Community Food Advocacy Resources and Education (FARE)
Food
Many of today’s industrial agriculture practices damage our soil, air, water, and ecosystems. Linked to this industrialized food system there are very challenging social and economic issues that impact community sustainability, such as obesity, ill health, increased rates of cancer, petroleum based (and green house gas emitting) long distance hauling of goods, and the competitive edge in subsidies and quantity sales available to the conventional large-scale farmers.
To address these issues, growing attention is being given to building wholesale and direct marketing channels for farmers, and customer access for local food grown on small to medium sized farms promoting environmentally sustainable production practices. Moreover doing this creates new jobs, fosters business development, brings new food products to local markets and attracts younger farmers to a profession that will provide a healthy, satisfying and lucrative future.
Community FARE is dedicated to promoting sustainable food production in our region and bringing healthy food to our local markets.
Advocacy
Community FARE intends to review local ordinances governing the installation of a food aggregation and distribution center, as well as ordinances that have supported this type of work elsewhere to determine the most favorable policies for supporting more local food production, aggregation, distribution and access.
Resources
How does one approach scaling up local food systems so that our communities benefit by nutritious and fresh foods, and producers (and rural families on the farms) benefit financially by greater profits?
According to several successful Food Hub start-ups, the process begins by doing a “Community Food Assessment”; that is, creating a dialogue with the community of producers and potential markets to answer specific questions about the market and growers.
In 2014 a group representing non-profit, government and the food production and sales business launched a Community Food Assessment to assess the drivers and impediments to more local food production, aggregation, distribution and consumption. Thanks to Fox Haven Organic Farm and Learning Center for leading that effort. A survey was sent out to over 200 farmers in Washington, Carroll and Frederick Counties (read survey questions here). With limited funds we chose to reach out to farms selling local and or are organic, but welcomed others! On March 18th Fox Haven’s sponsored a meeting in it’s Dairy Parlor to present the survey results and discuss needs for a food aggregation/distribution and marketing center in our part of the world, here are the minutes from that meeting.. The following are presentations from the March 18th meeting:
- Grower Community Food Assessment
- Growing Market Opportunity for Maryland Agriculture
- Co Packing Plant and Food Hub
- Hospitals for a Healthy Environment
Community FARE is poised to continue with the community food assessment to research the potential markets in our region.
Education
The National Good Food Network is a fantastic resource for those interested in value based supply chains for food. Take a look at their educational webinars. Here are some select documents pulled from their resource library:
- A Practitioner’s Guide to Resources and Publications on Food Hubs and Values-Based Supply Chains: A Literature Review
- Healthy Food Systems: A Toolkit for Building Value Chains
- National Good Food Network: Food Hub Center