The LocalHarvest Blog

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest newsletter.

We are often asked to estimate the total number of CSAs nationwide, and until now we have always said that no one knows, because the federal government does not track this number. Usually, we've gone on to guess that our database includes perhaps 70-80% of the country’s CSAs. We are proud of the CSA portion of the LocalHarvest database. As of today, it includes 2,727 CSAs.

Recently the feds took a crack at a national number, through a question on the Agricultural Census. And we were astounded by the results. It turns out that 12,549 farmers told the government that they marketed their products through a CSA in 2007.

Yes, 12,549.

There are many staggering numbers in today’s world, but most of them are too big for me to absorb in any real way. ($700 billion?) This number, though, is conceivable. It is a great number, actually. But its appearance prompted me to seek out a flat surface on which to lie down so that I could stare at the ceiling for some minutes. Could there really be another 9,829 established CSAs in the U.S.?

Emily Gilmore from the Robyn Van En Center pointed out that there was some ambiguity in the question. She makes a good point. The exact wording of question 32.1.j read, “At any time during 2007, did this operation market products through a community supported agriculture (CSA) arrangement?” Stated thusly, a farmer who sold, say, eggs through another farm’s produce CSA would have accurately marked ‘yes’. So what the census is counting, then, is the number of farmers involved in CSAs, rather than the number of CSAs.

12,549. It still seems high. High, schmigh. I want to find these farms. No matter how many CSAs there actually are, we want all of them to be part of LocalHarvest. If we had the resources for a huge marketing campaign, we’d do it. But we don’t. We have you.

Good enough, I say.

Not since 2000 have we directly invited farms to join LH. (The rest all found out about us by word of mouth.) It’s about time we sent out invitations again, but first we need a list. This is where the contest comes in.

We are offering a $100 prize to the person who sends us the most new CSAs between now and the end of September. Take a look at our list of CSAs. Know of any that are missing? If so, here is a little form, where you can tell us how to get in touch with them. Or, you can always go directly to the farmers yourself, and tell them about LocalHarvest. Be sure to mention that creating a farm listing on LH is free. In a few months, we’ll let you know how the project is coming. Meanwhile, please help us find the rest of the country’s CSAs!

As always, take good care and eat well,

Erin Barnett
Director
LocalHarvest

p.s. If you have a comment on the Ag Census’s CSA number, post it in the comments section of our blog.

It's been a big month for people who love real food. As you've no doubt heard, the First Lady planted a garden. On Friday my email inbox was full of messages triumphantly singing out the news. We'd like to send our own congratulations and thanks to Kitchen Gardeners International, a small organization that worked on this idea tirelessly and with great creativity over the last 15 months. It's a good one, and we believe the nation will be better for it.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've also received a barage of emails about the "Food Safety Modernization Act", or HB 875. The tone of these was somewhere between concerned and hysterical. From what we have learned, HB 875 is not the horror story it has been made out to be. It would not, for example, result in "totalitarian control" or "the planned elimination of farmers" as one oft-forwarded email put it. It actually contains some sound ideas. But for some reason, myths and misinformation about this bill have taken root and spread like a noxious weed.

It got me to thinking. First, truth be told, it made my head spin. All this justifiable jubilance stuffed in next to that screeching panic felt downright disorienting. The administration could not publicly promote organic gardening, and then sign off on a bill that would "criminalize organic farming and outlaw home gardening." It's absurd.

But what does it mean, to have so much exuberance in the locavore community on the one hand, and so much fear and loathing on the other? I think it comes down to this: food, and the ability to grow it honestly, is fundamental to our well-being. We celebrate when we see the food we love, and the values behind it, being respected by influential people. And if we feel that our right to grow that food without undue interference is threatened, we react strongly.

That said, it seems to me that we need to take a breath and put both of our hands to work. We can, each of us, sow at least one seed this spring. If the First Lady thinks pulling a few weeds is a good activity for her family, it's probably good for ours too - and it is. We can, each of us, also follow the food safety bills as they make their way through Congress, writing to our representatives to tell them how important small scale, organic agriculture is to us and to our communities.

It turns out that HB 875 is unlikely to go anywhere. And that's not necessarily great news, given that it contained some ambitious, positive changes. Our friends at the Cornucopia Institute tell us that 875 has been passed over for another food safety bill, HB 759. They, and others like Food and Water Watch think that we will need to make our voices heard as HB 759 moves forward, to ensure that the bill that is eventually passed includes exemptions for small food processing facilities and the same kind of smart, risk-based inspection processes that are contained in HB 875. We'll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, enjoy the rest of the newsletter, take good care, and eat well.

Erin Barnett
Director, LocalHarvest

Many times each month, people ask us exactly how they can begin to eat locally. The questioner invariably understands the ‘whys’ of the proposition, but is daunted by the ‘how.’ So this month we offer a short primer on eating local food, with emphasis on the notion of transition. Let’s start there. The first thing to remember is that eating locally is a continuum. If you allow yourself to get drawn into an all-or-nothing mindset, the proposition will seem impossible. You will get derailed by the list of the imported foods you think you can’t live without. Bananas. Coffee. Chocolate-covered yum-yums. Don’t start with those things. Don’t even put them on the table the first year. Eating locally is about doing what you can. It is about making the most of your region’s agricultural strengths. It is about beginning to pay attention.

Where should you start? Focus on whole foods first. Highly processed foods are made with many ingredients that are shipped from afar, processed, and shipped again. It is simpler, not to mention healthier, to put your efforts into simpler foods. Start with one or more of these food groups: produce, meat, dairy products and eggs. In many cases, you can buy these foods directly from farmers, which is often a highly satisfying experience in and of itself.

A few years ago, a friend whose family loves chow-mein hotdish and Cheez-its asked me what three things she could do to better her family’s diet without triggering a lot of grumbling. She was clear: she was not ready to take on the whole pantry, and neither was her family. Sound familiar? She knew that if she felt overwhelmed, the changes wouldn’t stick. But three things seemed reasonable to her.

After talking more about her food buying habits and priorities, we came up with this: Buy high quality chicken. Get organic milk. Shop at the farmers market when you can. Now, we live in Minnesota, where small-scale farmers make good meat and quality milk readily available, but the growing season is short. Other places in the country will have a different list of logical first steps. My LH colleagues, for example, live on the Central Coast of California, where gorgeous fresh veggies are available almost year round, but meat and dairy from small farms is a little harder to come by. For people there, just committing to shop at the farmers market or to join a CSA would bring local foods into their diets much of the year. Another regional difference concerns food preservation: neither my colleagues in California nor my friends in the South spend much time canning and freezing. Here in Minnesota, we do, because that is the way to enjoy local produce in the long winter. Getting to know what grows well in your state – and when – is a valuable part of your education as a locavore.

As you begin to dig more deeply into your region’s specialties, you will find that some of these cost more money than their anonymous counterparts at the supermarket. If you are one of the many Americans experiencing real financial distress, this may dissuade you from choosing them. But it is important to remember that there are ways to work around price if you have some flexibility in your food budget. For example, you might choose to buy high quality meat and cheese, but eat it less often, and instead eat more lower-cost whole foods like grains, beans, and in-season produce. Check out the LH blog for a close-up look at the home economics of my family’s local foods-based diet.

Finally, it pays to remember that for most human beings, change is difficult. Food is so fundamental to our sense of well-being that changes in that arena may be met with a lot of resistance. If that is the case in your house, go slowly and look for small windows of opportunity. For example, enjoy lots of local strawberries when they are in their glory. If you can, go out to the farm and have fun picking some of your own. Really pay attention to how good – and how different – they are. Acclimate your taste buds and over time your family may decide that the local ones are worth waiting for. You may even decide to throw a few bags of berries into the freezer for later. And you’re on your way…

In sum: Start with whole foods. Don’t make it too hard. Study your region’s agricultural strengths, and play up to them. Look for ways to be creative with your budget. Be gentle with your self and your family as you try out new habits. Do these things, and you will set yourself up for a highly satisfying adventure in local eating, and a deeper connection to your food.

Erin Barnett
Director, LocalHarvest

Like the photo? It's a new day, and we're kicking up our heels! So is this beautiful heifer, Cali Rae, from 4B Ranch in Mesick, MI. What an athlete! Two weeks ago we asked our members to send in photos of their farms and markets and nearly 300 people sent some of the most gorgeous farm shots we've ever seen. We are so pleased! Look for their beautiful photos on the LocalHarvest site and here in the newsletter throughout 2009.

Knowing that many of our farmers are also outstanding cooks, we also asked them to submit some of their favorite farm recipes. What generous members we have! Over 350 people sent in recipes. Starting next month we will be giving them star billing in our newsletter and, later in 2009, in a searchable archive on LocalHarvest. This change will make this the last month that Lorna Sass' recipes will be included in the newsletter. We want to thank her for sharing her enthusiasm for cooking and her healthy recipes with us over the last two years.! Lorna is the author of several cookbooks, including a new one being published this month. We have three copies of Whole Grains for Busy People to give away to lucky LH newsletter readers.

As promised, we have the results from our first ever grassroots survey, "How Does Local Compare?" You may recall that last fall we drafted a price comparison survey for seasonal produce and asked interested readers to collect data at their local farmers markets and grocery stores. What a complex puzzle this has turned out to be! We are learning a lot from this pilot survey. We hope to take another run at this question in the early summer, with some outside help. Watch the newsletter for details if you would like to participate in the data collection. Meanwhile, we offer you the results of our pilot study, below.

Erin Barnett
Director, LocalHarvest

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest newsletter.

It's nearly Christmas, but instead of sugar plums, I have numbers dancing in my head. Membership and site traffic numbers, year-end and pricing survey numbers. I'm a words-over-formulas kind of girl, so believe me, this is a rare day. Still, these are interesting statistics. Some we feel proud of, some we are humbled by.

Here's a few that please us: LocalHarvest welcomed 3,675 new member listings so far in 2008. That's ten new members every day! Of these, 2,583 were farmers, 590 were farmers markets, and the remainder were restaurants, co-ops, and the like. The LocalHarvest database now offers information on nearly 18,000 farms and farmers markets (etc.) nationwide. As always, our marketing budget for 2008 was exactly $0, so we have all of you to thank for helping us spread the word about LocalHarvest. Mil gracias!

Over 3.8 million people found local food with LocalHarvest's help this year, a million more than in 2007. Our monthly newsletter goes out to 54,000 people like yourself, and 75,000 people get our weekly Keep Me Posted updates. Over 16,200 people bought products through our catalog this year. Numbers on two new LH projects look like this: to date, 831 farmers have added Ark of Taste products to their LocalHarvest listings since we launched our partnership with Slow Food in April. In the last two months, nearly 300 farms have started blogging with us, posting stories about life on the farm, recipes, photos, and videos.

We had really hoped to give you the results of our first LocalHarvest pricing project: "How Does Local Compare?" but, unfortunately, we don't have those numbers yet. This is the 'humbling' part I mentioned up top. It turns out that crunching the data in a meaningful way is an exceptionally complex proposition. We've been at it on and off for a week and are still slogging through the fine points. I promise we will keep at it, and I will have the results for you in our January newsletter.

As we approach the end of 2008 we would like to thank all of you for supporting your local farmers and LocalHarvest. In these uncertain economic times, it feels particularly important to spend our food dollars on fresh, nutritious food grown by people whose chosen work is to feed our communities. Real food for the people!

As always, take good care, and eat well.

See you in '09,

Erin Barnett
Director, LocalHarvest

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest newsletter.

It's not every day that we get to roll out a brand new feature in LocalHarvest. We look forward to such days because they are so long in the making. Today is onesuch. In a word: blogs.

You know us – we love family farms. We love them in general, from a distance, painted with a wide brush, so to speak. We like the idea of small farms. What they represent and stand for is important to us, so we spend a lot of time promoting them, mostly in the general.

With the blogs it is different. The blogs are about close up and particular. They are about the farmers' own stories and struggles, in their own words. We like that a lot too. In fact, hearing directly from our nation's farmers feels imperative. It allows us non-farmers to get a better sense of what that life is really like, in all its variation and complexity. So, as of last month, we added a personal blog for every farm that wants one.

Already, over 230 LocalHarvest members have created blogs. They are publishing recipes and stories, musings and photos, all well worth a look. We'd like to invite you to visit them, and to add your comments to those entries that inspire you to write. You can use our new blog map to find LocalHarvest member blogs in much of the US. Click on the orange icons to get to our members' blogs.

Last week we invited each of our bloggers to write a special entry on the theme of Thanksgiving, available here. With the holiday of gratitude quickly approaching, we would like to express our heartfelt thanks to all of you for your enthusiasm about LocalHarvest and your support of family farms. At a time of hardship for so many, we are thankful for the enduring blessings in our lives, most especially the non-material gifts that lie within reach: a grateful heart, a hopeful outlook, and a commitment to kindness.

May your tables be laden and your hearts and bellies full,

Erin Barnett
Director, LocalHarvest

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest newsletter.

Last night as my husband was going through the mail, he held up a dozen political mailers from both parties and asked, "What if they just weren't allowed to out and out lie? It would be so much better if what they said was at least true." Indeed. In these final days before the election, we at LocalHarvest have ears for only two kinds of words: those that give shape to the hope we carry for the future, and those that shine a bright light on dark corners.

In this issue of the LocalHarvest newsletter, we offer you one example of each.

First, the hope. Good, honest food is making a comeback. Hallelujah. Beyond the table, we are seeing that food is central to many social ills. Pesticide abuse, food safety, obesity, immigration issues, climate change, gene patents, water quality – these issues and more are rooted in part in our collective approach to food. We know we can do better. The time has come to give voice to what a healthy food system would look like. Some of the finest minds in modern agriculture have carefully crafted a manifesto declaring just this. They call it the Food Declaration. It's meant to be used as a foundation for future agricultural policy, and a point of common agreement among food activists across the nation. The authors are looking to get a million individuals and organizations to endorse it. We think it's an excellent effort and well worth signing.

Now for the bright light on dark shadows. I have been wanting to write about dairy for a while now, but it keeps getting bumped down the list. Truth be told, one of the reasons for this desire was my discovery of Dexter dairy cows. They're miniature cows. Aren't they adorable? I want one for Christmas.

Anyway, back to the bright light. We know that all organic food is not the same, right? If it's grown on a vast scale, it carries many of the same problems as mega-scale conventional food. This goes double for dairy products. You've heard that despite organic rules, a few organic dairies milk thousands of cows held in confinement. So how are you supposed to know if the organic milk you're buying is really something you want to support? Thankfully, the Cornucopia Institute has made it easy. Their recently updated Organic Dairy Scorecard lists all the organic dairies in the country and gives each a rating, from one to five stars. The ratings criteria is described in their milk integrity report. Check it out, and stick to the good stuff if you can.

Read on for an update on our pricing survey, health info about the brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and their cousins) and a recipe.

As always, take good care, eat well and remember to vote!

Erin Barnett
Director, LocalHarvest

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest newsletter.

We get this question a lot: "Is it more expensive to eat local food?" Usually we try to work our way around the question, speaking with enthusiasm about the quality and flavor of fresh local food, its healthfulness, its contribution to the local economy, etcetera. Sometimes we convince the questioners that they can’t look at price alone, because the quality of stuff that's picked green and trucked in can’t be compared with that of the fresh, vine-ripened produce. Other times the person hears us out and then says, "So it is more expensive then, huh."

The truth is, we don't know the answer to the question. As with so many substantive issues, the real answer is, "It depends." It depends on the product and the season and the vendor. Depends on whether its organic and how much of it the farmer or grocer is trying to move that week. Lots and lots of variables. Still, with the economy looming large in many people's minds, it seems a good time to try and find out.

A few days ago I took a notebook to my local supermarket, made a list of the prices for various fruits and vegetables, and then compared notes at my farmers market. The organic produce section at the grocery store was completely cleared out on this particular day, so I gathered conventional produce prices at the store and "low spray" at the market. Small watermelons (the ones they’re calling "mini" or "personal size" this year) were $2 at the farmers market and $4.49 at the store. Local tomatoes at the grocery store were $2.49 a pound, and $1.50 a pound at the market. Peppers were less expensive at the market. Winter squash was about the same. Onions were cheaper at the store.

This small foray into price comparisons made me want to know more. I would like to have a good answer the next time a reporter calls to ask me whether ‘local’ is more expensive. Not that price is the only measure of value, but it is one, and sometimes an important one. Moreover, the perception about the relative price of buying local is also very important.

I'd like to ask for your help.

What I have in mind is a kind of collective research project. This newsletter will go out to about 50,000 people. Certainly a few dozen of you might be interested in doing a little comparative shopping over the next couple of months and maybe again in the spring? I have a spreadsheet that I will send to anyone who is interested. You can fill out the portions of it that apply to the foods that are in season where you live, and send it back to me. We’ll compile all the data and report the findings back to the group. If you are interested in learning more about participating in this grassroots research, please contact me.

Meanwhile, please enjoy the rest of the newsletter, and as always, Eat well and take good care –

Erin

Erin Barnett
Director, LocalHarvest

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest newsletter. Sorry for the delay in this "August" issue. We were eating tomatoes. Lots of tomatoes. And making really incredible sauce.

Through much of the summer, we have been hopeful. It's hard not to be, when being so well fed by the garden and the local farmers. Everywhere we went, people were talking about buying local food. We like that. It felt like the tide was turning. But in the last couple of weeks, it has seemed like The Insanity is gaining ground again. The FDA decided it was a fine idea for iceberg lettuce and spinach to be irradiated. A science advisor to the Bush administration equated seed saving with multi-species gene manipulation. Then a small scale cattle rancher from Texas told us that fuel and feed prices are going to put some of his neighbors out of business this year. A poultry farmer in the Midwest said the same.

I don't need radical change right this minute. I'm willing to watch it unfold, if it does so kind of quickly. But when it looks like momentum is gathering in a direction that seems fundamentally wrong, well, it's a little discouraging. I mean, irradiated iceberg lettuce?? That has to be a bad idea in about six different ways.

The up side of pondering the news is that it got me thinking about this notion of momentum. Motion, shift, gathering power. Harnessed for the common good, it could be our golden ticket.

When we choose to eat a more local diet, we first have to learn about what is raised near us, and when. Our minds are thus engaged on a new level with the land and the seasons. Buying our veggies and meat from the farmers market or a CSA, we strengthen both our social and economic ties to the farming community. We develop a taste for seasonal food, and may find we prefer plums from a neighbor's tree to any corn syrup laden snack in a box.

Little by little, the authenticity of real food reveals itself to us. Our eating habits change. Food, not as international commodity, but as deep nourishment, becomes important and interesting to us. We plan meals, we cook, we sit down to eat. Small acts, really, but ones that undermine the dominant food system's ethos of convenience and instant gratification. Slowly, momentum builds.

Having experienced real food, we see through the lies of irradiation and genetic manipulation and agricultural consolidation. We are willing to stand up for the real thing. Maybe we march in the streets, as the French are fond of doing. Or write letters, as over 275,000 people did a decade ago when the USDA was shaping the rules that would define ‘organic.' Maybe we simply keep putting our money where our mouth is and keep local farmers in business. More motion, more gathering power.

It's safe to say that the industrial food system is going to continue to roll out weird technologies and advertising campaigns and laws to ensure its profits and self-preservation. They will do so in the name of safety and satisfaction. No matter. Individuals can still recognize what is real and whole. Making contact with the authentic is truly powerful. When we do it together, in every community, great shifts will happen.

As always, take good care and eat well!

Erin

Erin Barnett
Director, LocalHarvest

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest newsletter. Last time I wrote about the choices we have as we face a rapidly changing future. It was a broad topic. No sooner had we finished reading your comments -- and thanks to all who wrote in! – when the New York Times published an editorial exemplifying the very fear we talked about last month. The Times editorial used the recent salmonella outbreak to call for a national food tracking system. Proponents of this system say that having the ability to track our food "from farm to fork" is the way to keep our food system safe.

A safe food system is a most excellent goal. It is fundamental. But the logic of traceability is fundamentally flawed. It relies on endless paperwork and pop inspections and numbered tags and microchips. Out of all this bureaucracy, "farm to fork" tries to build an edifice of safety, a Great Wall between us and the bad bacteria.

What we want is a guarantee. We want to trust that we won't get sick from our food. The thing is, "traceability" can't offer that guarantee. Say my grocery store watermelon comes with a barcode sticker on it. I peel the sticker off and throw it away. The garbage goes out. Two days later I get sick. Now what?

A traceability system would not change the things that need changing. Its purpose and methods concern themselves only with what went where when. It is about command and control, not quality. What we need to focus on is stewardship -- of land, crops, and livestock. Traceability is blind to issues of scale and the logic of the small scale farm. If something goes terribly wrong on a small farm, at worse a few hundred people are affected. No national, multi-million dollar sleuthing involved. If something goes terribly wrong in an industrial size farm, whose products were mixed in, processed and distributed with the goods from a dozen other mammoth farms, the numbers affected can reach the thousands, and as we are seeing now, the sorting out takes months.

One final thought: a farm to fork bureaucracy would place a disproportionate burden on small scale farmers, who often have no employees to pass the paperwork on to, and who would really like to spend their time growing healthy food, thank you. Should the government decide to implement such a scheme, we would hope that small scale farmers would be exempted. Requiring them to shoulder the same paperwork as the true offenders only makes family farming harder. What we ought to be doing instead is creating programs that encourage people to go into farming, so we can have as decentralized a food system as possible. That -- and developing relationships with the farmers who grow your food -- is where true food security lies.

With that, I'll invite you to browse the rest of this month’s newsletter, where green beans take the starring role. As always, take good care and eat well!

Erin

Erin Barnett
Director, LocalHarvest

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest newsletter. What a month! Things are different. You feel it too, right? With gas prices soaring, Iowa flooding, salmonella striking tomatoes, and a global food crisis threatening, it seems to us that America is finally, slowly waking up. The world is not what it seemed to be. Change feels inevitable in ways it didn't even a few months ago. The question now is not so much whether the collective we is going to change, but how - with what frame of mind. As we alter our consumption patterns, food and otherwise, we must be aware of how we approach change. We can be anxious or relaxed, defensive or curious, fearful or joyful. The differences are vast and vital.

Many of us live lives that are overly determined by convenience. Day to day decisions are made as if expediency and ease were our highest values. So habituated are we to these conveniences, so dependent on our luxuries (chocolate, coffee, bananas), that the idea of going without them actually makes us feel afraid. But fear - of scarcity, of change - is a terrible master. It makes us forget our own creativity and adaptability. We mistake the way it is for the way it has to be.

In that mindset, there is no way to discover something that might be better. Last month LocalHarvest was featured on a radio program out of Sacramento. The host started with the usual questions about how to define 'local' and how the website works. Once the conversation turned to actually buying local food, though, it became personal and he was stumped. Northern California offers astounding agricultural abundance, but this fellow could not see his way to buying this extraordinary produce directly from a farmer. He was used to shopping at Safeway, and the idea of deviating from the safe way (ironic, isn’t it?) made him tense. Shopping at a farmers market requires too much trust, he said, plus it's an extra trip and the veggies would sit in the frig drawer and rot anyway. Hmmm...

That interview stands out as an example of the kind of thinking we as a nation need to leave behind. If we greet every new idea with excuses that aim to defend our old ways, we will be lost. The future belongs to those who can walk lightly, willing to shift as needed, alert for the next ingenuity. If we let ourselves be afraid of this rapidly changing economy, it would be easy to lose site of the great beauty and new opportunities that surround us. If we keep ourselves relaxed and open, we will find ourselves reveling in the great gifts of this life: the beauty of nature, the comforting joy of friendship, the spark of creativity, and the civility of true community. And then we will be fearless.

Welcome back to the LocalHarvest newsletter! This month's main article was supposed to be about the value of growing a little of your own food, but Michael Pollan beat us to it in a piece published in the NY Times Magazine. He did a bang up job. It's worth your time.

The article prompted several far-reaching conversations around here. It got us thinking about personal and collective action, in the garden and beyond. We are continuing the conversation in the short article below. And ... from our nutrition and cooking columnists, we include a few thoughts on the glories of barley. How's that for something for everyone?

One of the best parts of my job is getting to talk to farmers. This afternoon I called Ber-Gust Farm in western Ohio and talked with Rick Kabara while he planted potatoes. (He had already put in 1208 hills when I called, and had another 600 to go for the day.) Like many LocalHarvest farmers, Rick and his wife Joanie grow a number of heirloom foods. In this issue of our newsletter we're announcing our new effort to promote "endangered" foods, so I wanted to ask him why they make a point of growing unusual varieties. Rick was quiet for a minute and then he said, "The biggest reason we like to grow old-fashioned varieties is that, well, I love food." It doesn’t get any more honest than that. He went on to talk about how he sees that so many people have forgotten what good food tastes like because they have gotten so used to "grocery store food." Rick likes to tell people who join their CSA, "You're going to learn to enjoy food again..."

We're making that our wish for all of you this Spring – may you find beautiful heirloom foods locally this year, food as it was meant to be. And may you learn to enjoy food again...

Asked to picture a farm in Iowa, and most people think of endless fields of corn. Though accurate for many parts of the state, there is something else going on in the northeastern corner of the state, something we would love to see cropping up all over the country. It is a cooperative of family farmers who joined together to market their products to local institutions. The local college, a couple of nursing homes and hospitals, and even a casino are now proudly serving healthy food, bought directly from local farmers. The barriers to such a scheme are considerable, but not insurmountable. Our main article this month looks at the draws and drawbacks of small farmer cooperatives like Iowa’s GROWN Locally.

Elsewhere in the newsletter -- if your diet needs some whole grains to balance out the jelly beans, be sure to read our nutrition and recipe articles about whole grain rice.

As always, thanks for your interest in LocalHarvest.org and your support of family farmers. See you next month, and until then, take good care and eat well!

If you're like us, every time the Farm Bill is mentioned, an uncontrollable urge to drift away from the conversation overtakes you. You start wondering what's for supper, or whether the car needs an oil change. You'd just as soon leave the whole complex affair to the people who are paid to make sure it all works out.

Us too.

BUT.

It turns out that the Farm Bill is the funding vehicle for the Community Food Projects program, the country's major source of funding for community food security projects. And funding for the CFP is in danger of being axed from the final version of this year's farm bill. Though we rarely ask readers to get involved in specific political scuffles, we are devoting this issue of our newsletter to convincing you to do one thing: make three short but important phone calls. Read our article on the CFP and you'll see why this is a program well worth saving.

If you need a minute and a little boost of energy before you make those calls, grab an orange and read our nutrition and recipe columns. You’ll see below just how far beyond vitamin C those beauties go!

As always, thanks for your interest in LocalHarvest.org and your support of family farmers. See you next month, and until then, take good care and eat well!