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.