Self-Reliance on a Global Scale

By John Bunker
MOFGA President

Turin, Italy, October 28, 2006 – We in Maine are a part of a growing, worldwide movement to reclaim, defend and invigorate local communities, local economies and local agricultural systems.  Nowhere is that more evident than here in this massive makeshift cafeteria.  I’m sitting at a long picnic table, having just finished eating a delicious lunch of local Italian food with a few thousand farmers from around the world.  I’m in Turin, Italy, and this is the third day of the Slow Food conference called Terra Madre.  I am joined by 10 other Mainers, including MOFGA’s executive director Russell Libby and several MOFGA members.  I am also joined by 5,000 farmers, 1,000 chefs, 500 agricultural educators and 800 volunteers.

Everywhere I look, I see people of different races and nationalities, many wearing traditional regional clothing.  As I sit and write, I hear chatter in several languages that I cannot understand.  Together we hail from 150 countries.  This is a “United Nations of local food.”  The atmosphere is excited, friendly and optimistic. I ate lunch a few minutes ago with a young fellow who taught himself English by playing video games and watching television.  His English is nearly perfect.  He works for a Portuguese nonprofit called Fair Trade and is assisting a group of Brazilian farmers at the conference.  All 8,000 of us have been fed, housed and transported back and forth at no charge.  The whole experience borders on miraculous.

Numerous workshops each day cover Market Access to Local Food for Education, Mobile Livestock Rearing, Tea Culture, GMOs, Cacao Production and so on.  All talks are translated simultaneously into our headphones.  It is amazing.  In the center of the hall, attendees display their local crafts and foods.  Everyone hands out samples.  (I’ve eaten some really interesting stuff.)  The convention center is humming with conversation.  My head is packed with new insights, new handy tips and much inspiration.  While the words ‘sustainable’ and ‘organic’ are everywhere, the word ‘local’ is the key.

When we planted our first garden in Palermo 35 summers ago, we had an assumption of what it meant to be organic.  We made our first compost pile; we used our neighbor’s cow manure; we employed no synthetic pesticides or fertilizers.  We used local inputs, local labor and local land.  We were, after all, “back to the land.”  We even called our farm “the land.”  Our friends and family called it “the land.”  Although we did buy organic rice and preordered organic citrus for winter treats, ‘organic’ was really something we did ourselves on our land. It was local.

Now we live in what Wendell Berry has called “a total economy.”  A few people make decisions that affect billions of people worldwide.  “A total economy is one in which everything – ‘life forms,’ for instance, or the ‘right to pollute’ – is ‘private property’ and has a price and is for sale.  In a total economy significant and sometimes central choices that once belonged to individuals or communities become property of corporations.”  Now, even organic products are often grown far away, owned by huge corporations and travel thousands of miles to Maine.  Is that kind of system sustainable?   Can such food be fresh or healthy?

Terra Madre represents the flip side of the total economy coin, offering an emerging vision of a different kind of globalization and a different future for the earth.  In this model people gather from all over the world to think together and to share information and stories in a collaborative effort of reclaim control over their own lives.  This is self-reliance on a global scale.  This is a cooperative support system of billions.  This is not about going backwards.  This is about creating a 21st century of local communities, local economies and local agriculture where fairness and justice and sustainability are key.  This is truly about thinking globally and acting locally.

Farm-to-School-to-Community Fundraisers: 
Better than Candy

Jean English
Editor of The MOF&G

When my kids were in elementary school, they invariably brought home fundraising catalogs full of junk during holiday seasons.  Glitzy, plastic-coated wrapping paper; plastic doodads that nobody needs and are toxic to make and toxic to dispose of; candy; highly preserved and colored and artificial “food”; too many magazine subscriptions.  Most parents, teachers and administrators balked at these sales.  “I wouldn’t feed this to my dog,” one teacher told me about a particular “food.”  

Most of us reluctantly went along with these sales to help kids raise money for class trips or other events. 

What were we thinking? 

We should have done what the Central Lake Elementary School students in Kalkaska, Michigan, are doing, according to an article by Diane Conners in the Great Lakes Bulletin News Service.  (The full story is on the Michigan Land Use Institute’s Web site, www.mlui.org/growthmanagement/fullarticle.asp?fileid=17084.)  These kids visit farms, learn how food is raised, harvested and processed into jams, bottled milk, maple syrup and more (or not processed, in the case of apples, for instance), then help sell that food through their fundraisers. 

Conners writes that U.S. schools, churches and other nonprofits earn about $1.7 billion a year selling prepackaged products for fundraisers, while the fundraising companies earn another $2.1 billion. 

One parent, Pepper Bromelmeier, who works for the Natural Resources Conservation Service, wanted to see more of that money staying in the community and wanted to get the Kalkaska fundraisers off the candy wagon.  She proposed the farm-to-community fundraiser idea to farmers she knew, and they loved it.  By marketing farm products through schools, farmers sell more of their goods locally, students learn entrepreneurial skills and values—and may even be attracted to farming as a career—and everyone is exposed to healthier foods. 

The students now visit a few of the dozen or so farms involved in the project; learn entrepreneurial math; and write thank-you letters to farmers and sales letters to prospective buyers (usually family members and neighbors).  Including math and writing in the program helped justify spending class time on the fundraisers.

The program sells some $4,000 worth of farm products over two weeks, and the Kalkaska students get about $1,400 in profit.  Organizers believe that the program could have a significant economic impact if other schools picked up the idea.  It’s also good advertising for local farms. 

In other school districts, parents have been the fundraisers, selling baskets of local farm goods each week, for example, which customers pick up at the schools; or kids have picked apples at an orchard and then resold them for a profit.

Maybe your local school is ripe for a homegrown fundraiser.  Try it.  You might even find some locally grown, gourmet dog treat

Are We Ready?

By Russell Libby
MOFGA Executive Director

For many years, organic farmers were the outsiders.  Organic agriculture was considered either obsolete (how our grandfathers farmed) or unworkable.  Growing food organically might work for the customers at the local food coop or the farmers’ market, but it wouldn’t meet the standards of the average consumer.

Now, after decades of slow growth and improving production systems, organics is everywhere – at the farmers’ market and natural food store, but also at the restaurant, the supermarket, the college dining hall.  Organic food is sold at Wal-Mart and at almost every other large chain store across the country.

Many MOFGA farmers are grappling with the scale issue right now.  As markets grow, many of our farmers are adapting their production systems to continue to supply some of their traditional outlets as demand increases.  This is a good problem, if we can solve it.  But as we grow, we enter markets where we compete with producers from across the country and around the world.

At Grow Smart Maine’s annual conference in Augusta in October, I was part of a discussion about how farming fit into the discussion of sprawl and changing land use patterns.  It seems to me that if we keep our discussion that narrow, we are going to miss a huge opportunity to move all of Maine forward for decades to come.

Maine has a national reputation as a state that is still environmentally pure.  Part of that is due to the size and extent of our forests and our coastline.  We can, as a state, make a conscious effort to turn that perception into a permanent reality.

I proposed that we think about Maine as a national leader and innovator in the science, research and development, and practice of environmentally appropriate land use, technologies and businesses.  Then we can use that goal to help shape our investments in the future.

We’ve already made some good starts.  Much of the private forest has met at least some basic green certification requirements.  We have the highest proportion of organic dairy farms of any state, and we are among the leaders in organic farming in general.  The Alliance for a Clean and Healthy Maine, which MOFGA supports, is pushing for a green chemistry initiative that would replace harmful household chemicals with biologically based alternatives.  The marine sector has some really good and insightful initiatives.  Could we add to this a goal of building housing that will last for centuries, as opposed to cheap units that may last for just a few decades?  Can we be national leaders in appropriate energy use?

The answer, to me, is an obvious yes.  Maine is ready.  The Common Ground Country Fair is a place where many thousands of people gather who are already trying to live these goals.  The 5,600 members of MOFGA are working on these issues every day on their farms and in their gardens and households.

Now we have to engage in the hard work of moving these integrated visions forward, sector by sector, remembering always that more and more people are becoming involved.  That will require some difficult discussions and decisions about scale and markets and how to maintain our values as we become a central part of what people expect to experience in their daily lives, and when they visit Maine.  Let’s make it happen!