Tierra Vegetables farmer Lee James raises what she calls “the remnants of the oldest flock of Shetland sheep west of the Mississippi.” A small flock, around a dozen sheep, eats leftover produce and grazes her home acreage, but there are so few at this point that it’s hardly worth it to harvest their wool, she says.

“I keep them for the wool, but it doesn’t really pay for itself,” says James.  Most of the world’s wool is now produced in Australia, New Zealand, and China, so the infrastructure in the U.S. has all but disappeared. The cost of shearing the sheep amounts to more than Lee can get for the wool. “It’s not something you’d get into to make a lot of money, but it’s something I really enjoy,” says James.

James has her sheep sheared every spring; most weeks of the year shoppers can find raw wool and yarn at the Tierra booth at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco, where it serves as a useful reminder that local agriculture does not stop at food.

In addition to yarn, James has often brought in whole fleeces for people to look at and touch. “So many people pick up the yarn and say, ‘Oh, it smells like sheep!’ But they don’t know what sheep smell like,” says James in her signature dead-pan tone. “I don’t usually say anything, but it doesn’t smell like sheep; it smells like spinning oil. The fleeces, on the other hand…”

Do market shoppers tend to draw a connection between local farming and textiles? “A few of them do, yes. But not many,” says James.

If Rebecca Burgess has a say, all that’s about to change. “We see people who are eating food from the farmers markets and going to restaurants where they know the farms, but they’re wearing clothes that equate to eating meals at 7-11,” she observes.

Burgess has been involved in a variety of projects designed to cultivate awareness of locally made fibers and the clothing they become. The latest is a year-long challenge to create an all-local wardrobe called Fibershed (think “watershed” but based on fiber). Now, she’s expanding the project beyond her wardrobe to create a network with the same name made up of “weavers, dyers, farmers, engineers, thinkers, makers, and artisans” within 150 miles of her Marin home.

Why local clothing? In truth, the movement toward clothing made on a small scale from ecologically farmed fibers is not very different than the parallel efforts to build local food systems, just a little less developed.

For example, Burgess is working with one of the only small-scale organic cotton producers in the state of California*, Sally Fox, as well as local wool producers who take a sustainable approach. She’s also fundraising in the hopes of purchasing crucial equipment (the first goal is a new solar-powered mill; currently there is only one in the area.) that will allow the supply and demand for local clothing to grow and, ideally, incentivize more fiber producers.

“We’re not trying to mimic industrial production, but we are trying to find that scale halfway between hand-spinning your yarn and a football field-sized industrial spinning rack,” says Burgess. Not, in many ways, unlike artisan food production.

“I’d love to see the food movement incorporate the fiber movement, because, whether it’s what we put in our body or what we put on our bodies, all of it comes from the same soil.”

Learn more about Fibershed here.

*When it comes to pesticide use, conventional cotton is considered the world’s “dirtiest” crop.

Originally published by CUESA

With news of Wal-Mart shifting their purchasing priorities to attract proponents of local food and the mainstream agriculture industry launching a $30 million PR campaign to fight against their rapidly corroding image, it seems like we should be glowing in triumph… the people have spoken and the corporations are responding in fear! But it isn’t that simple.

The risk of green-washing will certainly cloud the judgment of most citizens (and Wal-Mart shoppers) rather than inspire understanding of the complex layers of contradictions “sustainable food” issues present.  Even those of us who have pledged most of our lives, and finances, to supporting and promoting the small food businesses that actually do adhere to ethical, fair, small scale practices have a hard time sorting through it all.  But what hurts the most is, even in a time when terms like “sustainable” or “artisan” or “local & organic” seem old hat and cliché, the hard facts remain that the real people working so hard to produce these foods for us still can’t always succeed.

In 2004, a young couple in Santa Cruz, California started a small pig farm called TLC Ranch. At the time, very few options existed for us to get local, pasture raised meats locally, and when the stall appeared at our farmer’s market, our community exclaimed a collective, “Finally!”  Opportunities to engage in the whole process of meat production were at hand, pig roasts ensued, and the best chicken eggs outside of your own coop blossomed into a popular business.  In the beginning, they teamed up with a craft butcher who brought us amazing, innovative delicacies.  TLC was tagged on menus up and down the coast, and to all outside appearances, they seemed to be flourishing.

A few weeks ago, the monthly newsletter we receive brought quite a shock. With our mouths agape we read through the reasons why TLC Ranch has officially thrown in the trowel.  Probably the biggest challenge for them is the cost of land.  Here in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties the monstrous berry industry, long time cattle ranchers, or housing developments speak for the majority of usable pastureland.  The price to purchase is, even right now at the lowest point in the busted housing market, ridiculously high.  The cost to rent is equally as prohibitive.  “For all 48 acres we rent, we pay about 10 times the going rate for pasture.” states TLC owner Rebecca Thistlethwaite.  She goes on to discuss that typical leases are too short to sustain long-term business systems, coupled with the feeling of throwing away bundles of cash into the landlord’s pocket and never building equity for their own family.  These reasons hold true to the organic farming community as well.

Another huge issue had to do with meat processing and our nation’s current laws and regulations.  These are the same reasons we keep hearing about mobile slaughtering units and how they might alleviate the lack of high quality meat processing.  Thistlethwaite comments on TLC’s experience within the monopolized governmental system:

California has only a handful of USDA-inspected slaughter and butcher facilities. Because there are only a few, it is hard to even get an appointment to bring your animals in (one place we called had a seven month waiting list!). Also, because these abattoirs don’t have much competition, they don’t have to provide high-quality customer service to ranchers. They can charge what they want, they can choose not to follow your detailed butchering instructions (for example, put nitrates in the hams that you asked for “nitrate-free”, cut all the fat off your pork chops when you asked for two inches of fat on them, etc.). These abattoirs charge you by the carcass weight of your animal and then sometime they won’t even give you the whole animal back that you paid for, such as taking the head, the organ meats, the feet, etc. So we work our butt off to raise this amazing animal and then the butchers devalue your hard work. Having zero control over our processing is extremely frustrating and costly.

And finally, aside from just pure exhaustion and depleted quality of life while they struggled to keep going, TLC felt that too many consumers are not willing to actually put their money where their mouths are.  The price of quality, local foods are insulated with built in costs of organics, transportation, fair labor, taxes and fees. Cheap, highly processed foods with subsidized ingredients shed those layers, keeping them transparent and letting them land on our healthcare industry and float into our ozone layer.

Despite the saturation of local and organic options, or perhaps because of them, let’s try to remember that those extra few bucks really are worth it.  It takes a hardcore amount of backbreaking work, and energy, and motivation, and thought, and money to make a small-scale, sustainable food business succeed.  If we all claim to want them so much, let’s keep supporting them too.

You can visit Thistethwaite’s blog to follow the former TLC family on their next adventure, road-tripping and volunteering across the country.

Photo: TLC Ranch

In celebration of its 25th year, Farm Aid, the longest running concert-for-a-cause, has published a report to help us make this push. Rebuilding America’s Economy with Family-Farm Centered Food Systems takes one of the more sensitive topics in the American psyche today, the economy, and convincingly demonstrates the bounty of opportunity that family farmers can bring to local and regional communities.

Starting with a rally cry from Farm Aid’s celebrity board, originally drafted in a letter to Congress in September of 2008 in a call to recognize the potential of family farmers to revive the collapsing U.S. economy, Rebuilding America’s Economy paints a vision of what our nation could look like:

A $1 billion [a micro mini portion of the $700 billion bailout] investment in family farm agriculture would enrich us all, because we are all shareholders of the family farm. The return on investment in the family farm includes thriving local economies, nutritious food for better health, a safer and more secure food supply, a cleaner environment and more renewable energy. Investing in local, sustainable and organic food would shorten the distance between eaters and farmers, conserve energy, create economic opportunities, and new jobs through innovative processing and distribution systems, resulting in a better, greener, more efficient food and farm economy.

Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, and Dave Matthews
Farm Aid Board of Directors

Showing the sophistication of knowing millions of farmers over the years, Farm Aid authors launch the report by eschewing black and white definitions of “family farmer” and other key terms. Instead, the report offers that family farmers are those who own the majority of the land or tools, make most of the decisions, and do most of the work. Perhaps more importantly, however, that each farmer who meets the above description inherently possesses the capacity to earn and demand fair wages, further community well-being, be an environmental steward, and promote public health. These are the values that make up the foundation for the family-farm centered food systems envisioned in the report.

It’s hard talking points fall right into line as you read “Rebuilding America.” For example, research by David Swenson of Iowa State University, in conjunction with the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, shows “increased fruit and vegetable production could boost regional farm sales by over $882 million, and spur retail-level sales as high as $3.31 billion. The effort would also generate 9,032 farm-level jobs and 9,652 retail level jobs, and a corresponding $395.1 million in farm level labor income…”

To my mind, jobs and increased income/sales are exactly what’s needed at this very moment in economic history. Just in case data doesn’t make people’s heart sing the way mine does, I will simply submit that the report gives a multitude of similarly compelling facts that demonstrate the potential impact of small and medium sized farms to create thriving local economies by growing local, direct markets and regional value chains to feed wholesale demand.

Giving color to the well-researched data, are six case studies that show what can be done when a commitment to values is held equally to that of the bottom line: Shepherd’s Grain, Indian Springs Farmers Association, Woodbury County, IA, Red Tomato, Hardwick, VT, and Community Farm Alliance. These case studies show that each region, group of farmers, or specific product requires its own innovation. In Kentucky, for example, where tobacco used to be the cash crop, Community Farm Alliance has helped farmers put their Tobacco Settlement offers to good use shifting their farms to more diversified operations. With more food crops in the ground across the state, CFA can now estimate that “if Kentucky were to match the national average for per-farm direct marketing sales, it would generate an additional $7.9 million in farm income and $15.8 million for the state as a whole.”

In 1985, Willie Nelson named the family farmer the backbone of the country and the bottom rung on the economic ladder on which all else depends. Twenty-five years later, it is the job of the enthusiast and the advocate to understand what family farmers truly have to offer and what resources they need to seize the moment. Farm Aid, this report, the resources (down to the footnotes), and case studies in it, are an excellent place to start.

After months of uncertainty, the Senate is expected to bring pending food safety legislation to the floor within the next week.

The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (S. 510), has been stalled behind health care reform and other priorities since it was unanimously voted out of committee in mid-November. The coalition of interests supporting the bill, which includes the major food industry groups, public health organizations, and consumer advocates, and Senate staff working on the bill have been waiting for a break in a busy legislative schedule to bring the bill to the floor where it is expected to pass easily with broad bipartisan support.

Though S. 510 has the coalition needed to clear the Senate–which some would consider a miracle in this political climate–the small, sustainable agriculture community is still voicing serious concerns about certain provisions in the bill which, they contend, will stifle small-scale, local food production.

Eighty-seven groups, including the Center for Food Safety, Food Democracy Now!, R-CALF USA and dozens of food co-ops, recently signed a letter in support of an amendment proposed by Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) that would exempt small, local processing facilities from the bill’s hazard analysis and risk-based preventative controls and traceability requirements.

“Farmers and processors who sell directly to consumers and end users have a direct relationship with their customers that ensures quality, safety, transparency and accountability,” said the letter.  “In addition, small-scale food producers are already regulated by local and state authorities, and the potential risk their products pose is inherently limited by their size. For these farmers and processors, new federal requirements are unnecessary and would simply harm both the food producers and their consumers.”

In anticipation of the Senate vote, there have been a flurry of action alerts from dozens of ag groups to garner support for several amendments to lessen the impact of federal regulation on small farmers and producers. “There’s no doubt that industrial agriculture needs better oversight. But family-scale local and organic farms are probably the safest in the nation–they are part of the solution, not part of the problem–and need to be protected,” said The Cornucopia Institute in an action alert last week.

The notion that small farmers and producers are not the source of the nation’s food safety problems is a common theme in the dozens of alerts circulating via Twitter, email, and Facebook.  But the coordinated campaign for federal food safety reform, driven by the Make Our Food Safe Coalition, of which the Pew Charitable Trusts, Consumers Union, the Center for Science of Public Interest, and the Grocery Manufacturers of America are all members, does not support federal exemptions.

“We do have issues with anything that provides any blanket exemptions,” Sandra Eskin, director of the food safety campaign with The Pew Charitable Trusts, said in an interview. “Food should be safe regardless of its source–big processor, small farm, conventional operation or organic grower. We can talk about scale-appropriate regulation, but not exemptions.”

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), is also working with Senate staff to get specific provisions in the manager’s amendment (a group of amendments both sides of the aisle agree upon before debate). NSAC wants the FDA to focus “only on those on-farm processing and co-mingling activities that present significant risk for causing for foodborne pathogen contamination” and ensure food safety performance standards are based on scientific risk assessments. They would also like to see traceability requirements relaxed and a shift to a progressive fee structure–the House version, which passed in July, calls for a $500 flat registration fee per food facility.

Aimee Witteman, a spokeswoman for NSAC, said last week that, though the situation remains uncertain, she is optimistic that some of NSAC’s concerns will be addressed in the manager’s amendment.

If all goes as planned in the Senate, a final bill could be on the President’s desk within a few weeks. Both House and Senate versions give the agency mandatory recall authority, require more frequent inspections, and ask food facilities to implement food safety plans. The legislation incorporates key recommendations from the President’s Food Safety Working Group, which was launched shortly after the massive, multi-state Salmonella peanut outbreak in early 2009.

Originally published on Food Safety News

It isn’t only small producers who are feeling the pinch—a widespread lack of processing infrastructure appropriate for small farmers has caused supply chain problems for the big retailers as well. Whole Foods—the world’s largest natural-foods supermarket—wants to aggressively expand its local meat sourcing, according to its head meat buyer, Theo Weening. But it faces the same limitation as Hashley. Most regions of the country have “lots of agriculture but nowhere to process,” Weening told me, adding that the phenomenon is most acute in the northeast.

Whole Foods wants to change all that. In a move that has national implications, the retail giant has confirmed to Grist that it is working with the USDA as well as state authorities to establish a fleet of top-of-the-line “mobile slaughterhouses” for chicken. Starting with a single unit serving Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Hudson Valley, N.Y. area, Whole Foods hopes to offer small farmers an affordable way to process chickens as well as to vastly increase the amount of locally-sourced chicken it sells. If successful, this program could be expanded to any region of the country with similar infrastructure shortages.

Read the rest of this exclusive story at Grist

Two weeks ago, I noticed that two of my tomato plants had late blight. I was up on the roof, weeding, pulling off yellowing leaves from all the excess rain, and harvesting some early tomatoes when I noticed leaves with yellow and brown spots on them. I’d read the article in the New York Times about the blight, and so I sent out the photo on the left to Twitter, asking my followers, “is this the blight?” The answer, sadly, was yes. So I pulled one plant up, before it could spread to the others, and took all the leaves off the other plant which was confined to a corner, hoping to let it’s three giant tomatoes ripen.

Unfortunately, rooftops are not immune from the soil disease that ravages spuds and tomatoes — I bought my seedlings from two small nurseries upstate, which had grown them locally. But it is possible that contamination had already spread to my tomatoes from the nurseries’ neighbors who bought their plants at big box stores like Lowe’s and Wal-Mart, which sold plants in soil from an Alabama facility that carried the blight. Ironically, it is new growers’ enthusiasm that might have exacerbated the disease through increased consumer demand. And while a record number of people are growing some of their own produce this year, excess rain in the northeast has created the perfect conditions for the blight to flourish — but it is small organic farmers that are taking a punch.

Last week I spoke to some of the farmers at the Union Square farmer’s market. Three of my favorite sustainable farms are not spraying, even though it means a losses of up to $25,000. It’s a depressing worse case scenario. Amy Hepworth, the farmer at Hepworth Farms (my CSA) and Kira Kenney of Evolutionary Organics, both places from whom I normally get beautiful tomatoes for eating and canning, have sustained big losses this year. Another of my favorites farms, known for their tomatoes, has decided to spray to save their harvest — for the first time in 14 years. It’s hard to tell farmers not to spray. As M.K. Wyle wrote on Civil Eats last week, its painful to watch all of that work be destroyed in one fell swoop.

So what can be done, and is this just the farmer’s gambit? On my rooftop, I’ve planted salad greens and kale in the place of my missing tomatoes. But for small farms, most of which grow diverse crops and often don’t qualify for disaster insurance, such a loss could put them further into debt and make their ability to grow in the future uncertain. It is possible that had plants been grown from seed nearby, and soil stayed in its region, we wouldn’t see the blight spreading like it is through the northeast. So should small farms bear the brunt of the burden alone?

Governor Paterson doesn’t think so. He requested recently that the USDA designate 17 New York counties as agricultural disaster areas. If these counties get this designation, low-interest loans will be made available based on the extent of the losses.

But loans aren’t ideal. I’m glad that the option is there, but how about better supports in Washington for diversified growers, who support a healthier population and healthier soil? Loans are more like a band-aid, after the fact. Growers of cotton, soy, wheat, corn and other non-perishable commodities are protected because they are the biggest producers, and as such have the most detailed crop histories, lobbies, and of course that longer shelf life.

Getting crop insurance is based on data sets and tables which are essentially a history of a certain crop’s performance. According to Scott Marlow, of the Rural Advancement Foundation International, there is precious little information being gathered on USDA-designated “specialty crops” (around 10 million acres planted according to the 2007 census, a fraction of the total 310 million acres planted in the US), like tomatoes, and so it’s harder for these farmers to get coverage. It is also harder for them to get loans, which are often based on crop insurance.

Furthermore, planting restrictions put in place by the federal government aim to keep specialty crops at that 10 million acres so as to control prices. If a farmer shifts from commodity crops to specialty crops, they lose the payments on their land. All of this means that a farmer has to feel really passionate about diversified growing, because they are managing their own risk most of the time. And the growth of the local food movement gets stifled by these realities, too.

But I would argue that the farmers growing perishable fruits and vegetables are our insurance policy against future preventable disease; that, in fact, our health is rooted in this issue.

I may be able to withstand losses in my little plot, (an experiment in growing, really) but small farmers cannot. Let’s change the inherant unfairness in our system that favors big over small farms by pushing the goverment to re-evaluate these policies. Indeed, the future of local food is at stake.

The two young folks behind this gem are Eleanor Taylor and Noah Pinck, both with farming backgrounds and a humongous passion for food and the preservation of diminishing varieties. After a series of events, bringing them to Santa Cruz, crossing paths with the creators of Eugenelocalfoods.com who happened to hand over the valuable software, and a failed land deal that opened up some free time, they are launching this site to the joy and excitement of our community.

The main goal is really to support small, local producers who might be facing the daunting amount of competition this area presents due to our climate and renown. My own farm is a case in point, and I discussed this issue in my last Civil Eats submission, Make Your Own Market. We are too small, yet too big, and now with Santa Cruz Local Foods, we have an outlet to sell some unique items to people that appreciate them but wouldn’t have otherwise found us. “Competition at farmers markets here is crazy and everyone is growing the same stuff. We really want to work with people that might just grow one thing and be able to provide fair market value to them. We also want to use this as a catalyst for building community through local food awareness, cooking classes on Youtube, local foods potlucks and tastings…there are so many ideas!” says Noah. His enthusiasm builds as he keeps talking, and I feel like I’ve found someone who gets it…always a great thing.

The online marketplace, definitely still in its infancy, already features some amazing products at good prices. We can order a pound of Claravale butter, some organic sourdough pizza rounds, a few bunches of fresh herbs, a jar of seasonal jam, and some tomatoes, and then swing by a central pick up location that is honestly, a whole lot more accessible than the weekly downtown farmer’s market tangle. This is not to say that I won’t still venture out to partake in the festive nature of our local farmers markets and grocers. But sometimes I do want convenience, I will totally admit that, and now we can feel good about supporting our local farmers, bakers, cheese-makers, canners, and ourselves, with this user-friendly shopping format.

Most importantly, this model could also be utilized in communities that may not have the glut of fresh, organic, healthy food at their disposal year round like we do. In towns where food deserts prohibit simple choices, urban sprawl where big box stores are the only shopping option, or in isolated rural locations in which one trip to the nearest town or city has to really count. This last spring, Steph Larson, one of the panelists at Cooking For Solutions in Monterey, discussed how appreciative she was of a very similar idea. As a rural policy organizer at the Center for Rural Affairs in Nebraska, she feels light years away from California’s glimmering local and organic food options. But relief has recently arrived in the form of an online co-op with a real time database of groceries and relay-style delivery system, hitting each main town across the state. That way, the customers can simply locate the nearest drop off location and make one trip to pick up their order, or band together with neighbors and share the driving responsibilities.

These new systems, blending modern tools, social networking, and basic business concepts are sprouting up everywhere. We see them in online foraging sites, fruit exchanges, and produce donation forums. Whether free, for purchase, or as barter, these ideas are re-connecting people after a backlash of cold, Internet impersonality and dependency. We can re-examine the value of technology while creating stronger human-to-human support on a wonderfully local, delicious scale.