Focus

One thing that I am working on is developing a series of field trips out to local producers. I have found a list of local producers from across the country and we have a good number fairly close by. We will start close in and work our way out. This will give us a chance to meet the producers and pick their brains about a farmers market and promoting local agriculture. It will allow us to learn their stories so that we can do a better job of promoting them. It will provide an opportunity for at least a few people to get an intimate view of local production which will turn them into meme pollen. There are already several folks interested in participating in this. I will be promoting it a little more widely. If you have not already done so let me know if you want to be a part of this effort so that I can put you on the email list.

I am assuming that the group that is meeting for Monday happy hours is a working group. That is that everyone involved is willing to be involved at the level of taking on tasks. There are several different arguments that we will be looking at making. I am clear on some of them and less so on others. Those arguments are:
• To the University – for community garden space, sustainable production facility as many other universities have. I’m un clear of what we are looking for here and also what the nature of the argument that needs to be made. I’m also unclear who the argument gets made to. I suspect that, as most things at the university, this hinges on funding. In looking over UCSC stuff, I have to guess that the most likely source of funding is the US government. I suspect that by taking a “save the family farms”, economic approach that we might also be able to wrangle some bucks out of old ags in time. This is all beyond my knowledge base. It seems to me that we need to define exactly what we want and then devise a plan for how to fund it.
• To the city – We want to put together a long term plan for a complex that includes a farmers market, a community garden, an arboretum, and a sustainability center. We need to define this in a way that allows city council people to understand a dollars and cents value, as well a the value from a green perspective. We also need to provide a plan that will allow this to happen over the span of about ten years. We currently have a very receptive City Council and we need to act quickly to take advantage of this.
• Community gardens in Bryan – Cody has started looking into a couple of potential plots for community gardens in his neighborhood. What is involved in starting a community garden? What are the cost involved? How do you get people who are truly willing to work a garden?
• Locovore Ethos – this is the underlying push of all of this. How do we develop a culture that understands and values local agriculture? One of the ways we do this is by having local restaurants, health food store and farmers markets who sell this value. To do that we have to make local foods abundant and easily obtained. If a restaurant is promoting local foods and can’t find anything to sell in January we will loose them. We have to do what we can to promote our local producers, our farmers market, BNF and restaurants. We could be at the forefront of a significant awakening in our community, or we could be pissing in the wind. Which it is, is completely dependent on our level of commitment and creativity.

Please fill in the blanks of what I have left out here.

Master Naturalists

If you have not checked out our local chapter of the master naturalists program, you should do so. Not only do they do a great job of educating folks about our local bioregion. They have one incredible publication, which you can link to off of their website.

Producers

I found a good resource for starting to collect local producers. This is a great site with lots of good information including local producers.

I'm going to start calling producers and going to see one a week on Sundays. All are welcome on these field trips.

One of my goals is to wean my family from non-local non-natural foods. We will start buying grass fed natural beef, goats, turkeys and chickens.

cognitive update: We should sign people up for local agriculture 101. This would be an effort to get people eating more locally. The focus would be these Sunday field trips and a collaborative effort to eat more locally. So, for example, several folks might go in together to by a locally raised cow for slaughter. Maybe we would have weekly egg deposits, milk, cheese etcetera. Each person participating would be given an assignment such as lining up a local producer to go visit.

Peconic Land Trust: Farm, Steawardship, Community

here is a link to the Peconic Land Trust Website:
http://www.peconiclandtrust.org/

I'm not going to speak too much on the Peconic land trust, one just needs to view their website. This project is truly remarkable. This program has worked, directly to protect 9,000 acres of land, they have reclaimed a former shell fish farm (in coordination with Cornell University) and now manage the site sustainably and open it up to small scale aquaculture companies, they have a CSA, support farm to market, farm to school, and much more!

Peconic Land Trust was founded in 1983 and is run as a 501 (C) (3) nonprofit organization. The trust generates 60% of its operating revenue from donations and 40% is from services provided to clients. Fascinating model.

Getting to Work

This group has been spewing ideas-a-plenty. Beautiful though that is, it is time for us to start working toward something more concrete. But, as we all know, concrete cannot be placed until it has been mixed. Let us now gather the ingredients that will go into that mix. Specifically, at this time we need information. But even before that, we need to have the containers that we will put this information into.

Here are some containers that we might think about using:
Why Local Agriculture?
Dollars, Cents and Nutrition: What is the Economics of Organic?
What is the Value of Community Gardens?
What is the economic value of investing in a farmers market?
What is the value of having a farmer laureate and what would she/he do?
What is a sustainability center and why should we want one?
What is the value of a community arboretum?

We need quantifiable and primarily monetary information that will help answer these questions. While quality of life reasons are wonderful, they are less persuasive for most people, especially those in a position to make a difference. What questions have I left out or not phrased properly? Which question(s) do you want to work on finding answers for?

Once we can fairly persuasively answer these questions then we can start thinking about who to make the argument to.

Grants

UCSC's Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems recently got a grant for $355,000.00 to "study and develop integrated, model programs for improving health, ecological, sustainability and agrifood system literacy within college and community environments."

This project seems to be most heavily focused on campus. While I'm sure that this is a worthwhile endeavor it may be somewhat misplaced. USCS proably has a fairly aware campus population to begin with and while the cloistered environment of a college campus may be condusive to conducting studies in a population, it is probably not as conducive to generating results. A similar study, conducted in a less informed population, which focused more heavily on real world agricultural relationships might be worth pursuing.

Agrifood? Maybe that is not completely redundant but it comes pretty close. It might be good to get some real farmers plugged into a program like this. If nothing else, a farmer would be unlikely to get all gussied up with an expression like "agrifood system literacy."

Wonderland Gardens

Looks like the City of Bryan (CoB) is interested. I met with Martin Zimmerman and we discussed the hurdles that may be involved. This definitely fits in with the CoB's sustainability initiative. Zoning and land acquisition are going to be the largest hurdles.

Zoning-

We're going to need to rezone the property from multi-family residential to either some sort of agricultural use or something under the parks system.

Agricultural use is not our best option as it opens it up for cattle, sheep, etc. even though we are not looking to do that, it still doesn't look good on the books so going the park route would be the best.

Land Acquisition-

This is going to be tough if the city doesn't have the funds to acquire the two plots I'm looking at. They are priced (by the city) at 15k each. I'd like to have both of them, but one would do. Another method of obtaining them may be through grants. If we wrote to the federal/state government and got the money that way, we could purchase the land and hand it over to the city as a park then use neighborhood funds to pay for the construction of the garden.

Making the Arguement

Our task is difficult because we are looking at convincing several fundamentally different groups of the value of our shared and overlapping visions that are, at this point, largely idealistic. We must convince people who might contribute to building the ideas and resources. This includes various disciplines of academics, city leaders, producers and hopefully grant providers. Each of these discussions is as fundamentally different as are the people in the various groups.

Like term paper writers, we must collate information and indicate on our index cards, figuratively speaking, which group this information is relevant to. For many of us, the saliency of this argument is axiomatic. It would be a mistake for us to proceed beyond this point with only axioms. We must collect facts and figures on fuel consumption, nutrition, supply, demand, top soil depletion, water conservation, obesity, carbon emissions, revenue streams and much more.

I know that for me this represents a shift in the way that I approach the discussion. I do not need facts and figures to be convinced of the value of connecting more directly to the bounty of the earth and less directly to corporatization. No matter how fervent I may be, such idealism will not convince most people. Even for people most directly impacted such as producers, we must convince in dollars and cents terms that we can substantiate. I don’t know if we have an agricultural economist who works in local and sustainable markets, but this is information that we will need.

Please use this blog to post studies, books and other sources of information.

Integration: A Case for Local Agriculture

The items discussed in this post are more or less derived from Patricia Allen's book: Together at the Table. Allen makes many great points concerning local agriculture and social movments. In particular, I enjoyed her distinction between sustainable agriculture and community food security. Both of these movements, have seen sucess in the public and private arena. And I agree with Allen that both are necessary to making local agriculture work. Bryan/College Station needs a community resource center that embraces the ideals of food security and provides markets for sustainable agriculture. We must encourage the growth of sustainable agriculture by area farmers and providing resources to further the knowledge base of sustainable agriculture both on the part of the producer and consumer.

If both, Food Security and Sustainable Agriculture are pursued in such a fashion we will find a resurgence in not only the quality of food produced but a new placed emphasis on the importance of developing a positive food culture. This culture will lead to keeping money in the community, money to support local farmers, a more environmentally friendly community, and ultimately a strengethening of the community in manifold ways.

Allen, speaks specificially to agriculture, but she also hits on the import of social movements wedding themselves with one another. "If social movements are to be more than ephemeral, they must become part of the fabric that organizes and mediate social relationships...(52)" It is tantamount to the success of local agriculture in BCS to wed itself with supporting bicycle partipation, the success of bikes is directly related to success of community gardening, and so on and so forth. We must create mechanisms for linking persons and projects that work to build community.

Our community has failed on two accounts; either the groups (the movement portion) themselves become focused striclty on their individual projects and or ideology seperates and then ultimately severs local collaboration (individual/social relationships.) If we can find a way to mitigate this scenario we will all be better off.

Lick Creek Park

In College Station we are fortunate to have a somewhat natural park. Lick Creek Park is a treasure for those interested in experiencing the Post Oak Savanna. I would like to thank my friend Lucy Decker for passing along this wonderful resource on lick creek park. This will certainly motivate anyone to go take a walk in this wonderful park.

Also Lucy passed along this nice collection of photos.

Synergistic Diversity

Okay, I'm fairly sure that this is a previously unused term, but it is a good one. Synergy, by its nature implies diversity. But it is more than a random collection; it is a rather precise mix. Understanding the mix is an important science.

As we think of affecting a culture of localism in the Brazos Valley, the synergistic diversity is crucial. What are the components that will allow the concepts of localism to transform from an abstract idea into a value broadly embraced? I am working from the perspective that those components are the market, the arts and an increased understanding of our bio-region.

Projects like developing an enhanced farmers market, developing a community garden and creating festivals that are a celebration of our local community, bring these components into what we hope will be synergies of shifting paradigms.

From Barbra Kingsolver

From:
Animal, vegetable Mineral

"If every US citizen ate just one meal a week, any meal, composed of locally and organically grown meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week. That's not gallons, but barrels."