During a panel discussion at the summer meeting of the National Governors Association, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack urged state governments to alter the “extraction economy” of sending goods and people to the city, said the Des Moines Register. One step to bolster rural areas, Vilsack said, would be for governors to work with schools and large institutions to buy food locally.
“The most pressing thing for us is to give small family farms access to retail outlets,” said Vilsack in the Register story. “We want farmers to continue to be farmers, not salespeople.”
Chef Edward Lee, of Louisville, Kentucky, said the food-service industry is part of agriculture. “I can’t do my job without small family farms,” he said. The average U.S. worker is nearly two decades younger than the average farmer, Lee said. “We need farming to be economically viable. We need to make farming attractive, we need to make it sexy.”