local food

The Agriculture Department will distribute $1.7 billion for the purchase of locally and regionally produced food for emergency food assistance, said Agriculture deputy secretary Xochitl Torres Small on Tuesday. Most of the money would flow through schools, childcare facilities, and food banks and some would go directly to emergency food providers.

To build resiliency into the food system, the Agriculture Department said on Monday it would award up to $500 million to state and tribal governments for purchases of locally grown food for emergency food assistance. The Local Food Purchase Assistance program has a goal of buying food from socially disadvantage farmers and putting it in the hands of under-served communities.

Small farmers who sell their products locally are eligible for a new micro-farm policy, said the Risk Management Agency, which oversees the federally subsidized crop insurance system. The policy, which simplifies recordkeeping and covers post-production costs, is available for 2022 crops.

Alaska imports more than 90 percent of its food, but with Covid-19 interrupting supply chains, especially to remote regions, people in the state are reacting by starting gardens and advocating for more locally grown food, reports Miranda Weiss in FERN's latest story. (No paywall)

Companion bills introduced in the House and Senate would make it easier for schools to buy locally produced foods to serve to their students, said sponsors on Thursday.

California offers an example of how to avoid the electronic equipment snarl that threatens SNAP sales at 40 percent of farmers markets across the nation, says The New Food Economy. "Their method? Creating a system partially, if not fully independent of the federal system."

In the small town of Ava in southern Illinois, brewers Marika Josephson and Aaron Kleidon take a look outside when they need ingredients for their brewery. With a garden on their property and a "commitment to sourcing their hops and malt close to home," Scratch Brewery "is part of a new movement of breweries that want to use foraged beers—beverages brewed with wild ingredients sourced hyper-locally—to educate drinkers about agriculture," says Civil Eats.

The great majority farmers under the age of 35 hold a college degree, significantly higher than the U.S. average. It is a cohort that "is already contributing to the growth of the local-food movement and could help preserve the place of midsize farms in the rural landscape," says the Washington Post. It cites the 2012 Census of Agriculture as saying the number of farmers under the age of 35 is increasing for only the second time in a generation.

With an eye toward the 2018 farm bill, congressional backers of regional food marketing efforts filed bills in the House and Senate that would expand local and direct sales of food, which were estimated at $8.7 billion in 2015.

In a lengthy report, the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank identifies regional food systems as "a promising avenue for economic growth for both rural and urban communities through the creation or enhancement of existing jobs and businesses."

The James Beard Foundation announced six winners of its Leadership Award this this year, saying they are "pioneers in their areas of work, including reducing food waste, environmental protection, local and national advocacy, and workplace safety." The winners are Rep. Chellie Pingree of Maine, chef Dan Barber, author Joan Gussow, food advocate Olivier De Schutter, and the directors of the Food Chain Alliance, Joann Lo and Jose Oliva.

Growers in California reaped one-third of the $8.7 billion in direct marketing of food nationwide, said USDA in its first-ever Local Foods report, based on 2015 sales of fresh and value-added products. Farms who sold directly to institutions or intermediaries, such as wholesalers or food hubs, took the largest share, $3.4 billion, of the U.S. total.