field notes: news & resources for re-linking the food chain

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.”}

Read the full story here.

Meet Mike

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.

Read the rest of Diane’s report on the Michigan Land Use Institute’s site.

I had the pleasure of attending the Michigan Organic Food and Farming Conference last weekend and was inspired by the vision and integrity of farmers I met who’ve built successful businesses, as well new farmers who are just starting out.  Highlights included an intergenerational panel that addressed needs and resources for incubating new farmers, a session on creative strategies for farmland acquisition, and a panel about Michigan Thumb Organics (MTO).

MTO is a cooperative of experienced farmers whose individual members sell organic commodities crops like soy and corn.  They’ve come together to expand and diversify sustainable local food production.  Check out Chris Bedford’s video for their story.

“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” Carl Sagan

Henry David Thoreau once wrote that “it is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.” Michael Pollan

from Orang1na on flickr

It’s apple season.  My family ushered in the Jewish New Year last weekend by dipping apples in honey with a blessing for fruit trees, renewal and a good, sweet year. I thought of a cookbook, written by women in Theresienstadt, the Czech concentration camp.

Fighting hunger and malnutrition, the women wrote down the recipes they remembered, an act of defiance that created a cultural legacy.  One of the women, Mina Pachter, gave the recipes to a friend on Yom Kippur in 1944, just before she died.  The recipes were published in the 1996 book, In Memory’s Kitchen.  65 years later, I’m looking at a recipe for apple dumplings (below).

Alan Turing, a mathematician and cryptographer, is considered to be the father of modern computer science.  Turing was also gay, and in 1952 he was prosecuted by the British government for the “crime” of homosexuality. Instead of going to prison, he agreed to be injected with estrogen to “curb his libido.”  In 1954, at the age of 41, he committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.  Turing was persecuted for his desires.

Apples, Pollan writes, satisfy our desire for sweetness. “…sweetness has proved to be a force in evolution. By encasing their seeds in sugary and nutritious flesh, fruiting plants, such as the apple hit on an ingenious way of exploiting the mammalian sweet tooth: in exchange for fructose, the animals provide the seeds with transportation…Desire, then, is built into the very nature and purpose of fruit.” (The Botany of Desire)

Decio, which dates back to Roman times, is the oldest known variety of apple.  Cox’s Orange Pippin, introduced in England in 1825, is my absolute favorite apple; I’ve found it in Michigan at Christmas Cove Farm.

Stats from the Lansing State Journal’s Interactive Guide to Michigan Apples:

• Pounds of apples the average U.S. consumer eats in a year: 46.1 (at 5-6 ounces per apple, that’s about 138 apples per person)
• Top apple producing states: Washington, New York, Michigan, California, Pennsylvania and Virginia
• Number of family-run apple farms in Michigan: 950

No post on apples would be complete, of course, without a simple and fabulous recipe:

Apples with honey and salted butter – from Larousse Gastronomique

1. Preheat the oven to 475 degrees.
2. Peel, halve and core 8 dessert apples.
3. Pour 3/4 cup liquid acacia honey into a flameproof baking dish, spreading it evenly.
4. Place this dish over a brisk heat and arrange the apple halves in the dish with their curved sides underneath and a small knob of salted butter in each.
5. Cook for 10 minutes and serve immediately.

From the women of Theresienstadt: Apple Dumplings

Make an ordinary dumpling dough with 1/2 kilogram flour, 2 eggs, 1/2 decagram yeast some fat. Now cut fine delicate apples into small pieces. To prevent them from darkening, pour some white wine over apples. When the dough is kneaded, add apples and make ordinary dumplings. Serve with stewed prunes. It is a good supper.

We’ll be profiling Local Orbit buyers and sellers from time to time and thought it would be great to kick off our new video series with a new farmer, Brad Boettcher. After losing his job at General Motors last year, Brad decided to become a full-time farmer and raise catfish, chickens and turkeys. Aimee Boettcher keeps bees.

Video: Wendy Williams
Photography: Peter Schottenfels

There are many reasons we buy local.  It’s a given that we get healthy, fresh, great tasting food – from producers we know and trust.  Equally important is the impact our spending choices have on local economies.

According to the Michigan Department of Agriculture,  if each household in our home state of Michigan started spending $10 per week of their grocery bill on Michigan products, we would keep more than $37 million in Michigan, each week.  That’s almost $2 billion per year.

(Did you know?  Michigan has the second most diverse agricultural output in the country, after California.  It’s also among the top five states in the production of over 30 different types of crops, and ranks first in the production of tart cherries, blueberries, navy beans, cranberry beans, and black turtle beans.  Agriculture is the second largest industry in Michigan and, unlike manufacturing, has shown steady growth through the recession.  The sector is expected to create 12,000-23,000 new jobs in the next 2 years.)

The dollar you spend at a local business contributes three times more to the local economy than the dollar you spend at a chain store. That’s three times more income, three times more jobs, and three times more tax benefits. It’s called the local multiplier effect.

YES! magazine lays out the numbers in this downloadable poster , demonstrating how buying local can … make your money count—more than once.