Healthy Foods, Local Farms Conference Oct. 13

The 13th annual Healthy Foods, Local Farms Conference in Louisville will feature such speakers as author-farmer-poet-philosopher Wendell Berry, Goldman Prize winner Lynn Henning, Environmental Protection Agency water administrator Nancy Stoner, and Dennis Dimick, National Geographic's executive editor for environment.

The conference will be held from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 13 at Kentucky Country Day School in eastern Louisville. The registration fee is $40 and includes meals with locally and sustainably grown food. Scholarships are available. For information email or call Aloma Dew at 270-685-2034. A pre-conference Harvest Party on Friday evening, Oct. 12, at the Bashford Manor B & B, is $45. For information email or call  Joan Lindop at 502-836-3853.

As large farms replace mid-sized and smaller ones, rural communities suffer loss of local spending

"It’s not difficult to see the dominant trendline in agriculture when nearly every view of the landscape provides evidence," writes Heidi Marttila-Losure in the summer issue of Dakotafire, a regional reporting project of small news outlets in the eastern Dakotas.

"The tractors and planting rigs that were out in the fields this spring were double the size they were a generation ago; a farmer can cover hundreds of acres in a day," she writes. "Simply put, there are bigger farms, and fewer farmers.The percentage of the workforce employed in agriculture in the United States declined from 22 percent to 2 percent from 1930 to 2002, and since then it’s fallen still further, to something less than 1 percent." (Photo by Martilla-Losure)

And there's a problem with that, she notes, and it's something, sadly, people get around to talking about only after they've discussed big-farm economics. It's this thing about rural communities getting more economic and social benefit from mid-sized farms than from large ones.

Large farms, Martilla-Losure writes, buy in massive quantities, usually going to larger outfitters in larger communities or to direct suppliers for better prices. Some, in fact, are bound by contracts with corporations to buy from a certain much larger supplier, so there's not even an option for shopping local.  Small and mid-sized farms, on the other hand, stay home to buy. Research bears that out. Farms with a gross income of $100,000 made nearly 95 percent of their expenditures locally, according to the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Production's "Community and Social Impacts of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations" report. Farms with gross incomes higher than $900,000 spent less than 20 percent locally. (Read more)

Farmers use more direct access to consumers to build relationships and explain their practices

Farmers are having direct contact with their consumers more and more as a result of farmers' markets, the local food movement and community-supported agriculture, in which consumers agree to buy farmers' produce. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, farmers' markets have increased by 9.6 percent, to about 8,000 markets, since last year. More direct conversations are happening between farmers and consumers, and this can strengthening the relationship between them.

At the farmer's market in Lafayette, Ind., beginning farmer Neil Moseley, right, is able to educate shoppers about his organic farm practices and address concerns they might have about "big agriculture," which his brother practices, reports Sarah Gonzalez of Agri-Pulse. He can also tell shoppers about pesticide and herbicide use, and evolving conservation practices that maintain soil quality, protect sensitive land and preserve water quality. "The best part of what I do is getting that interaction with people," Moseley said.

Direct interaction with customers is a vital part of public relations for Moseley's farm, Gonzalez reports. He's also utilizing social media to interact, reaching more than 2,200 Facebook users. "We didn't realize we'd have to do these things when we started," he told Gonzalez. "There's so much to the marketing side of this it's baffling."

Gonzalez's article is a good example that could be replicated almost anywhere in the U.S. Agri-Pulse is a subscription-only newsletter, but offers a free, four-week trial here.