I have no doubt that my first and perhaps strongest connections to nature were anchored through my earliest years of life on a farm in eastern Kansas. Those experiences are part of what led me to start this blog, and from the first post on I have kept the No Farms, No Food, and Friend of Farmland action campaign badges from American Farmland Trust in the sidebar.
When I got the most recent AFT newsletter I decided to see if there was a story that would make a good update on Earthbytes for the work this organization does. That's when I found a great blog article by Julia Freedgood, the managing director for Farmland and Communities at AFT.
In her post, Reconnecting Farmers and Consumers Makes Dollars and Sense, Freedgood talks about a study on Ohio's food systems by Ken Meter that speak to the potential for localization of food markets to boost local economies:
Food is an important industry in the Buckeye state. Ohioans purchase $29 billion of food per year, and the food industry accounts for 13 percent of the state’s economic activity. According to Meter, state policies that focus on distant markets rather than local consumers are detrimental to the economy—resulting in a $30 billion economic outflow each year, more than four times the $7 billion of total farm production in the state.
Recapturing these dollars would create significant economic opportunities, especially in Ohio where personal income increased 70 percent and food consumption increased 32 percent over the past 40 years. In recent years, direct sales from farmers to consumers rose significantly: 45 percent in Ohio (just shy of the 49 percent national average). The value of those sales rose 70 percent in the state. While the total sales figures remain small, farmer-to-consumer sales are one of the fastest growing sectors of the food economy, offering valuable opportunities to keep farmland in farming, especially in areas where farmers have close access to consumers. Indeed, a report on Northeast Ohio proposes that a 25 percent shift to local products could result in the creation of more than 27,000 jobs!
Some of the goats just down the lane at A Place of the Heart Farm. You can find Mac and Adrienne at the Market Square Farmer's Market in Knoxville. [Photo credit: Cathie Bird]
Everytime I drive past my neighbors' organic farm on my way out of the holler, I can't help but think what a great example it is of how localization of food markets could work for Tennessee. It's at least one way we could move beyond economies that require tearing down mountains and eliminating productive farmland.
Freedgood's full post has links to at least three full reports on localization of food markets and the economic activity it brings. There were other interesting articles in AFT's July newsletter that is available online.
Here's a short video from AFT, Saving the Land that Sustains Us:
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