Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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 UW Assistant Professor Awarded $5 Million Grant for Sustainable Community
Food Project
April 11, 2011 — A University of Wyoming professor is leading a $5-million,
multi-state project to build community food systems that nourish populations
in both current and future generations.

Christine M. Porter, assistant professor in the College of Health
Sciences<http://www.uwyo.edu/hs/>Division of Kinesiology and Health,
leads the five-year "Food Dignity:
Action Research on Engaging Food Insecure Communities and Universities in
Building Sustainable Community Food Systems," project. It is funded by the
United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Agriculture and Food
Research Initiative (AFRI) Competitive Grant program.

This is the largest USDA grant the university has received, says Bill Gern,
UW vice president for research and economic development. Porter’s project
has three facets: extension, research and education.

The project's extension portion includes five community food initiatives.
Each will create a local steering committee to disperse small grants that
invest in citizen solutions to their own food system issues.

Two of the initiatives are in Wyoming -- Gayle Woodsum of Action Resources
International is organizing the Albany County project and Virginia Sutter of
Blue Mountain Associates, Inc. will lead the Wind River Indian Reservation
initiative. The others are Dig Deep Farms and Produce in Alameda County,
Calif.; Whole Community Project of Cornell Cooperative Extension, Tompkins
County, N.Y.; and East New York Farms!, Brooklyn, N.Y.

The research focuses on developing case studies of what each community has
already done and during the next five years will make clear what factors
influence their successes and failures as they work to create sustainable
community food systems that provide ample and appropriate food for all,
Porter says.

The education portion aims to create new cross-disciplinary undergraduate
minors in sustainable food systems to prepare UW and Cornell University
graduate students to engage in this work.

"At UW, the team developing the minor is considering nesting this within a
more generic sustainability program of study," Porter says.

She says the project comes at a crucial time in today's economy.

"We are close to peak oil and peak soil, are enduring the greatest wealth
and income inequality in decades, and somewhat ironically, face soaring
rates of both food insecurity and obesity," Porter says.

While there is no single cure-all for these problems, Porter and her team
view community food system development as a core part of the solution.

"We'll never compete with China in making plastic buckets or tennis shoes,"
she says, "But we can grow, process and sell our own food. The more we
localize food systems, the more local jobs we create and the fresher our
food is when it reaches our plates."

She also says research shows that medium-sized producers are more productive
than industrial-scale farms and also tend to be more attentive to ecological
and community sustainability.

While finishing her doctoral degree work, Porter says AFRI had a call for
proposals to foster food security and local economic development through a
blend of research, extension and education.

That pushed her to "dream bigger than I ever would have before dared." She
assembled a team of more than two dozen top-notch community food
practitioners and UW and Cornell University representatives for the "Food
Dignity" proposal.

Many UW faculty, staff and students are involved in the project, including
Urszula Norton, Kent Becker, Bill Gribb, Cole Ehmke, Deborah Paulson, Jill
Lovato, Cheryl Geiger, Leslie Darnall and Peggy McCrackin.

For more information about the project, contact Darnall at (307) 766-2141,
email ldarnall@uwyo.edu or visit the website at www.fooddignity.org .