…it’s the beginning of a revolution. And we need you to join us. That’s what the EAT LOCAL! Campaign, now in its fourth year, is all about. This second edition of Boulder County’s EAT LOCAL! Resource Guide is a comprehensive directory of all the local food resources we’ve been able to find, as well as a kind of manifesto for the EAT LOCAL! Campaign itself. It’s also a celebratory feast in itself, a celebration of local!
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The Boulder County EAT LOCAL! Campaign presents positive pathways of engaging citizens, communities, businesses, and local governments to take the far-reaching actions that are required to strengthen the local food system. This ten-year Campaign is working to expand the capacity of our local food system and to promote closer connections between community members and those who grow our food.
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The overarching mission of the EAT LOCAL! campaign is to catalyze a more resilient local food system for Boulder County, based on deep ecological principles and a more connected populace, with far less dependence on fossil fuels and petroleum-based inputs.
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…According to a 2009 study by consultant Ken Meter (Crossroads Resource Center), “Boulder county consumers spend $662 million buying food each year, including $374 million for home use [and, by implication, roughly $288 million in restaurants]. Only $715,000 of food products (2% of farm cash receipts, and 0.1% of local consumer needs) are sold by farmers directly to consumers.” Based on these numbers[1], we estimate that if Boulder County citizens would purchase only 10% of the food they need for home use directly from county farmers, this would produce $37 million of new annual farm income in Boulder County — an amount equivalent to more than all of the 2007 farm sales in the county…
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While watersheds outline the flow of water supplying a particular area, “foodsheds” outline the flow of food feeding a particular area. A foodshed is everything between where a food is produced and where a food is consumed—the land it grows on, the routes it travels, the markets it goes through, the tables it ends up gracing. The modern U.S. foodshed includes the entire world. Much of our food traverses the globe to reach our dinner table. In fact, food can often travel back and forth thousands of miles to different processing plants before it eventually reaches us…
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The mission of the proposed Boulder County Farmer Cultivation Center is to provide space and programming to foster increased food production in our community. It will be an incubator for new farmers, farming and gardening techniques, and food related businesses.
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…We have become dependent upon technology and synthetic inputs, subsidized by what was, until very recently, cheap oil, which facilitated not only the production of nitrogen fertilizer, but also the management of large-scale, mechanized farms and the energy-intensive system of processing and long-range transportation necessary to bring agricultural products to distant markets. Agriculture accounts for more than 20 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions—all the more shocking when one realizes that recent science indicates that fertile soil is a potent carbon sink, holding the potential to play a significant role in remediating global warming.
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…Undertaking the change of something as deep rooted as a community food system will require a careful and analytical planning process to insure success and efficiency. Ultimately, the end result of the planning process will be to develop a set of comprehensive, sustainable, and fair food and farming policies, and then to implement policy objectives via a strategic plan that is inclusive of diverse voices in our community. Achieving these goals can only be accomplished via a coordinated and thoughtful effort.
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To be sustaining and sustainable, agriculture must make the transition from an oil-based industrial model to a more labor-intensive, knowledge-intensive, localized, organic model. This means a radical reduction of fossil fuel inputs, accompanied by an increase in labor inputs and a reduction of transport, with production being devoted primarily to local consumption. What would an agriculture without fossil fuels look like? How could we get there?
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