Welcome back to the LocalHarvest Newsletter.

Let's talk frankly about the state of agricultural labor in this country. Don't worry, the US is not alone in this dilemma- it is happening in countries all over the world. Despite a growing human population, we have fewer people who want to be farmworkers. And those that do want to do the work may not be located in the countries that need the workers. It is a mismatch of global proportions because we don't let labor move freely around the world.

There has been a long-term decline in the number of people employed in agriculture in the United States. This includes principal operators, their family, and non-family paid labor. This is not a new trend, but it is a complex one. Increasing mechanization can account for the vast majority of labor declines (USDA ERS Farm Labor website). But there are numerous sectors of agriculture that still require the skilled knowledge and dexterity of humans, and thus far, the robots and machines are just not cutting it. This includes most fruits, vegetables, dairy, and livestock and poultry production. These are precisely the kinds of diverse crops you may see on small and mid-scale family farmers around this country, and the same kind that you will find when using the LocalHarvest search engine.

The decline in the number of people working in agriculture is not due to a reduction in demand for their services. Indeed, there is a growing and acute shortage of agricultural workers in most parts of the country. The causes of this decline of available workers and the implications this had for US agriculture is extremely complex. But I think it is worth understanding. With all the heated opinions and vitriol being passed around regarding foreign-born workers, it really helps to understand some of the nuance.

US agricultural workers are comprised of US citizens and immigrants from many parts of the world, around 2.5 million people in total. One quarter are US born and the rest are from other countries. Most have the legal right to work in the US, but in some agricultural sectors such as specialty crops, an estimated 50-70% of the employees are thought to not have the proper legal documentation to work here (NAWS 2016). Yet, the only legal visa program for agricultural workers (H2A), provided work permits for a paltry 200,000 people in 2017. It is expected to double to 400,000 in 2018. Clearly, though, there is a significant mismatch between a need for millions of people and only allowing 400K people in legally to do the work. In addition, the H2A program is only for seasonal work, and many farms such as dairies and poultry farms, may operate year-round.

Less people are immigrating to the US for agricultural work. Fifty-five percent of agricultural workers have been in the US for at least 15 years. They are skilled and proficient at the work they do and many are rooted and embedded in their communities. Eighty percent of farmworkers are settled now and non-migratory. The days of following crops all over the country are over. It is not a sustainable lifestyle for most. Farmworker immigration to the US is down due to the after affects of the 2008 Great Recession, increased mechanization, and improving economic conditions in Mexico where the bulk of agricultural workers for the last 70 plus years have emigrated from. More recently, increased deportations and fear of movement have curtailed worker immigration as well.

With the strengthening job market of the last 5 years, many farmworkers have moved into more lucrative work in landscaping, construction, food service and processing (NPR Morning Edition 5.3.18). Despite wages going up in agriculture to an average of $12.47/hour in 2017, finding and retaining employees is really tough. The NPR radio show described a California celery farmer who was now paying over $20/hour but still struggling to get enough workers to harvest the crop. As a result, he has shifted to less labor-intensive crops and is moving production down to Mexico. Same workers, different country. What will become of the US farmland when it is fallowed and the intensive production shifts out of country? A 2017 survey conducted by the California Farm Bureau demonstrated that nearly 20% of surveyed farmers/ranchers were going to fallow land or simply not harvest the crops due to labor shortages. Fallow land can become a hotbed for invasive weeds, or be sold off for development because it is not bringing in farm income. Not many people can hold onto unproductive land.

Where is the domestic workforce? Quite simply, they are not applying for jobs in agriculture in any appreciable numbers. One factor is that 1 out of every 5 American men ages 25-54 have some sort of drug addiction (mostly opiods) that keeps them out of the workforce. Ten percent of young American men ages 21-30 are completely idle- meaning not choosing to work nor to further their education. So that's about 30% of the able bodied male workforce that are not going to be applying for agricultural jobs. The rest are either furthering their education or working in other careers, caring for family members, or disabled (see this 2017 Brookings Paper on Economic Activity called “ Where have all the workers gone?” for this data). Nobody should delude themselves into thinking that American-born people are going to fill the need for millions of farmworkers each year. Even with increasing wages, better benefits, shorter work days, and other structural changes, the farms and ranches of this country require access to a certain amount of motivated immigrant workers in order to stay viable and thrive.

Farmers and ranchers have chosen to cope in a number of ways. Raising wages has been their first strategy, but they are working with labor contractors to find employees, increasing mechanization to the extent they can afford to, switching to less labor intensive crops (meaning less production of fruits and vegetables), reducing acreage, changing cultural practices, and simply not harvesting crops. If we worry about food waste, this last statistic of nearly 9% not harvesting crops and letting them rot on the tree, vine, or in the field is a really unfortunate situation (California Farm Bureau Federation 2017).

I will return to a premise I made in an earlier Local Harvest article I wrote. That we need a safe and sane immigrant agricultural worker program. It must ensure human rights, it must not be exploitative, and it needs to respond to the realities of diverse agricultural systems. It must not be used as a crutch to prevent living wages in agriculture nor to use people like indebted servants. Likewise, we need an end to the hateful scapegoating of hard-working people who want to work, regardless of their nationality. I hope you will join me in advocating for these things.

Kindly,
-Rebecca Thistlethwaite

Guillermo

07:00 PM CDT

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest Newsletter.

A week ago I attended the Northwest Meat Processors Association annual conference, held this year at the beautiful Lake Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. I went for my day job where I have the pleasure of assisting small, niche meat processors make their businesses more sustainable and thriving. It probably sounds like a bizarre job for many of you, but I absolutely love it. I have worked with farmers for a couple decades now, but the food processing sector and all of the links in the chain of local food production and distribution may be even more critical for the long-term viability and growth of local foods. They are the invisible actors that transport, slaughter, wash, cut, box, bag, cool, and distribute many of the foods that you enjoy. Because of my background raising animals and direct marketing meat, I am intimately familiar with just how important the meat processors of this country are to my business. You literally cannot have local meat without local slaughterhouses.

I wanted to share an epiphany I had as a result of attending this conference. It may seem small and insignificant, but each nugget of wisdom that I acquire in life is important to me. For many of you, this won’t be a revelation because you already live life in the "radical center". I applaud you for that.

While at the conference, I conducted several short video interviews with any meat processor willing to speak to me before a camera. I also facilitated a roundtable discussion about the opportunities and challenges for Northwest meat processors. Almost every single meat processor I talked to was enthusiastic and excited about the growth of the local food movement and consumers wanting to better understand where their meat comes from. They saw this as both critical to keeping their small businesses afloat but also to bridging the so-called "urban/rural divide" and engendering a higher level of respect and support for family farmers, ranchers, and small food businesses.

There is no doubt about the trends- our country is getting more urbanized. Rural America is de-populating, meaning less people hang out in rural areas, or have rural relatives, or have a deep, visceral understanding of agriculture and management of working lands. But if people from metropolitan America truly want more local food, there is a tremendous opportunity to build a relationship of mutual respect and transparent, educated engagement. Instead of loathing each other for some supposed fashion choices, political bent, or level of formal education, why not come together in our commonalities? Those could include our support for local food, local farms, quality and craftsmanship, and economic interdependency.

I see this mental divide where I live, which is both rural and agricultural but also touristy and increasingly so. I frequently hear the message from friends and neighbors that the skinny-jean wearing, Instagram obsessed crowd should just stay away and stop crowding our local hiking trails or favorite pizza and beer joints. But yet we are just as dependent on them to buy our agricultural goods, our lumber, and our recreational experiences as they are dependent on us to produce those things for them. So instead of an all out Carharts vs. skinny jean war, why not realize we both like to wear pants and we are in this boat together?

The other part of the epiphany that I experienced from this conference was that by focusing on the things we had in common and the humanity of each individual that I met, I could hear them and put our potential political differences aside. Many of us live in echo chambers where the people we surround ourselves with are a reflection of our personal values, perhaps even an exact replica of our own. I have purposely broke free of that way of living since I was in my early, dogmatic 20s. Working in and around agriculture has been an excellent opportunity for me to meet and collaborate with others who are decidedly not in my echo chamber. I thrive on that challenge and make a special effort to listen and get to know folks who have vastly different philosophies than my own (religious, political, social, etc). I used to have a bumper sticker on my car that read: "A mind is like a parachute- it only functions when open". I am only now starting to understand that bumper sticker that I carried around in my 20s like a badge of honor. When you find common ground with people of diverse backgrounds and ideologies that is where the magic of human connection happens. It is the seed you plant that will grow into something beautiful.

So next time you interact with your local butcher or farmer and make assumptions about him/her, or conversely the next time you interact with a bike-riding skinny-jean wearing young person, cast your stereotypes aside, strike up a friendly conversation, and listen. Try to identify some things you have in common and grow from there. Good food is often a great unifier- start there. The only rural/urban divide is in our minds.

Kindly,
-Rebecca Thistlethwaite

Guillermo

07:00 PM CDT

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest Newsletter.

US dairy farmers are in a crisis. Thirty percent have left the business in the last 10 years. Prices are the lowest they have been in the last three decades, yet costs of production keep inching upwards. If this pace keeps ups, we will be down to just the largest, vertically integrated mega dairies in a couple decades. There are a lot of contributing factors to this dilemma. Like fleas on a dog, it is not one flea that causes the itch, but all of them sucking the life out of the animal that makes its life miserable. There is so much despair in the dairy world that farmers are committing suicide at an increasing pace. Now when the dairy processor mails the paltry milk check to the farmer, they send a list of suicide crisis hotlines at the same time.

Why is this happening? Overproduction is part of it. We continue to breed more productive dairy cows who produce more milk. When milk prices were high in 2014, a lot of farms bought more cows. Larger herds of more productive cows means a lot of milk. Add to that trend is the growth of what I like to call “gigantiation”. The gigantic dairies in the West are getting even bigger as they figure out how to pack more cows onto a piece of land and flaunt, bend, or break local environmental laws. Take this 30,000 cow dairy that was just approved in Oregon in 2017 despite objection from thousands of citizens and several environmental groups. Now, just one year later, the Oregon State Department of Agriculture may shut them down for numerous manure and wastewater violations.

One aspect of the crisis that has been occupying my brain is the increased consumption of plant-based milk alternatives and decreased consumption of fluid milk. In just the last five years, there has been a 61% increase in plant-based 'milks' and nearly 30% of Americans consume these beverages on a daily basis. Real milk consumption has dropped 22% in last two decades. There is most definitely a relationship here, although it can't all be blamed on the rise of almond, soy, and coconut milk. Dietary fads and allergenicity are also part of this shift.

Does increasing our consumption of plant-based milks benefit US family farmers? Certainly not as much as dairy milk, which is produced by around 41,000 farmers around the country and processed at regional milk plants. Small dairy farms can be licensed to bottle and sell their own milk. I don't know of any farms that bottle and sell their own soy or cashew milk in this country, but if you learn of any, please do let me know. Most of the plant-based milks are manufactured and distributed by only a few very large corporations, such as $6 Billion dollar company DanoneWave, makers of popular Silk and So Delicious brands. They buy ingredients from some US farmers, such as California almonds, but much of the ingredients are imported from other countries, such as coconut from the Philippines, or cashews from Africa and Vietnam.

Similar to my lab meats article in January, I think about what the loss of those independent dairy farms mean in a larger context. They mean less dollars circulating in their rural economies. They mean that tractor dealership, feed mills, and even slaughterhouses that harvest the veal calves and older cows have much less business to the point of many of them going out of business. Less economic activity, fewer jobs, loss of multi-generational farms and their hard-working families. What happens to their land? In some rapidly urbanizing states on the East Coast, these picturesque farms get bought up as gentleman farms where maybe a couple horses will be kept, or they are subdivided to pay off the family debt and sold for housing.

To be clear, I am not for saving giant factory farms, and as this article clearly shows, it is not the giant factory farms that are going out of business. It is the independent dairy farm with an average herd size of 200 cows. As yes, there are issues with how some animals are raised, fed, housed, and their manure managed. Again, not the point of my article. I only want to encourage you to think about the larger and long-term repercussions of the loss of family-scale farmers, the loss of rural jobs, economic activity, and working lands. Our dietary fads have serious consequences on our food security and rural communities, ones that we rarely think of. We are putting more of our food dollars into the hands of a few corporations, which not only makes our food system less resilient (ever heard of eggs all in one basket?) but it is also like a giant vacuum cleaner sucking the life and resources from our rural communities into the hands of a few masters. It is time to democratize our food system. It is time to build the economic power of our rural communities, to see them as equals, to partner with them for the good of all. Now go get yourself a glass of milk.

Kindly,
-Rebecca Thistlethwaite

Guillermo

07:00 PM CDT

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest Newsletter.

A Tibetan proverb tells the secret to a long life is:

• Eat half
• Walk double
• Laugh triple
• Love without measure

This has been my mantra the last few months as I embark on a new chapter in my life, focusing on cultivating more self-love and personal health. I think a lot of us here in the Local Harvest community are interested in health, both on a personal level, a community level, and a planetary level. But you always must start from within. You can't save the world while you are crumbling inside. You can't show love to others while you secretly loathe yourself. It may appear selfish to work on yourself, but indeed is it the most generous thing you can do. We want you around for the long haul. You are the agent of change that is most important.

Everybody's journey to self-care and mental health is different and as diverse as there are shades of skin. These are the practices that are working for me right now and perhaps could benefit you as well.

1) Take time to pause and tune out the monkey-mind. For me it is meditating when I wake up and right before I go to bed for about 10 minutes each sitting. I used to think there was no way I could meditate because my thought process is incessant. It turns out I was wrong and now thoughts come and go like waves on the shore. I focus on my breath and the open space of the mind.

2) Spend time outdoors everyday, rain, snow or shine. Everyday I try to go for a walk, run, or hike for 30-60 minutes, but sometimes it is just sitting on my backporch for 10 minutes with a warm mug of tea in my hand. I also try to watch the sunrise and sunset more deliberately and just sit by a window while I am reading.

3) Set limits on your screen time and stick to it. My new rules are no screen time after 8pm and don't read emails or social media right when I wake up. You don't want to start the day with anxiety nor end the day with it. Give yourself a break from the incessant noise.

4) Eat a healthy breakfast everyday, no matter how busy you may think you are. My usual is two eggs scrambled with leafy greens (spinach or arugula are my go-tos), along with some homemade salsa on a warmed corn tortilla, plus two cups of coffee with cream and a touch of maple syrup. Try more protein and less carbohydrates for breakfast, which will provide longer-lasting energy until lunchtime and not spike your blood sugar.

5) Embrace idle time, even schedule it if you need to. I try to leave my weekends pretty open and limit the amount of commitments that I make. Usually once a weekend, I go on a walk with my toddler and let him lead the way. Sometimes we go out for 30 minutes, sometimes two hours. Sometimes we sit by the river and throw rocks for a long time. Other times we hunt for interesting leaves. I let him lead and I don't pull out my phone because I am bored. I try to stay present with his curiosity and joy. I used to think everytime I was eating or sitting still, I had to have my phone in front of me to occupy the time and make sure I was reading something. Now I pull out a book, a magazine, or just look at my food and enjoy each morsel.

6) Give gratitude daily for something, no matter how small it may seem. After I meditate and then do a short round of yoga in the morning, I sit with my coffee near the living room window and think of something I am grateful for. I either say it out loud or write it down. Somedays it is as simple as being thankful for the coffee and the food I will have for breakfast. Other days it is because of a great conversation I had with my mom or spending time with friends. Other days it is the nourishing rain falling from the sky or the eagles making a nest in my backyard. Giving thanks regularly will increase your positivity and help you better cope with the things that may be less positive in your life. They help you see a glass half full rather than half empty.

7) No matter how frazzled, upset, or sad you may be, there is always good food to lift the spirits. For the longest time, I used to think of cooking as a chore. If I was too busy, or depressed, or anxiety-ridden, I would barely cook at all. Boxes of macaroni & cheese with some frozen peas thrown in was starting to dominate my 'cooking'. It took a yelling episode from my tween daughter to awaken me to the fact that my attitude towards cooking was bringing everyone else down. In short, my cooking 'sucked'. I resolved right then and there to shop for more fresh produce, purchase more frozen meats from our winter farmers market, and more frequently look up new recipes. Not only are my children a little happier with what I feed them, I am feeling more nourished and inspired. It's a calm, stress-reducing activity now rather than a chore. I find pleasure in eating rather than just wolfing down a bowl of fake orange mac n' cheese just to fill my belly. I am trying new recipes (like the one below) that bring some level of excitement to my life and challenge me to break out of self-defeating habits. This is good.

There are a few more positive habits I am working on cultivating, such as calling friends and family more often, making time for laughter, reading spiritual texts, and keeping my house de-cluttered. I hope you too will make time for your own healthy habits and continue to cultivate self-love and inner peace.

With love,
-Rebecca

Guillermo

06:00 PM CST

photo by Think Geek

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest Newsletter.

The production of meat brings with it all sorts of physical and mental baggage. As we have industrialized nearly every product of nature, animals were rounded up and industrialized too. Business interests are now trying to engineer the animal out of the meat. Just as vitamins can be synthesized, so too can meat.

There has been considerable media hype about how different fake meat products (and all imitation animal products, such as those trying to replace milk, eggs, leather, fibers, etc) are clearly more environmentally sustainable, better for human health, and better for the animals if they don't have to die to produce your food. In reality, things are not so clear. There is significant wealth and whole organizations tied up with convincing consumers that "meat analogues" and plant-based meat replacements are the ones you should be choosing. Just to be clear, none of these organizations or investors would make any money should people choose to just eat less meat or buy better sources of meat. They only make money if consumers shift to the new processed products that they have invested in.

Meat analogues or imitation meats can be produced in a variety of ways. Some of them are actually plant-based while others are grown from animal blood, serum, or cells. For the purposes of this short article, I am just going to lump them all together and call them "fake meats". Whatever technology they are made from, there are two indisputable facts. One is that they require ingredients, such as bovine fetal serum, or plant-based derivatives such as soybean roots, potato proteins, wheat proteins, and pea powder. Those ingredients were grown somewhere and transported somewhere else, just like the feed ingredients that make up the diets of most livestock. Those ingredients and their transport have an environmental impact. Secondly, the growing of meat cells in a laboratory or the various manufacturing processes of creating fake meat takes both energy and water. Lots of it. The raising of livestock can take a lot of water too, particularly if that livestock is fed grain that was irrigated. Yet the raising of livestock can also take very little water apart from the water that falls naturally from the sky. Likewise, livestock take energy to produce, but most of it is free solar energy in the form of plants they eat. Meat processing takes energy too, but the facilities tend to be highly energy efficient and use more human-powered energy than mechanical. The fake meat industry will tout how it has a lower environmental footprint, yet there is actually almost no scientific research that shows this. Most of the fake meat industry is incredibly opaque, full of trade secrets and very little data sharing. As a result, nobody actually knows the full life cycle impacts of these products. Yet we know very well the life cycle of a beef steer, of a sheep, or of a chicken. And we know that we can make tremendous improvements towards reducing the environmental footprint of meat by purchasing it closer to where it was raised, from rotationally grazed animals, from breeds that thrive in a specific environment, and by eating the whole animal so there is less waste.

Could fake meats replace some of the consumption of conventional, feedlot-based meats and thus improve animal welfare or the environment by reducing demand for cheap meat? A couple thoughts on why that won't happen. First, fake meats are still considerably more expensive than the cheapest feedlot meats. A 9.7 ounce box of Quorn Meatless Chik'n Cutlets is around $4 (more than $5.60 a pound) whereas conventional chicken may cost $1-2/lb. in the store. Or an Impossible Burger that is said to cost around $10-11/lb., more than three times the price of regular ground beef. Because of the steep price, these products are most likely going to appeal to people who have more money, people who are already able to buy higher quality meats and who probably don't eat a McDonald's hamburger every day. So instead of pulling business from conventional CAFO meats, it will probably pull business from more sustainable and ethical meats. Secondly, fake meats really appeal to the vegans and vegetarians, who obviously are not consuming conventional meat anyways. Therefore, it is unlikely that fake meats will make any noticeable improvement towards reducing the environmental footprint of meat production or improving the welfare of factory farmed animals. Yet if you look at the messaging of these companies, they literally think they are saving the planet. When in fact, the unintended consequences of fake meat production could be incredibly high, with farmers and their communities probably suffering the most from the disruption of their livelihoods. The fake meat companies don't care about that. That is not part of ‘saving the world' that they care about. They are out to grow a limitless supply of money, not food.

As if that is not enough, fake meats come from a few factories owned by corporations (most of them investor-owned). Real meat comes from hundreds of thousands of family-scale farms contributing to our rural communities all over this country (and 1 billion people globally raise animals as part of their livelihood). Do you see the clear difference here? Do we want more colonization of our food supply by venture capitalists or do we want democratized, small-scale farming businesses that invest in and give back to our communities? Do we need more food products that are divorced from nature and continue to erode our connection to it? The more we head down this road, the less resilient our food system becomes.

Next time you read about or hear someone touting the solution that is fake meats, ask them why they think it is a solution and what will it solve for? What data do they have to back up their claims? You will find, most often, they have nothing to say. It is just a seductive story with no substance.

Kindly,
-Rebecca

Guillermo

06:00 PM CST

photo by Island Shire

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest newsletter, and Seasons Greetings to you all-

There are times in most people's lives when their bank accounts dwindle towards a painful void. The holidays often contribute towards that depletion (buy this, buy that, check off everyone on your list, travel, etc). Thankfully, my family doesn't expect much from me. I'm pretty good as setting the bar low ("wow, you sent us a card- thank you so much!"). It's OK- I have come to peace with the fact that my handwritten cards are the best gift I can give, along with plentiful hugs and "so good to see yous".

This winter, the funds depletion seems more acute than ever, but I won't bore you with the details why. Suffice it to say, I must get creative to feed my family through this winter. I am thankful for the opportunity to clear out my pantry of random bags of things from the bulk section and eat through as many jars that I put up over the summer. What are some other ways to stretch those food dollars through the wintertime?

To be clear- I do not spend all my time laboring in the kitchen, I have a busy life just like most of your. Secondly, I am not a gourmand or a very talented cook. My family gets fed, we eat healthy, and once in a while my food even tastes good! Thus, the following suggestions are only things that I am willing to do myself.

• Buy a box of cabbages and make a huge vat of sauerkraut or kimchi.
• Toss diced-up root vegetables (think potatoes, carrots, turnips) with some apples, onions, olive oil, salt and pepper. Roast them until slightly browned and fork tender.
• Buy whole grains and dry beans from the bulk section (or order by the 25lb bag). Then once a week, cook a big pot of grains or beans with a pint or two of stock that you made for great flavor and boosted nutrition. I then have plentiful cooked beans that I can add to tacos, burritos, scrambled eggs, or throw into a pasta salad over several days. You can even save the bean cooking liquid and add it to soup. Leftover grains make a great "fried rice" with scrambled eggs, perfect for a hearty breakfast.
• Pull that dusty bread machine out of the closet and start using it again. It costs me about .80¢ to make a loaf in my bread machine, while my favorite bread in the store costs around $4.99.
• Buy bones or save the bones from meat you eat to make your own stock.
• Save all your vegetable trimmings, keep them in the freezer until the time comes that you will be making stock. Use them to add flavor and minerals to your stock.
• Render animal fats. Either buy bulk bags of fat, or cut if off of roasts/chops that maybe have too much on them for your liking. Save up the fat in the freezer until you have enough to render in a crockpot. Another way to use fat is to trim it off a piece of meat you are eating and instead dice it up and lightly render it to sauté some greens in.
• Ground meat is cheaper than steaks, chops, bacon, etc. But it can get boring just making burgers all the time. Some ways that I mix it up include getting creative with the meatloaf (mixing different kinds of meat or adding lots of vegetables to it), making meatballs, sautéing with vegetables and serving over brown rice or quinoa, adding canned tomatoes, peppers, and onions for taco night, or making different variations of shepherd's pie. Instead of buying linked sausages (I'm not a big fan of the casings anyways), I buy ground meat and mix in my own spices to make bulk sausage. It's not only cheaper but helps me avoid things like preservatives, excess salt, and sugar that are sometimes added to sausage.
• I really try to stay on top of food waste most of the time, but especially when my budget is lean. If the cauliflower is starting to brown, just trim off the brown bits. Pull off the wilted leaves of lettuce but eat the rest. If your broccoli has gotten floppy, use it in a cream of broccoli soup instead.
• All leftovers get eaten, even if I am sick of them. If that pot of beans I made on Sunday evening is getting boring by Wednesday, I will put the rest into pint size containers and throw in the freezer for later use. Then when I am making a soup or taco night, I just thaw out a container of already cooked beans rather than having to resort to using more expensive canned beans. I still always keep a few cans of beans around for emergencies or exhausted weeknights.

According to Shannon Hayes, author of "Long Way on a Little", you can pinch pennies and still enjoy delicious and nutritious farm-fresh foods. Her book is full of recipes for using all parts of the animal, making stock from bones, rendering fats, creative re-use of leftovers, and more. This month's recipe, Stuffed Acorn Squash with Ground Pork, is courtesy of Shannon. It is simple to make, gluten-free, and looks gorgeous on the table. Use it for a fun weeknight meal or to bring to your next holiday supper and wow your friends.

Cheers,
-Rebecca

Guillermo

06:00 PM CST

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest newsletter.

As I am sitting here snacking on some roasted pecans, niçoise olives, extra sharp cheddar cheese, and red pepper slices, I am thinking about all the foods of this vast, vast world. It is at once truly amazing what this planet provides, and truly abhorrent what we are doing to that diversity. It’s as if Homo sapiens have a death wish of turning planet Earth into a wasteland that is not fit for other species nor our own.

Just take these facts: Seventy-five percent of crop diversity has been lost in the last 100 years (mostly cultivars and landraces). Thirty percent of livestock breeds are at risk of extinction. Our diets around the world are looking more and more alike, with less and less of the unique and native foods being offered anymore. The Western diet, prevalent with starchy, calorie-dense processed foods, high in sugar and salt, and full of trans-fats is becoming more common in far-flung places, with its resulting health problems that come along for the ride.

Take this other fact. While it may seem like an isolated one, it is emblematic of the whole food supply. Ninety-six percent of the bananas we consume in this country come from one genetically identical clone of banana- the Cavendish, despite there being hundreds of cultivars. When along comes a banana disease, such as Fusarium, it could wipe out the monocultures of Cavendish clones, as it once did to the Gros Michel cultivar in the 1950s. Diseases cannot thrive amongst diversity. Standardization of our food supply reduces diversity, complexity, and the resilience of species. We also loose the cultural connections to our food that preserve language, song, story, and skill.

An attempt to save these unique and endangered food emerged from the Slow Food movement in 1996, called the Ark of Taste. Much like the mythical Noah’s Ark, the Ark of Taste seeks to save these species and foods from the rising tide of homogeneity, habitat loss, genetic diversity reductions, and loss of cultures. Since the founding of this program, the Ark of Taste has catalogued over 3,500 foods from over 150 countries. The United States has contributed more than 200 to the Ark. To get "boarded" on the Ark, a food must be endangered, taste good, be produced cleanly (can be grown without harm to environment, not genetically engineered) and fair (not trademarked, not produced with slave labor).

This Ark is virtual- there is no vast storehouse holding all the rare animals, seeds, or food products like a time capsule. But the farmers, ranchers, and food artisans cultivating and creating these foods are very much real. Local Harvest has partnered with Slow Food USA to highlight all of the producers on our website that are keeping Ark of Taste foods alive.

What inspires farmers and ranchers to raise and produce rare, heritage breeds of crops and livestock? Mickey Willenbring of Dot Ranch in Scio, Oregon appreciates the lively personalities and thriftiness of rare breeds of livestock and poultry such as the Navajo-Churro sheep and Muscovy duck that she raises. She remarked, "I grew up surrounded by commercial modern breeds and really didn’t enjoy their placid personalities. Heritage breeds have character, personality, and a challenge to them that makes me feel more connected to them and to the moment. They demand your full attention, and for a vet with PTSD, that demand is crucial to stay engaged with the here and now. Each breed at my ranch was selected for their cultural and historical significance as well as their adaptability and resilience to a primitive environment (aka the shoestring budget ranch). Heritage breeds were developed when most labor was still accomplished manually, which means they are still very self-sufficient on their own merits."

Evan Gregoire of Portland Seedhouse is inspired by the flavors and resilience of the heirloom vegetables that he grows and sells the seeds of. He says, "Seeing diversity disappear is tragic in many senses. The loss means we lose genetics we need for climate change not to mention we lose flavor, flavors our grandparents cherished and survived by." He spends a great deal of his time educating other growers and consumers about how to grow and cook these crops, "Education is key, people love new things so making the old new again is key. Look at fashion, mom jeans are back." Editors note: I for one hope that "mom jeans" do not come back into fashion.

The best way to keep a unique food or breed alive is to buy it and consume it on a regular basis. If there is no demand for Hidatsa Shield Figure Bean, it may still exist in small homegarden populations, but it will not be grown in large enough populations to keep its own genes diverse. If there is nobody eating Florida Cracker Cattle, their herds will get smaller and more inbred, until disease and reproductive decline eventually cause it go extinct. We cannot rely on the generous souls who grow crops, raise animals, or make foods for personal use only or as a hobby. When all is said and done, other than subsistence producers, everyone else needs to at least breakeven on their enterprises. They need to sell these unique foods. LocalHarvest can help you find them through our online store and on our producer listings.

The interplay of humans and their natural environment in the form of agriculture and food is a sacred connection. You can honor the cultural knowledge, the hard physical work, and the outstanding flavors by supporting those cultivating Ark of Taste foods.

Kindly,
-Rebecca

Guillermo

06:00 PM CST

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest newsletter.

It has been a long, hard winter for us and certainly others too. There has been at least a foot of snow covering our entire acreage since late November- we call it the permafrost because it never seems to melt. Just today I heard a couple red-winged blackbirds down by our pond, a sure sign that spring will be coming soon. Last year at this same time, my daughter and I were going on hikes to look at the earliest wildflowers (the grass widow) and we were starting onions from seed in our cold frame. This year, even though it is early March, I haven't ordered seed yet. It's like the thought of gardening is so remote for me, I can't commit to buying seed. Is it really true that spring will come back to us?

Seeds are the stuff of life, these miraculous little orbs of dormant cells just waiting to multiply with the right conditions. While I can always buy ready-to-plant transplants come May or so, starting crops from seed is so much more gratifying and economical. They also seem to produce stronger crops, better root development, and pest resistance that the store-bought transplants. We either direct seeds crops, such as lettuce, cilantro, carrots, radishes, and beets into the soil, or we start the seeds in our little propagation greenhouse 5-6 weeks early and then set them out in our garden once they have a few true leaves and moderate root development.

I was just at the Oregon Small Farms Conference in Corvallis, OR where many of my favorite seeds companies were displaying their catalogues and giving away free packets of seed. I hesitated to pick up any packets, worrying that they may not get in the ground this year of the big freeze. But the catalogues enthralled me and had visions dancing in my head of fat onions, rosy tomatoes, multi-colored radishes, bitter greens, crunchy beans, zesty parsley, and other favorites that I plant every year. LocalHarvest works with a number of small-scale, regional seed farms and companies offering a wide variety of seeds for sale. From artichokes to zucchini, flower seeds, grains, herbs, and more, consider supporting these farms and buying your garden seeds from them. I promise I will break out of my winter stupor and order my seeds straight away.

Not only is it time to think about buying seeds and designing your garden, it is also time to sign up for a CSA share, especially if you don't garden. Even though you have many options for how you buy food, including pre-chopped, pre-portioned, and almost pre-masticated these days, consider that one of the best ways to support your local farmers and receive the highest quality produce is by becoming a member of a CSA farm.

CSA numbers are way down- we get it. Ordering food on the Internet and getting it at your door 2 hours later seems attractive. But there are a few drawbacks to instant gratification- lots of packaging, lots of transportation, lots of food waste, and your dollars leaving your community and often your state entirely. Now, more than ever, we need to strengthen our local economies and our relationships with our neighbors.

The United States used to be a net exporter of fruits and vegetables. Starting in 1996, we became a net importer. We now import $11.4 billion dollars more fruits and vegetables than we export. This is due to more factors than I can describe in this short essay (see Congressional Research Service report RL34468 to learn more), but suffice to say, it's a lost opportunity to support more family farmers, create jobs, improve our rural economies, and reduce our food miles.

By joining your favorite local CSA farm, you are becoming part of the support network that keeps them in business, keeps dollars circulating in your region, and helps turn back the ever growing trade deficit in US agriculture. Be the change.

Kindly,
-Rebecca

Guillermo

06:00 PM CST

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest newsletter.

With the November elections thankfully behind us, there is still a considerable amount of uncertainty moving forward with regards to federal agricultural and food policy. Things will be up in the air for quite some time until a new Secretary of Agriculture is chosen and our Congress takes on the reauthorization of the Farm Bill, the main piece of food and ag legislation set to expire in 2018. Most of the political wrangling for the Farm Bill will start next year so we all should take some time to not only understand what the Farm Bill is and isn't, but also the various ways we can get involved. Regardless of whether we farm or not, as Wendell Berry likes to point out, “eating is an agricultural act”. Our lives all intersect with the food system.

Since food and agricultural policy was discussed very little during the presidential campaigns, it is largely a guess what may happen over the next four years. One concerning issue is there is some talk of separating the food assistance programs from the Farm Bill. Approximately 75% of the last Farm Bill budget went towards nutrition and food assistance programs, including SNAP (i.e. food stamps), senior farmers market vouchers, emergency food assistance, Native American food distribution programs, fresh produce for public schools, and more. Over a quarter of all Americans receive one or more of these benefits. Taking these programs out of the Farm Bill puts them at risk of deep cuts, and will cause the more urbanized states where most of these people reside to be less interested in the negotiations of the Farm Bill. That very well could concentrate the power in farm dominant states, and mean that commodity support might increase at the expense of other more progressive programs. With food assistance programs out of the Farm Bill, they are more likely to face stiff cuts when negotiated and budgeted on their own. The SNAP program, for example, could face cuts of up to $1 trillion dollars over the next decade if House speaker Paul Ryan gets his way. We can't say for sure by how much food assistance will be diminished, but the cuts are coming. The collective impacts could be disastrous on the food security of our nation.

Although president-elect Trump campaigned on promises to not sign the Trans- Pacific Partnership (TPP) and dismantle other international trade agreements, it doesn't look likely that he will actually follow through on his words. Not only is he hiring trade-promoting agricultural commodity lobbyists to manage his agricultural transition, it is obvious that a GOP controlled congress and commodity state control of the Senate and House Ag Committee will engender more trade deals. That is good for large, vertically integrated companies and commodity growers that export a lot, and could be harmful for specialty crop growers that have to compete with ever more less expensive imported produce (see my article in December 2015 for more on that subject). Many in sustainable agriculture don't want to see the US turn off trade, but would like to see trade deals emphasize fair trade principles, such as environmental, worker, and income protections. Will Trump work to change the nature of our trade agreements to include more of those protections? Since he didn't share any of those ideas on the campaign trail, it is probably unlikely.

Labor availability for American farms and food processing is not likely to get any better under the new president. It could actually get a lot worse, which means that not only will food prices increase, but many labor-intensive farms could go out of business or choose to mechanize to a larger extent. Regardless of what you think about immigrant labor, agriculture is going to be hard hit in this aspect and could have devastating consequences on rural economies.

Conservation and research dollars in the Farm Bill may be reduced, which not only could impact some of the great environmental gains we have made in agriculture (reducing soil erosion by 44% in the last 20 years for example), it will also reduce the research and development money that helps make American agriculture a leader in innovation.

This is what I know. We need more diversified family farmers around the country making a decent living, we need access to more affordable farmland for those that want to farm, we need competitive markets, we need a reasonable regulatory environment that takes scale into consideration, we need a safe and sane agricultural labor policy, we need fair trade policies that allow our country to enact rules that protect our people and environment, and we need conservation and research dollars going towards improving the resiliency of our agricultural systems. I urge you to get involved in the negotiations for the Farm Bill next year by first reaching out to your congressional representatives. Also consider joining the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, a broad coalition of over 100 member organizations that advocates for federal policy reform to advance the sustainability of agriculture.

P.S. Because of the subject of this article, we ask that you refrain from commenting on who won or didn't win the presidential election and instead focus on agricultural policy. We look forward to hearing an engaged and respectful dialogue.

Kindly,
-Rebecca

Guillermo

06:00 PM CST

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest newsletter.

It is time to fall into fall and celebrate the harvest, yet I fell exhausted. I'm not even a farmer, just a very ambitious gardener, but still I am tired. Every year it is a push-pull between my husband and I about how big to make the garden and how much to plant of each crop. Around 40 pounds of garlic seed goes in, 1,000 onion sets that we start ourselves, 100 tomatoes and another 30 pepper plants go in the ground. All the other crops are just window dressing. Can you tell we like salsa? Each spring I say, “let's make the garden smaller and have a little more time for adventure this summer”. My husband, on the other hand, is focused on the inevitable zombie apocalypse. He practices canning like it is an Olympic sport.

So here we are, in the thick of harvest and processing time and I don't want to spend another whole weekend dicing, stirring, cooking down, and canning food. Thus far, we have dried 2 gallons of plums, made 160 jars of various plum concoctions (jams and chutneys), 48 jars of ketchup, 24 jars of tomato paste, and 60 jars of salsa. Still remaining are more types of salsa (roasted green tomato, tomatillo/tomato), fermented hot sauce, pickled beets, and kimchi. We will dice up and freeze copious quantities of winter squash (for some reason I can never get it to store well as intact squash), freeze cubes of pesto, and harvest the rest of our dry corn. Later in the fall, I will break out all the frozen fruit I socked away and make more jams- cherry/peach and black n' blue jam. I like to freeze fruit when it is in season and then process it when the weather is much cooler and I don't mind being inside over a warm hearth.

I did not grow up this way at all, with the art of gardening and preserving food having largely skipped my parents' generation. But for the past 10 years I have been getting more and more skilled at canning to the point where I even sell a few dozen jars at fairs. I love seeing people's delight as they come across a favorite jam, chutney, salsa, or homemade ketchup that they haven't seen or tried in years. I also fancy the wee bit of income the sales afford me in order to cover any costs of buying new jars, lids, or ingredients like sugar each year. If I can cover all those costs, I am a happy homesteader.

Then all winter long and into the summer before our next harvest comes due, we happily munch on pickled beets and garlic scapes, thaw out homemade pesto for pasta, spoon salsa over our eggs, and smother plum jam on the PB & Js that my family makes often for their sack lunches. I know all this work saves us thousands of dollars in grocery bills, makes us more resilient in case of power outages or other emergencies, and fills our bellies with nutrient-dense food that we grew with care. But you know the best thing about preserving our food? Giving it away. All these jars make great gifts or just tokens of appreciation throughout the year. When my daughter has a sleepover at a friend's house, I send a jar with her as a thank you to the parents for taking my kid on and giving me a break. I give jars to new employees, board members, new friends, and neighbors when they lend me a tool or watch our pets while we are out of town. So maybe it does make sense to process 300-400 jars a year so we can give away half of that. Here's to the happy exhaustion of the harvest and the abundance we are blessed with.

Kindly,
-Rebecca

Guillermo

07:00 PM CDT

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest newsletter.

You may have read that the venture-capital (VC) funded company Farmigo recently announced that it was terminating their online ‘farmers market’ and going back to just focusing on their software services.

Farmigo’s food distribution service was not Community Supported Agriculture by any stretch of the imagination. Although they did buy from some small farmers, they also bought from a lot of larger farmers whose products you can find in grocery stores across the country. It looked a lot more like the Amazon of food rather than a local farmers market.

As more and more of these heavily funded food distribution companies come online (Farmigo, Good Eggs, Instacart, Amazon Fresh, etc), spending millions of dollars to acquire customers and advertise, they pull many would-be CSA customers or farmers market shoppers into their schemes. What are the impacts on the actual local farmers in those regions? Certainly hundreds of farmers benefit from being able to wholesale their products to these companies, at however smaller margins than selling direct-to-consumer. Yet many of the companies go out of business a few years later and the farmer is once again left scrambling trying to find a buyer. A couple farmers and multi-farm CSAs recently shared with us that they had to fold or change their sales model due to competition from fake CSAs like Farmigo and others, only to witness those ventures close just a few years later. "The offering of 'local' food with the click of a mouse, delivered fast and fresh to your front door is not something most of us can compete with," said Marie Tedei of Edens Organic Garden in Texas. Several long-standing CSAs have told us that unlike years ago when they had waiting lists, they are now struggling to sell all their memberships.

LocalHarvest has several multi-farm CSAs, Food Hubs, or small distribution companies that we support with our software. We have no problems with ethically-ran, privately or cooperatively owned food distribution companies that accurately represent what they are doing. However, we do take issue with companies posing as CSAs or pretending that their mission is to assist farmers or help consumers gain access to the freshest, most sustainable foods when their actual mission is to gain the largest returns for their investors. Even the New York Times has noticed this issue, just penning an article about the rise in fake CSAs and how that impacts actual CSA farmers.

The Times article brings up an important truth that CSAs and Farmers Markets only serve a very small slice of the American population. If we want more diversified family farmers and if we want Americans eating a fresher, more localized diet, there has to be equally diverse efforts to create more options for consumers to get access to that food. We support varied efforts to scale up and scale out sustainable foods with a commitment to quality, transparency, economic equity, and environmental responsibility. Unfortunately, the investor-owned and funded efforts tend to try to get too big too quickly in order to maximize investor returns. They are, by design, an unsustainable model. The profits go to the investors, not back to the farmers, nor up the supply chain towards lowering prices for consumers. A venture capitalist expects to make a significant return, on the order of six times their original investment. This means, for example, that the staggering $26 million dollars that have poured into Farmigo needs to generate $156 million for those same investors. Maybe I lack imagination, but I just don’t see how that could happen from CSA management software or building a food distribution business.

LocalHarvest runs our business differently. We are a very small, privately owned business. We allow farmers, farmers markets, and others to list their businesses for free in order to link them to consumers searching for good food. To support that free service, we have built software for CSA farmers and food hubs that generates a modest but sustainable revenue stream that in turn supports our amazing little team of dedicated employees. Despite repeated attempts by VC investors to purchase a slice of our company, we have resisted because we understand how that would change the nature of our work for the worse.

So keep directing your dollars as closely as you can to the actual people who grew your food, grow some of our own, and resist the hype of these new techno-fancy, multi-million dollar funded models that may look pretty on the outside but usually lack the ethical core that we need to create a truly sustainable food system.

Kindly,
-Rebecca

Guillermo

07:00 PM CDT

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest newsletter.

Summertime, and the grilling is easy. Fresh salmon are jumpin, and the pastures are high. Oh, your sauces are rich and your steaks are good-lookin'. So hush little riblets, don't you turn out dry. (Adapted from the great George Gershwin)

We pulled our grill out of the garage last weekend and are thawing out a flank steak and lamb loin roast to throw on the grill for a small gathering of friends. I also plan to grill some bok choy and green onions, two things I can find at the farmers market that happen to grill nicely. There are tons of foods that go great on the barbecue, but this article will focus on meat.

What kind of meat? About a year ago we got a whole grassfed Jersey steer to fill our freezer. He was finished on pristine mountain pastures and native grass hay. Despite being grass-fed, this beef is plenty marbled with fat and moderately tender (the dairy genetics are a big part of that- he was from a Jersey milking herd). I'm not a fan of fork tender beef- I think it's not natural and requires lots of grain to make it that way. A beefy flavor and tight texture are more important to me than the ability to cut a piece of steak with a fork.

The lamb loin roast came from one of the Dorper sheep we raised last year on our own land. We purchased two weanlings in the late spring and moved them around our property to consume grasses, weeds, and acorns. In December we slaughtered and butchered them ourselves, then packaged and labeled for our freezer. Our family rarely eats any meat we did not raise or know personally (Portlandia chicken episode anyone?). I appreciate that is a great privilege that many don't get to experience, but I also see acres and acres of yards around this country that sit unused except for the Saturday morning mowing session. A lot more yards and small acreage properties could be using a few sheep or other livestock to keep their grass short, reduce fire danger, and provide meat for personal consumption. Think of it as your "Freedom Flock". Freedom from complete reliance on grocery store meat. Freedom from burning petroleum and spending hours mowing your grass. Freedom from the danger of wildfire destroying your home. I also recognize there is more to raising animals than that, and luckily there are a lot of great books out there on how to do it (including my own The New Livestock Farmer if you want to turn a livestock hobby into a commercial business).

LocalHarvest is a great place to start if you desire to include more local, pasture-raised, and organic meats into your diet. At last count, they had more than 3,554 producers of pastured pork alone. Not every farm on Local Harvest uses the same practices, but they are all independent family farms. Just for clarity's sake, let's give a short definition of what some of the common meat terms are these days so you can understand what you are looking at:

100% Grassfed: this term applies to ruminant animals only (cattle, bison, sheep, goats) and means that the animals are fed only grass and forages from weaning until harvest. Sometimes you will see another term "grassfed and finished" to imply that it was finished all the way until slaughter just on grass. If meat is simply labeled "grassfed" that does not necessarily mean it was on grass its whole life and may have been finished on other feeds such as grains, soybean hulls, distillers grains, waste vegetables, etc. Look for AGA, AWA, or PCO certified grassfed.

Certified Organic: requires that the animals are fed 100% certified organic feeds or forages (that is GMO free as well), the pastures they graze on are managed organically, no antibiotics or hormones are administered, and some outdoor access is provided. Look for the USDA or certifier seal on the label to be sure it is organic.

Non-GMO or GMO Free: this just became an approved claim for meat and it applies only to what the animal ate. Livestock fed GMO free feeds can still be raised in confinement, can still be given antibiotics or hormones, and the feed can still be grown with chemical pesticides and fertilizers. It just does not contain crops grown with genetically-engineered seeds. Look for Non-GMO Project certification.

Pasture-Raised: is not a certification program, so its interpretation can be quite broad. But in general it means that the animals derive a portion of their diets from being on pasture and that they spend most of the daylight hours outside on growing pasture. Can apply to both ruminants and non-ruminants (such as poultry and pigs). Ask questions to find out more about the farmers practices. For example, what do they do to ensure the regrowth of the pasture and that it doesn't just turn into a dirt lot?

Ok, back to grilling. I am by no means a grilling expert. I look to books like "The Grassfed Gourmet" or websites like AmazingRibs.com to get it right. My best tips for a classic grilled steak or chop are: 1) thaw out your meat for 1-2 days in the refrigerator, 2) a good piece of meat needs only simple seasoning, 3) get the grill properly hot, 4) don't overturn the meat, 5) don't overcook grassfed meats, and finally 6) let it rest for a couple minutes before you devour it, but don't let it get cold.

Happy Grilling,
-Rebecca

Guillermo

07:00 PM CDT

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest newsletter.

I need to preface this discussion by pointing out my - and LocalHarvest's - longstanding commitment to social justice, fair trade, and living wages. Yet, as a recovering farmer who had a business large enough to have employees, I also understand the invisible math that most people never get to see. In the December newsletter we spoke to some of the challenges that US farmers face when competing with cheaper, imported food. If a retailer or a consumer can get a cheaper organic tomato grown for a 10th of the labor costs as a US organic tomato, they just might do that. Now imagine if those US labor costs were to go up 50%?

Building on the momentum of the Fight for $15 minimum wage campaigns around the country, mainly in big cities such as New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles, there is now a growing movement to raise minimum wages to between $12 to $15/hour at the state level in places such as New York, Oregon, California, and Massachusetts. Some states are talking about establishing different wages around their state based on the relative costs of living. So in more rural counties, the wages won't go up quite as high or quite as fast. California, however, is talking about $15 across the state, regardless of location, cost of living, or industry.

Without diving into some of the really hot-button issues around employment, wages, and farm labor, I am just going to share a couple stories and quotes from various people thinking about how a substantial increase in wages (30-60%) may affect the viability of small and mid-scale farmers, particularly those growing more labor-intensive crops like fruits and vegetables. Will farmers have to drop growing specialty crops, the very same ones that we are supposed to be eating for optimum health? For example, winter wheat uses a lot less labor than cherries, but do we need to be eating more wheat?

I know that if our farm had a 50% increase in labor costs that we would have probably scaled down to hire less labor or we would have invested in a better piece of equipment that would have required one person to work it rather than two. Either way we would have employed less people. That may be an unintended consequence of steep wage increases- less employment opportunities.

New York State is talking about an increase to $15, after just implementing a new $9/hour minimum wage last December. That represents a pretty staggering 66% increase in minimum wages. A central New York farmer Tony Emmi was quoted in the paper saying that a $15 wage would cost his 300-acre farm in Lysander almost $200,000 extra a year, a burden that would cause him to hire fewer workers. Another Tony, this one Tony LaPierre of Rusty Creek Farm in Coopersville, has a dairy with 500 cows with a crew of eight full-time and four part-time employees. He said that if the NY governor's plan to hike the minimum wage comes to fruition, some farms will need to cut back on their workforce and in some cases look to technology to do so. For those farms that can't invest in modern technology, he said, there is a possibility they will go out of business. Will these large increases in labor costs further disadvantage small and mid-scale farmers because they don't have the capital to invest in expensive labor-saving technology? For example, an Iowa State University study showed that a robotic milker (called Automated Milking System) cost around $210,000 each. A dairy farmer, unless they bottle and market their own milk, can't usually pass increased production costs onto their consumers. Farmer LaPierre said that, unlike some other businesses, dairy farmers can't simply charge more for their milk to make up the difference. Milk is a commodity, with prices set by the market and the federal government.

Another negative impact a large wage increase like those proposed or being implemented could cause is discouraging farms from hiring young people or inexperienced workers. That will not only close another industry from hiring young people (whose unemployment rate hovers around 15%) it will also inhibit new, inexperienced folks who want to get started in agriculture.

"My workers are all worth 15 bucks an hour because they've been around," said Duane Chamberlain, who also sits on the Yolo County Board of Supervisors in California. "Starting people out, it would be nice to hire kids at lower wages because they're not worth it. They don't know what they're doing." Farmer Sarah Wiederkehr of Winter Hill Farm in Freeport, Maine whom I interviewed for this article felt similarly. She said "We definitely would NOT be hiring young, inexperienced labor if we were mandated to pay a much higher minimum wage. We already decided to stop hiring apprentices because we simply cannot afford the time it takes to train newbies. We decided last fall to only hire hourly employees, and ones with experience."

Another nuance to consider is that farms often provide other forms of compensation, such as free or reduced cost housing, transportation, food, and sometimes child care, health care, or other services. None of these things are taken into account when a city or state passes new wage laws. Although agriculture has a long and sordid history of not providing the best compensation and working conditions compared to many other industries, it also has a history of providing housing of some sort, often due to the rural location of the farms. Will farms be able to afford to continue to offer housing or to fix up and improve their housing if wages go up 30-60%? Farmer Wiederkehr of Maine says that she would also like to offer benefits beyond workers compensation insurance (mandated by her state), but currently she cannot figure out how do so and likely could not if she had to pay a mandatory higher wage.

Northeast Organic Farmers Association of New York (NOFA-NY) understands the need for farmworkers to be more fairly compensated but also understands that farmers have to earn living wages themselves. The current system does not satisfy either. With regards to NY governor Cuomo pushing for increase minimum wages, NOFA-NY states: ..."Fairness is an important value for NY's organic farmers, yet the wages farmers pay their workers range from only $9 up to $20 an hour. Most of the farmers are not earning much more, and farmers in the first 10 years of their farming careers often pay their workers more per hour than they earn themselves."

The minimum wage is not tied to inflation. It should have been indexed to inflation a long time ago, rather than just raised every now and again based on political whims. Had the 1968 floor of $1.60 per hour been indexed to inflation, it would be $10.90 per hour today, more than 50 percent higher than the current federal minimum wage of $7.25. However, should some states be raising their minimum wages by double that $7.25 over a few years to make up for decades of political inaction? What price will our diversified family-scale farms pay for these rapid cost increases? And are you, as consumers, ready to do your part by paying higher prices for your food, particularly the labor-intensive healthy foods you should be eating? Not only will food be more expensive, which is not necessarily a bad thing, some specialty crops will be scarcer because some farms will choose to stop growing them.

Kindly,
-Rebecca Thistlethwaite

Guillermo

07:00 PM CDT

Photo by: Grand Lagoon Waterfront Farmers' Market

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest newsletter.

Unlike the calm blue water lapping at its Floridian shores, the latest series in the Tampa Bay Times is making some giant waves. The "Farm to Fable" series written by restaurant critic Laura Reiley exposes some unsavory issues that shake the foundation of the local food movement. The first article points out dishonesty in the restaurant trade about the provenance of their so-called "local" ingredients. The second article in the series exposes pervasive and egregious fraud in the farmers markets of the Tampa Bay region. This is by no means a "Florida thing"- I have experienced first-hand similar issues when I farmed in California and heard about it from others farmers around the country. What may be one of the most important and financially viable ways for farmers to sell their freshly harvest goods may also be a place where consumers are being lied to in some cases. That is not a story anyone wants to tell, but keeping an industry honest is important for both the producers and the consumers.

I wanted to find out if the problem of produce resellers posing as farmers was in all farmers markets in Florida so I called a friend of mine who has a 60 acre mixed organic farm up near Gainesville and sells at 6 farmers markets a week. Amy Van Scoik of Frog Song Organics, a Local Harvest member since 2011, says that she attends some "producer-only" markets such as the Alachua County Farmer Market, where growers are only allowed to sell items they grew or raised themselves. Reselling is not allowed. Consumers frequent this market because they know they are supporting Florida growers and getting some of the freshest food around. Farmers must possess a growers permit issued by their local Extension office to even sell there, which is written documentation of the farming location and the items that the farmer grows or raises. Although it's not a perfect protection against fraud, Amy feels pretty confident that nearly everything sold at that market is locally produced.

Other markets her farm attends do allow some resellers. Amy figures that as long as the resellers are being honest about where and how the produce is grown, she thinks it probably helps to attract more customers to those markets. It's when the resellers lie and say they grew something or when they label something "no spray" and then sell it for cheaper than her certified organic produce is when she believes it is unfair competition. That is beginning to change as some market managers are no longer allowing unverified production claims on produce or meats.

Her farm, unlike the resellers or the fake farmers, is open to the public a couple times a year for a farm tour. She likes it when her customers ask questions and come out on a tour- it builds their trust in her farming business and begets more loyal patrons. She encourages them to ask questions of other vendors too.

But for some fledgling farmers markets or ones located in areas with few farmers, they often have little choice but to invite some produce resellers if they want to actually have fresh produce at their markets. Amy also thinks that practice is fine as long as everyone is being honest and food is accurately labeled. Some markets that have removed the resellers have then found themselves with no produce vendors and consequently, a dwindling customer base.

On the other side of the country is the Portland Farmers Market, which is actually a non-profit association of 8 different markets. Oregon does not have a growers permit system like Florida, or the more cumbersome Ag Department certification that farmers have to go through in California to ensure they grew what they sell. The Portland Farmers Market works hard to build relationships with their vendors and aims for more of a personal vetting system rather than farm inspections. Their Executive Director Trudy Toliver is not a fan of more regulations, licensing, and fees for farmers and food producers. She thinks their system works and eliminates nearly any chance for fraud.

Trudy believes more in a self-policing strategy in which customers or farmers that suspect a vendor did not grow or make something themselves can simply report it to the market management. The markets have a clear complaint process and follow up on every written complaint that somebody may make. Likewise, each vendor must reapply every year and fill out a lengthy application listing where they farm, what they produce, or in the case of prepared foods, where their ingredients come from. The PDX markets also require that value-added foods (prepared or processed) contain at least 25% Oregon ingredients. This has really amped up the demand for Oregon grown foods and helped many farms scale up. With more than 700,000 shoppers and 240 vendors, these markets are having an impact of more than $8 million dollars in sales annually. They are especially proud of the numerous small businesses that got their start there.

We at Local Harvest love the concept of farmers markets- a marriage of public space, community-building, values-driven commerce, and agrarian ethics. We think that most farmers markets and most vendors are honest and work hard to follow ethical procedures and management. So don't let a few rotten apples spoil the bushel- keep supporting your local farmers markets, ethical farmers, and just keep asking questions.

Kindly,
-Rebecca Thistlethwaite

Guillermo

07:00 PM CDT