is working to revive a forgotten heirloom varietal, the project also blurs the line separating the consumers from the producers. Participants in the Marshall project are one and the same.

We gathered for trainings, conversation, and immersion in Detroit’s urban farms and gardens. We delved into issues of food justice and inequity, both local and national. We heard from local leaders about their organizations and companies, and the career paths they’ve followed. And, of course, we got our hands dirty on some field trips.

It’s not easy bringing everyone together in person, but these meetings are an important part of the experience for our service members, and they’re critical to helping FoodCorps learn as we grow.

Detroit provided an important backdrop for this event. Like many of the communities we serve, Detroit faces high rates of childhood obesity and food insecurity, economic hardship, and institutionalized inequality. At the same time, Detroit is a place where local solutions to these problems are taking root. Detroit is addressing its challenges through strategic and thoughtful community organizations and leaders who have stepped up to build thriving new communities centered on food and agriculture. We’re proud to be a part of this through partnerships with organizations like the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network––one of our service sites in Detroit, where FoodCorps service member Whitney Smith is spending her year.

While together, we celebrated our accomplishments since August: reaching nearly 55,000 children in 300 schools, giving them opportunities to gain knowledge of what real food is in the classroom, to engage hands-on with fruits and vegetables in school gardens, and to get access to farm-fresh ingredients in their cafeterias. And while our metrics of success this year are strong (13 football fields worth of school gardens! 2,000 volunteers! 230 healthy items added to lunch menus!), our proudest accomplishments come in the form of stories.

That’s why, while in Detroit, we held our first ever “FoodTalks,” an evening of storytelling that we recorded, and can be seen on YouTube. We had a chance to hear from service members in each state about how they see FoodCorps service working in their communities; about students who have taught them as much as they’re teaching; about the people in their lives who inspired them to get involved in food and farming; and about where they see themselves headed after FoodCorps service. Jen Rusciano, another of our FoodCorps service members in Detroit, explained to us how her student, “Jay,” who usually struggled with school, found connection and pride through the small food business he created with his peers.

These are the stories that fuel our service members to keep doing what they do. Each of them could tell a similar story, about a child who fell in love with gardening, about a school food director who was willing to think outside the box.

We hope you’ll take a moment to watch some of these beautiful stories, and maybe feel inspired to start telling your own.

But college students across the country are taking a stand. Through the creation of student run, sustainably sourced food ventures these young people are creating a food system that is good for their bodies, communities, and the planet. 

The Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive is a network and training program for college students starting food cooperatives, and today we are launching a video on financial management that will bring business terms to life using carrot costumes and bacon kale donuts.

Follow up at www.cofed.org to learn more about the cooperative sustainable food businesses that we work with. If seeing students creating real change in their communities inspires you, CoFED invites you to give. We need to raise $5,000 from 50 new donors in the 96 hours after Earth Day in order to get a matched donation from our funders at the 11th Hour Project.  Donate today!

Watch the video on financial management here:

My work takes me around the continent, speaking at local food conferences, new economy events, green business workshops, and the like, where I have the privilege of interacting with some very advanced thinkers and doers in the world of local, sustainable agriculture. I teach about financing mechanisms that enable food entrepreneurs to access mission-aligned capital that will help them keep the values in their business, wherever they fall in the food value chain, from farm to fork and back again. I do this because I am passionate about supporting small food businesses, the backbone of our economy and so often, the keepers of what makes a specific place unique in an increasingly homogenized strip-mall landscape.

When I mention to people I meet during my travels that I’ve written a book on financing socially responsible food businesses, the first question I usually get is, “Can I buy your book on Amazon?”

The short answer is, “yes,” but I hope you’ll consider buying it from your local, independently-owned bookseller instead. Here’s why, through the lens of food.

Buying local food from Walmart does not have the same economic benefits – to your local farmers or local community as a whole – as buying local food from locally-owned retailers. Big food retailers pay fewer taxes than locally-owned businesses, hamstringing local government programs. Even if they do buy local produce, local goods represent a very small proportion of their offerings, and they recycle very little (if any) of their revenues buying other local goods or services. Plus, you have the problems associated with letting a huge, multinational company choose what products they will buy, from whom, and at what price.

It’s the same in the book publishing and selling world. Locally-owned, independent booksellers pay more taxes, circulate more money within their local communities, and are often cornerstone businesses in endangered downtown retail zones. Much like the seed-savers of the book world, they are the ones promoting “book biodiversity,” choosing to display and promote titles, authors, and publishers that might disappear in Amazon’s more controlled, monopolistic environment, made even more powerful by its recent acquisition of GoodReads.

What about the issue of price? Anyone who has helped promote local food knows that positioning on low cost is not as effective as setting local food apart by its taste, freshness, connection to community, and all its other benefits; often, local food is just going to be more expensive than food from afar. So in the food access conversation, aren’t Walmart’s low prices a good thing? Truth is, Walmart’s low prices come at a great cost to communities. Furthermore, low prices at big box stores are often offset by the costs of getting there, either in terms of gas money, or in terms of the time it takes to get there and back by public transportation, bicycle, or walking.

Just like with food, sometimes access to resources (books or otherwise) is limited by cost. Though I have worked out a few ways for you to access discounted copies, you’ll probably find the lowest retail price for my book on Amazon. (Full disclosure: Finance for Food, my nonprofit which receives all royalty payments from sales of my book, and Chelsea Green, its employee-owned publisher will benefit just as much when you buy my book from a huge online retailer as when you buy it from an independent bookseller.)

But consider the cost of losing your favorite local bookstore. How do you quantify the lost community fundraising events, the empty storefront, the missing opportunities to stumble across obscure books you hadn’t thought to search for online… never mind the tax revenues lost to sales made outside your city, county, state lines?

The American Booksellers Association has a program called IndieBound to promote independent booksellers, and I love how they see themselves as part of a whole that is much larger than books: “IndieBound is a socially-conscious movement in support of independent businesses and shopping locally, starting with indie bookstores. It’s about raising awareness, it’s about reaching out, and it’s about taking pride in your community. It’s about what makes your hometown a more interesting place.”

That we, as a food movement, do not often connect the Buy Local dots to other sectors of our economy troubles me (though I suppose it’s not all that surprising, given that the food movement itself has some challenges connecting the dots). The more we support Buy Local campaigns for all kinds of products and retailers, in addition to those in the food system, the more we amplify the work we do to create more self-reliant, resilient communities, period.

The people who are responding to appeals to, for instance, shop at local retail stores during the holidays are the same people who would understand the benefits of shopping at a local farmers market. Wouldn’t it make sense to join forces when it comes to communicating with the same audiences?

I don’t claim that I have all (or really, any) real, on-the-ground next steps figured out, and I am the first to admit that I am doing the best job that I could be at building partnerships, whether within or across sectors. But I do know which organization is “minding the movement” (to borrow Andy Fischer’s phrase) for all things local, and making these types of connections: the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, or BALLE.

BALLE sees local food as one of the building blocks of a vibrant, healthy, and just economy that provides prosperity for all. They connect leaders, spread solutions that work, and drive investment toward local economies. I am honored to be launching my book and giving a couple workshops at their upcoming national conference for business leaders, social entrepreneurs, network leaders, and local economy funders, policy makers, and localists of all stripes, taking place in Buffalo, NY, June 12-14 (register by April 22 to take advantage of early-bird pricing).

Whether or not you can join us, spend a moment or two thinking about the ways in which your food work is connected to other local efforts in other sectors, and how you might be stronger working together. And I hope that the next time you need to buy anything, be it food or anything else, you’ll buy local.

Here’s the 30-second supply chain story. First, a local rancher raises a grass-fed steer. The animal is taken to a slaughter facility and now you have a beef carcass – about 500+ lbs. of meat hanging in two big pieces on hooks in a walk-in cooler.  From there, it can either go as a half or quarter carcass to a wholesale customer (restaurant, retailer or food service) or be processed (cut and packaged for sale direct to individual consumers or wholesale clients) depending on the needs of the end customer and the type of processing facility used.

For restaurants and butcher shops that specialize in high quality meats, whole, half, and quarter carcasses are the only way to go. With a whole, half or quarter beef carcass, they can dry age the meat for as long as they like and then process it into the exact cuts their clientele demands.

Herein lies the problem: As of February 2013, there is not a single meat processing facility in the Bay Area that will deliver a whole, half or quarter beef carcass to a restaurant or butcher shop. Ranchers aren’t really equipped to make the deliveries themselves. One needs a refrigerated box truck with a meat rail inside of it – something that very, very few ranchers have.  Same for restaurants and butcher shops – most chefs and butchers are not in the business of going out and picking up the products they purchase, particularly large bulky items that need to be kept cool at all times.

In addition to the headaches this situation creates for local ranchers, butchers and chefs, a huge educational opportunity is lost by not being able to deliver whole carcasses to local restaurants and butcher shops. John Richter, of Harley Richter Meats, is a butcher who specializes in working with whole carcasses.

He described how detrimental it would be to his business if he had to now start relying on pre-cut packages of meat, or “boxed meat,” for the sausages, pates and other specialties that he prepares for sale at the Marin Farmers Market. “There is always going to be an element of education in a butcher shop,” said Richter, “and the more people who know how to butcher the better.”  He works with other butchers and chefs who want to learn the art of butchery and be able to utilize every part of the animal.

The ability to deliver whole carcasses is also critical to local ranches like the Magruder Ranch in Potter Valley, CA.  Grace Magruder,  fifth generation on the ranch, explained how their “whole animal program” (i.e., selling whole carcasses to restaurants and butcher shops) is an important part of her family’s business.

“When we first started selling whole animals to butcher shops and restaurants, like Chez Panisse, about 12 years ago it was maybe one third of our business,” she said. “Now, it easily accounts for 75 to 80 percent of the ranch’s sales.”  Previously, they were able to get half and whole beef carcasses delivered to their restaurant and butcher shop clients.

Now, those carcasses are arriving cut up into smaller pieces because there is no processor that is willing to deliver them whole.  Magruder Ranch has had to field complaints from unhappy butchers and chefs that can no longer age and process the meat the way they used to be able to when whole carcass delivery was available.  “The care factor is really important to us. We want to work with someone who takes these animals as seriously as we do, who keeps that level of investment, pride and responsibility that we put into them on the ranch all the way through to the finished product,” said Magruder.

So what can be done?  The most logical solution is for an existing slaughter facility or meat processor to offer whole animal distribution to local butcher shops, restaurants and retailers.  These operations are already in the meat business and used to dealing with carcasses, and it would be a natural extension of their services.  However, the profit margins on deliveries are slim and distribution might not be an attractive endeavor for many meat processors.

If distribution isn’t a terribly profitable enterprise, maybe it should just be seen as a cost of doing business.  For example, wineries don’t make money off of putting their wine in bottles – it is just something that has to be done to get the wine to the customer. In addition, a cooperative of ranchers, chefs and butchers could take on distribution and fold those costs into the price of the meat.

While this could be difficult to set up, in the long run it would be a business designed by and operated by those who know the product best – local ranchers, butchers and chefs.  Here’s to the entrepreneur who solves the distribution conundrum!  Your local ranchers, butchers and chefs will be eternally grateful.

FCS is a nationwide network of 85 customer-owned cooperatives. Created by Congress to serve all of agriculture, FCS is America’s largest agricultural lender, booking nearly $192 billion in loans and earning more than $4 billion in profits in 2012.

Its lenders take pride in being able to close loans in a matter of minutes for relatively low risk borrowers who are beneficiaries of federal subsidy programs. No wonder Farm Credit affiliates are well-known within agribusiness circles and an enigma in the local food marketplace.

Keeping local food constituencies at arm’s length is not an effective strategy for FCS to retain its status as a “Government Sponsored Enterprise” (GSE).  That helps to explain the purpose of a new federal regulation requiring FCS affiliates to submit annual marketing plans reflecting “diversity and inclusion” in their market territory. Farm Credit Administration regulatory official Mark Johansen told the Illinois Council  that the FCA expects to see “strategies and actions” demonstrating service to “all eligible and creditworthy persons.”

The Illinois Council intends to reach out to FCS affiliates and help ensure that they become a dynamic force among farmers eager to supply consumer demand for healthy, green, fair, and affordable products sourced from nearby farms. The Council views its statewide networking capability as a tool FCS can use to create a systemic approach to reconstructing regional food economies throughout the Midwest.

New face on an old problem

FCS is the outgrowth of federal legislation that filled a financial-services vacuum impeding agricultural development in the early 20th Century.  In his 1913 State of the Union address, President Woodrow Wilson advocated legislation enabling farmers to secure “their own abundant and substantial credit resources…as a foundation for joint, concerted local action in their own behalf.”

The 1916 Federal Farm Loan Act authorized $9 million to start 12 Federal Land Banks.

This first federal farm aid program created a pathway for borrowers to own the new banking system. As rural America gained easy access to Wall Street capital markets, Washington invested massive federal resources in a cheap food system. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson praised that Farm Loan Act for having “opened the door to modern farming.”

In 2008, as a consultant for Farm Credit’s Washington lobbying organization, I co-authored an internal report to inform the FCS network about the local food marketplace. “Growing Opportunity” identified long-term economic potential and short-term political risk.  FCS affiliates were not keen to hear their loan portfolio supports a widely reviled global food system. The report caught the eye of their federal regulator which has since advised proactive engagement with local food constituencies to avoid “losing relevance in the marketplace.”

Proactive role for Congress?

Congress could help by requiring a dedicated funding stream.  There is the precedent of another GSE, the Federal Home Loan Bank. FHLB fiercely opposed a provision in the 1989 savings-and-loan bailout requiring allocation of a portion of profits for affordable housing grants. Today, FHLB touts that 10 percent set-aside as a demonstration of its public purpose.

In 2012, FCS lobbyists squashed two Farm Bill measures that sought to replicate the FHLB precedent.  The first proposed “10 percent rule” would have meant $400M+ a year in loans and grants to grow local food economies at no cost to the federal government.  A second one would have tapped FCS’ annual $600M+ in federal real estate exemptions.  After both measures were killed without so much as a hearing, an anonymous Capitol Hill staffer told me in a private conversation: “the single greatest reason local food systems aren’t growing more rapidly is that Farm Credit isn’t doing the job it was created to do.”

Effective implementation of the new reg could accomplish the same end.  FCS has much to gain by developing a plan to phase in an annual investment of 10 percent of profits to grow a vibrant nationwide network of small-scale farmers.

Community reinvestment

For starters, FCS affiliates should rethink their longstanding “mission” from Congress to supply credit and “related services” to young, beginning, and small farmers.  The main response has been discounted loan terms.  A more expansive view of “related services” could provide resources to energize foodshed planning initiatives nationwide.

The Illinois Council will seek FCS help leveraging $2 million in USDA farmer training funds that Illinois groups received in fiscal year 2012 to increase the number of farmers supplying nearby markets. FCS participation could attract other financial sector players and spur investment in all components of the supply network—including aggregation, processing, distribution, marketing, and waste management.

Food councils are “much-needed mechanisms” to “identify and advocate for food system change,” according to a new report by Harvard University’s Food Law and Policy Clinic.  State food councils could become much-needed partners for FCS to retool itself to adequately meet both large-scale and small-scale needs of 21st Century agriculture.

The Illinois Council views effective implementation of the new “diversity and inclusion” regulation as a means to lay the groundwork for brokering the peace in America’s agriculture wars.  Such a step could be essential to ensuring that President Obama will want to give a speech in 2016 honoring the Farm Credit System’s centennial.

Yet, Detroit is also an epicenter of the good food movement with hundreds of neighborhood and school gardens, farmers’ markets and farm stands, and energetic urban farmers sprouting up around the city. Our new video about Fair Food Network’s Strengthening Detroit Voices project illustrates both the challenges facing Detroit citizens and the innovative solutions they are developing to provide healthy food for their community.

Recently, Fair Food Network sponsored a virtual gathering, a “Detroit Telephone Town Hall,” that brought together 7,500 Detroiters–people who are concerned about accessing healthy food for their families. Fifty-eight percent of people polled during the Town Hall said that the biggest issue they face in feeding their family healthy food is the cost.

According to the 2011 U. S. Census, more than 31 percent of Detroit families reported an income below the poverty level and more than 34 percent receive government food assistance. More than half a million residents live in neighborhoods where they must travel twice as far to reach a grocery store as a convenience store, gas station or liquor store, where healthy, fresh food is difficult to find. As a result, they are frequently compelled to purchase low-quality, highly-processed products, often at higher prices than in the suburbs.

Fair Food Network understands the depth of the food problem in Detroit and believes that only through the collective, authentic voices of Detroiters can citizens effect the changes in public policy that will make a difference in their quality of life.

Local community leaders and organizations have identified federal policies that they believe will shrink food deserts and increase access to healthy, fresh foods.  These policies include expanding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and encouraging USDA to pilot incentive programs to encourage SNAP participants to purchase local fresh produce, like the Double Up Food Bucks Program.

One of our partners, Ponsella Hardaway, leader of the community organization Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength (MOSES), comments:  “Sometimes, people say, ‘What can I do about something so big?’ But if we create a huge network and relationships and conversations about this, I think people can feel more empowered – ‘I do have a voice.’”

Our Strengthening Detroit Voices video illustrates the vital collaboration between citizens and community leaders and organizations to inform public policy at the local, state, and national levels to grow a healthy, sustainable food system for all.