We were so pleased this morning to see this excellent article on Detroit Eastern Market published on the homepage of MetroMode.com. Eastern Market “is the most comprehensive food hub in the nation” according to its president, Dan Carmody. Understanding their methods and learning from their model could significantly increase the amount of regional food hubs in our nation – creating jobs, improving the health of our communities, and growing the small farm sector in an unprecedented way.
Dan Carmody, president of Eastern Market
We’ve excerpted a few of our favorite quotes from the article, especially the piece that shares how we are aiding in Eastern Market’s efforts, but please make sure to read the full story here.
{The food hub helps small farmers grow the size and yield of their farms and create other viable sales outlets that aren’t community supportive agriculture (CSA), a farmer’s market, or direct sales to restaurants because “farmers have to balance their time between selling food and growing it,” Carmody says. “It’s the next step in the devolution of a food system into a stronger regional system, encouraging smaller growers.”}
{Carmody and his staff have increased the profile of local and regional growers supplying the market, says Debbie Tropp, branch chief of the Agricultural Marketing Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is conducting a two-year study of Eastern Market. “They’re doing their level best to try to revitalize the regional food system in a way that may not have happened prior.”
Eastern Market is considered a “hybrid market,” where wholesale and retail activities occur, one of about 50 in the nation, according to James Barham, agricultural economist and head of a USDA interagency task force on regional food hubs. “Hardly any of these would be classified regional food hubs. Mainly, it’s a property manager who’s leasing space…. What Dan is doing is pretty remarkable. He could have set up as a property manager and leased space. Eastern Market would have continued to exist.”
Food hubs are a fairly new designation for comprehensive agricultural centers that provide a catalytic impact on the regional food system, says Barham. “Because of the strong relationship regional food hubs have with producers, and because of the demand for locally grown product, producers are scaling up their operations, they’re hiring more staff, they’re planting more crops, they’re switching practices from more conventional to more sustainably produced because there’s higher customer demand for that type of product.”
Eastern Market has established a virtual food hub to connect the region’s growers and buyers in an unprecedented way using Local Orb.it. “The buyer can go online and pick Eastern Market as their hub, see a variety of our growers, our specialty product vendors, and be able to order from these different types of growers on one purchase order,” says Christine Quane, wholesale market coordinator for Eastern Market. “That allows growers to tell their story, inventory their items and put their wholesale pricing [on display]. They pick their products, make their orders, and the two meet on a set day — saving time for both. By knowing the story behind the grower, they know where their food is coming from. They’ll know who the growers are and how they grow.”}
Mike Thorn believes in change. He believes that small farmers can build sustainable businesses. He believes that restaurants and institutions will one day be able to source local food with ease. And he believes it’s time for high-tech solutions to support the vibrant, local businesses that are bringing good food to our tables.
Mike joined Local Orbit as the lead programmer in May, and he hasn’t come up for air since. From developing new features for our pilot hub sites to figuring out how to solve problems created by rural satellite internet connections, he’s been busy. Mike’s work on our upcoming release will allow us to tailor Local Orbit’s tools to each region’s unique needs and support a variety of food distribution business models. It will also provide rich production and distribution information to help everyone involved in the value chain with future planning.
Mike’s food values come from his deep family roots. His father, a professor and doctor, cooked dinner for his family every night, inspired by the foods of his Thai and Chinese upbringing. Local produce was always on the menu and still is today; he purchases at least 50% of his food from Farmer’s Markets and blows away dinner guests with his unbelievable lamb curry that takes 10 hours of hands on cooking to perfect.
Mike was majoring in Chemistry at Eastern Michigan University, but chose to jump into the fast and furious world of internet startups instead. Soon after, his first startup consulting company was awarded a major project for The Dow Chemical Company, lasting 9 years. Mike’s role in this project was the primary software architect for their laboratory information management system. His software was used to outsource millions of dollars of routine testing, enabling shorter hold times on inventory and freeing expensive internal resources to focus on product development and refinement. Later, he helped implement a web-based data mining processor that used natural language processing to calculate performance metrics for Fortune 500 companies such as Disney and RCI. Most recently, he designed a HIPPA-compliant architecture for an electronic medical record system start-up, Therapy Charts
Mike is excited to see his work help farmers grow stronger businesses. In the long run, he sees himself making an even greater contribution by helping our users run their businesses more effectively with the robust, easy-to-use planning and marketing tools Local Orbit is developing. His goal is to bring the resources and tools that create advantages for big agriculture and huge retail chains to 10-acre farms and 10-table restaurants alike.
Local Orbit team members Becky Noffsinger and Patty Cantrell attended the Farm Routes to Prosperity Summit in Traverse City last month and I just had an opportunity to read Diane Connor’s report of the event. The region is well on its way to achieving its 10-year goal of increasing the resilience and doubling the value of the region’s local food and agricultural economy by 2019. With two recently-launched Local Orbit marketplaces in Benzie County, we’re please to provide the online infrastructure to help make this happen. We’re particularly excited by Rob Sirrine’s map of farm-to-school growth in the past six years. More please!
When Rob Sirrine, chairman of the Northwest Michigan Food & Farming Network, clicked on his favorite slide during his presentation to the third annual Farm Routes to Prosperity Summit, the audience responded with an appreciative “oooh!”
More than 100 people were there on Feb. 4, gathered in Traverse City to chart and plan for making more progress in the eat-local, buy-local food movement that is slowly but surely changing northwestern Lower Michigan’s farm and food economy.
The region is home to a unique, Lake Michigan-powered microclimate that supports a beautiful landscape of fruit orchards; tourism-related farm stands, wineries and breweries; and nearby fields of vegetables, livestock, and small dairies. Members of the Food & Farming Network—a diverse group of farm, nonprofit, health, community garden, land preservation, business, school, and economic development professionals—want to not just preserve it, but grow it.
Why did Dr. Sirrine’s slide show take their breath away? Because one of this MSU Extension educator’s slides showed a map with just one dot on it, marking the location of Central Grade School in the Traverse City Area Public Schools District. In 2004, that school launched the region’s first “farm to school” program, serving fresh, locally grown produce from area farmers in school lunches.
Technology can only help our ideas bloom. Bits and bytes…connecting growers to eaters.
I just ran across this lovely animation promoting the Eat Well Guide’s, Cultivating the Web. Since its 2008 publication, digital tools have been central to the growth of the good food movement, conveying the stories and building online networks that support offline relationships and transactions.
And generating an increasingly broad-based awareness of the value and impact of local, sustainable food on nutrition, on the quality of our eating experiences and on the economic development of communities.
Want to feed the world? Let’s start by asking: How are we going to feed ourselves?
Or better, How can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself?
Dan Barber shares the story of Veta La Palma, a 27,000 acre fish farm in Spain that has “completely reversed the ecological destruction” created by a large cattle farming operation that preceded it. It’s an amazing story about repairing environmental damage while building a profitable business that produces great tasting fish.
And, Barber posits, “it’s a recipe for the future of good food.” Watch. Renew your flagging optimism.
Mark Bittman posted a good piece by Russ Parsons. It addresses conflicting perspectives in the increasingly audible conversation about building a better food system. Parsons proposes a set of shared principles to anchor serious discussion about our shared problem. While I question the 20th century “agricultural miracle” to which he refers, and not everyone in either “camp” views the issues in such extremes, the article, published in the LA Times earlier this week, bears re-posting here.
Let’s not join one of the armed camps deeply suspicious of one another shouting past each other.
The issues facing agriculture today are much more complicated than lining up behind labels such as “local” and “organic.” (Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)
One of the more pleasing developments of the last decade has been the long-overdue beginning of a national conversation about food — not just the arcane techniques used to prepare it and the luxurious restaurants in which it is served, but, much more important, how it is grown and produced. The only problem is that so far it hasn’t been much of a conversation. Instead, what we have are two armed camps deeply suspicious of one another shouting past each other (sound familiar?).
On the one side, the hard-line aggies seem convinced that a bunch of know-nothing urbanites want to send them back to Stone Age farming techniques. On the other side, there’s a tendency by agricultural reformers to lump together all farms (or at least those that aren’t purely organic, hemp-clad mom-and-pop operations) as thoughtless ravagers of the environment.
Well, at least we’re thinking about it, so I suppose that’s a start. But the issues we’re facing are not going to go away, and they are too important to be left to the ideologues. What I’d like to see happen in the next decade is a more constructive give-and-take, the start of a true conversation.
With that goal in mind, I’d like to propose a few ground rules that might help move us into the next phase — fundamental principles that both sides should be able to agree on.
The Toronto Star sent Margaret Webb to find farms that produce the raw materials for junk food. The result of her search is a compelling and unsettling piece about the journey of food from field to factory to snack.
Ultimately, however, Webb articulates what many of us already know and are working toward in the way we eat, produce and distribute food:
Food is powerful. Change is possible with every purchase we make, in every link we forge between good food and good farming, and in every bite we take.
Follow the flow of food. That’s what any farmer will tell you. Because apples don’t grow in supermarkets.…to get to the root of the exploding obesity epidemic, I went in search of a junk food farm.
Such farms are not so easy to spot. No fields of Dorito bags waving in the breeze, no orchards blooming with soda pop, no soil bursting with 99-cent burgers.
I’m a big fan of Springwise, a site that spots intriguing business ideas (where else would I have learned about Van Gogh is Bipolar a restaurant in Quezon City, Philippines?).
A recent post highlights an unexpected – and very cool – local food distribution model that offers convenience and direct farm-to-consumer sales.
In a world wrapped up in complex supply chains, small farmers are in a catch-22: sell to the supermarkets and get less cash for your carrots, or spend a lot more time and effort trying to sell directly to customers. Consumers, meanwhile, are torn between loyalty to local businesses and the convenience of those established supply chains. Now a German farm, Peter-und-Paul-Hof, has found a solution in the form of… vending machines. The result of a collaboration between the farm and vending manufacturer Stuewer, the specially designed Regiomat machines currently sell fresh milk, eggs, butter, cheese, potatoes and sausage in thirteen German towns and communities.
It’s not a solution that sprung up overnight. Initially, Peter-und-Paul-Hof were operating a service delivering milk to their customers. Finding this too time-consuming, they began encouraging customers to collect the milk from fridges on their farm, which proved successful and inspired them to use vending machines as a more versatile solution. The Regiomat machines can be placed outdoors 365 days a year as long as they’re under a roof (some have even been placed alongside hiking trails in Switzerland), effectively giving locals a 24-hour farmers’ market and farmers a lot more free time. By cutting out the middleman, this system also offers potential savings over retail stores. An update to the traditional farm stand that is beneficial to both farmers and local-loving consumers, this is definitely a concept we can see spreading to other parts of the world.
What if a version of the Regiomat was installed in schools throughout the US – both for student snacks during the day and quick grocery shopping for parents and staff on their way home?
Following up on my last post, I ran across another resource in the quest for transparency.
What’s On My Food is searchable database that uses research from the USDA’s Pesticide Data Program to rank the toxicity of fruits and veggies (fresh, canned and frozen), meats, grains, dairy products and water. (via Bitten)
I’d love it if someone could turn this into a mobile tool for people faced with the choice of $8.99/lb for organic, local garlic vs. $2.99/lb for conventional, domestic garlic, as I was yesterday. I chose the cheaper garlic because my budget is limited. And while there’s no specific data on garlic in the database, I learned that onions, a similar crop, have extremely low amounts of pesticide residue, which made that choice a little easier.
Peaches and apples, on the other hand, are a different story. Armed with data on the residues found in these fruits, it was an easy choice to buy the more expensive local, pesticide-free options.
As I’ve noted before, when we get cheap food, we aren’t necessarily paying for its true cost. There are hidden costs to the environment, to individual health, and to local economies. With an unlimited budget, I’d always choose the local, pesticide-free option. Most of our food budgets, however, are limited. Easy to use, data-driven tools can make it a little easier to spend wisely and eat well.
The best way to know your food you is to purchase it directly from the people who produce it. The farmer who grew your salad or raised the chicken you’re roasting for dinner. The artisan who made the cheese that’s going into the omelette you’re making with the eggs that came from the farmer who also grew the potatoes you’re going to eat on the side.
That’s why we created Local Orbit and our sellers are committed to our core standards.
However, we can’t always get to a farmers market (and Local Orbit isn’t widely available – yet!), and there are plenty of foods you can’t buy locally. The trick is figuring out, in the words of Good Guide’s Transparency Manifesto, three simple things everyone should know about their food but don’t:Where did it come from? How was it made? What’s in it?
As Collin Dunn writes in Treehugger, Labels on food items are as numerous as the aisles they’re sold in, and many proclaim that they’re helping you be healthy, helping the planet, or both. The truth is that there are myriad labels out there that aren’t worth the shiny sticker they’re printed on; certifications that promise to be “all-something” or “whatever-free” that aren’t under any government or third-party oversight, free to be molded and marketed by anyone who puts a product on a shelf.
From Pringles to starfruit, you can learn about specific products on the Good Guide site – and you can use their mobile applications to help you at the grocery store.
