Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Here's an interesting site about Local Food Systems.
http://www.environmentalcommons.org/LocalFood/  It carries a great deal of
news and pep talks about local efforts to ban GMOs, and state efforts to
strip counties and cities of the right to regulate food crops locally.  It
goes into the problems with centralized, corporate control of crops and
food. Scanning their page, Getting Involved, it's all about organizations
of all kinds and how to get them involved with local food initiatives.  The
headings include As Citizens, As Consumers, As Community Organizers,  As
Artists, As Philosophers, etc. 

But there's something missing. Even in As Entrepreneurs, this is all they
offer:
"There are many ways to help foster our local food economies. We could
start a farmers' market, help a local farm establish a Community Supported
Agriculture (CSA) program, develop local processing facilities, start a
community kitchen, or invest in our local food economy."

Let's see: if we just talk it up, get people informed, get organized, and
all that, then we'll get where we want to go and have more local food.
Right? 

Wrong. 

The glaring omission is nothing about actually producing the food locally.
Zip. It's as if the food is expected to appear out of nowhere. After all,
if dumb farmers can do it, anybody can, right? It's not just that
particular website. We're in an organization mindset. Like, publicity and
organizing will take care of everything. It won't. In our own area we've
seen a half dozen farmers markets with almost nobody selling, with the
nearest real market an hour away. And that's been bothering me. You can't
get buyers to a market, or schools or restaurants to buy locally, if
there's nothing to buy. 

Growing some of our own food can be done by just about anybody, anywhere,
with obvious exceptions. But growing for market, growing to sell, is a
skill with a learning curve, a specialized occupation that demands
foresight, practice, research, and some investment of time and money. It's
easy to go broke and never figure out why. And a losing operation won't
produce food for anybody. No college degree prepares us for the challenges
we face in producing food for local consumption. It may well be a
hindrance. Know of any market growers who can  apply cost accounting and
enterprise accounting to their operation? Know of any books on the subject?
How many small growers have many thousands of dollars tied up in land,
equipment, and labor, but have no idea how to control costs or raise
production or market profitably? How much study did they put into it before
starting? 

Too many well meaning people just don't get it.  Until we promote best
practices for production and cost control, and encourage a hundred thousand
more growers to get growing and make enough to live on to keep producing,
the local food movement will exist mainly on paper. Statistically, local
food of all kinds is still a drop in the bucket. And food doesn't grow
itself. 


paul tradingpost@lobo.net
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