When was the last time you went to a conference that followed dinner with a rock, paper, scissors tournament among 150 participants?  At times the 2nd annual Southeast Youth Food Activist Summit (SYFAS) felt more like summer camp than a conference (in a good way).  Don’t be mistaken though; we got down to business.

SYFAS is the first of six Real Food Summits that will be happening over the next two months across the country as part of the Real Food Challenge, a student movement to increase the procurement of real (sustainably grown, fair, humane and local) food on college and university campuses, with the national goal of 20% real food by 2020.

The summit kicked off with a keynote address by Anna Lappé.  She spoke about how far student food activism has come and shared an anecdote about her activism in college, how she and fellow students convinced the campus dining service to trade individual cereal boxes for bulk cereal dispensers.  In contrast, the Real Food Challenge’s goal would direct an estimated one billion dollars annually in campus food spending toward real food by 2020.  In regards to this goal, Lappé asked a very real and pressing question.  “How do you get a school feeding 30,000 people transitioned to real food?”  There’s no easy answer to this but it was one of the major questions that the participants grappled with over the course of the summit.

UNC Chapel Hill’s FLO (Fair Local Orgainc) Food group, the hosts of the summit, have worked on increasing the availability of real food on campus for two and a half years.  They’ve established a good rapport with Carolina Dining Services (CDS), organized events to raise awareness about where our food comes from, and have managed to get cage free eggs and local grass fed beef into the dining halls.  One major challenge that they’ve faced is sourcing sustainable local meat and produce in the quantities that CDS would need to serve thousands of meals a day.  There are a multitude of sustainable small farms in the region but few that could produce in quantities large enough for CDS.  Of those even fewer are willing to sell at wholesale prices when they can get substantially more by selling retail through local farmers’ markets.

Scott Marlow, Director of Farm Sustainability at the Rural Advancement Foundation International who spoke at several sessions during the summit had an intriguing point of view:

As we grow local food we’re going to have to grow beyond the very small scale farms that pioneered local food into mid-scale agriculture.  Mid-scale agriculture is exactly where we’re losing farms, farmers and farmland the fastest.  So the big question is, how do we help the mid-scale farm transition to these new and exciting and rapidly growing markets fast enough before we lose them?

And what keeps the mid scale farms from transitioning to sustainable agriculture? He said, “[crop insurance is] the biggest barrier to the mid-scale farmers moving into higher value markets and higher value products that are represented by local foods…and these are the people that you need to sell into universities it’s not those small guys.”  They can’t get crop insurance on the higher value products and therefore they can’t get loans from the bank.  Scott will be the first to tell you that working on crop insurance isn’t sexy, but it’s important work if we want to see more sustainable local food in large institutions.