Fifth Annual Forum For Rural Innovation

Yesterday I attended an all day conference just over the Virginia line in Winchester. Great meeting! What strikes me most about the times we are in now -- anticipated for most of the last decade -- is how both the organic and the local-regional aspects of food production are reaching critical mass, both in terms of volume, and in terms of mind share.

Regional food distribution networks, Farm-To-School programs, local sourcing by institutional buyers...all these things have been discussed for years, and a hardy core group of people have been working not-so-quietly in the background to make them happen...and now they are!

Just one example for now: Chris Carpenter from Washington & Lee University. I went to a Community, Farm and Food Systems meeting a year ago further down the Shenandoah Valley at Harrisonburg, and heard Chris, who was then the Dining Services Manager. He has now been promoted to a Special Projects position, and managed last year to arrange purchase $90,000 worth of locally produced food. This year he expects that to rise to almost $225,000. And in addition to the direct economic effect of those purchases -- from a single institution -- there are ripple effects estimated to almost double the impact.

Another of the presenters at last year's conference was Dr. Kamyar Enshayan of Northern Iowa University, who did a study of the local food economy in Black Hawk county Iowa (think Cedar Rapids) and found that cash outflows for food -- even there in one of the most productive food growing areas of the US -- were in the hundreds of millions annually. After years of work, they have managed to capture almost a million of that locally. [Large PDF of his presentation at another conference.]

This is good, slow work, and being done in a variety of ways, more of which we will cover in future posts.