Some of you may have noticed we weren’t at the Westerville Farmers’ Market last Wednesday. Instead, we were in Pennsylvania. I have family there, and it was nice to visit, but the real reason for going was that I attended the NAIS Listening Session in Harrisburg. (There’s another one in Louisville this Friday if anyone with the inclination to go reads this in time.) I had pre-registered online, and got an email telling me that while my pre-registration was confirmed, there was still a limit on the capacity of the room, so even among pre-registered attendees, it would be first-come-first-admitted. They advised I show up early if I wanted to get in.

I didn’t show up early, but it didn’t matter. The parking lot was mostly empty other than several fire trucks that were there for an unrelated event. I told a woman at the registration desk that I had pre-registered online, and it made no difference. “Did you register to speak?” I had, I told her. She handed me a folder with a colored sticker on the outside and a ticket inside. It appeared that everyone got one of these folders. So much for the scary warning about the need to pre-register.

I went into the banquet room where there were probably fewer than a hundred people in what looked to be a space designed for a thousand or more. That “fewer than a hundred” included members of the press, USDA officials, and a handful of security personnel in addition to regular attendees like me. I got a seat to the left of the central aisle, where there were microphones about every 15 feet. In front of me was a woman wearing a T-shirt that read “I LOVE MY COUNTRY. IT’S THE GOVERNMENT I DON’T TRUST” or something to that effect. To my left was a young woman carrying a baby in a sling. The woman with the T-shirt was making it her business to personally accost each person she could before the start of the meeting, as though we were all going to vote and she wanted to make sure we voted the right way. Unfortunately for the cowboy-hatted gentleman sitting next to her, he responded that he really hadn’t taken a position and could see the merit of having some kind of system for tracking diseases. The T-shirt lady got into a heated debate with him–well, heated on her side, at least. When she failed to rattle him, the lady with the baby joined in. I felt bad for him, though I disagreed with most of what he was saying. Just about the time I hopped into the conversation, the meeting started. Continue reading USDA-APHIS Holds NAIS Listening Session in Harrisburg…

(cross-posted to Local Food Columbus)

An odd thing just happened. I tried to post the following to the OEFFA Direct email list, but it was rejected for some reason. Still, I thought it would be of interest to people here, so here it is.

You are not allowed to post to this mailing list, and your message has
been automatically rejected. If you think that your messages are
being rejected in error, contact the mailing list owner at
oeffaco_oeffadirect-owner@oeffa.org.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Wayne Shingler
To: oeffaco_oeffadirect@oeffa.org
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 12:56:31 -0400
Subject: co-op cannery…where’s the meat?
I was really excited about this message until I read further into it. “…for the production of a premium brand of creatively designed fruit based preserves.” Farmers can already make their own jelly at home. It’s covered under the cottage food exemption. You’ll find fruit preserves at every farmers’ market in Ohio.

What our farm needs is a cannery that will do meat, broth, soups, and other meat-based products. We’ve made inquiries to ACENet and the ODA–even looked into starting our own facility–and all we heard was “You have to have a big industrial cannery to do meats.” After more than a year of searching, we finally found Keystone Meats in Lima, Ohio. They charge $1.35 per 28 oz. can, and the minimum amount they’ll process is 2000 lbs. of boneless meat.

They don’t slaughter the animals, though. You still need to have that done at an inspected facility somewhere else. Otherwise, the cans will be marked “not for resale.” That means I’d have to take my broilers to King & Sons (presently the only state-inspected custom poultry processor in the state) to have the birds processed first. The trouble with that is that they’re only equipped to do 800 birds a day. Conservatively estimating two pounds of boneless meat per bird, that means you’d need a minimum of 1000 chickens to get enough meat for Keystone to let you in the door. And King’s doesn’t slaughter every day. It’s just one or two days a week, never consecutive days, so I it wouldn’t even be possible to have them do 1000 birds at once. You’d have to drop off 800, store them frozen somewhere, then do another 200 on a different day.

Let’s say this was workable, though. By the time I pay around a thousand dollars for a thousand chicks, and buy feed for them at $11.35 per 50 lb. bag, then pay for fuel to haul them two hours to King’s, pay them to slaughter and de-bone, and pay Keystone $1.35 a can for 2000 pounds worth of 28 oz. cans, I’ve got over $11,000 tied up in cans of meat that I have to sell for something like $9.60 a can just to break even. If I sold it for $11 a can (too low? How much will someone realistically pay for a can of non-organic chicken?), I’d make about $1,500 profit. That’s not accounting for marketing costs, fixed assets, etc. Presently, I can make more than that on 300 birds I sell at the farmers’ markets, and I don’t have to raise them a thousand at a time or take out a loan of $11,000 for operating expenses.

And Keystone won’t do broth. That’s principally what I’m looking for. After my customers make a rush on the chicken breasts and buy about half the leg quarters, I’m left with a bunch of wings, backs, and the other half of the leg quarters. I’d like to cook these down into broth or soup to try to recapture some value, but try collecting 2000 lbs. of those pieces! I have a big pressure canner, but the state won’t let me sell broth or stock canned in it.

If some well-funded entrepreneur were to open a cannery that could do small, custom batches of soups, broths, canned meats, etc., affordably, it would be a fantastic opportunity for small farmers to sell value-added products. We have no shortage of Ohio produced jams and salsas, but there are no small farmers in Ohio doing direct sales of hot dog sauce or chicken noodle soup made from their own meat. And if a cannery is licensed and outfitted to handle meats, they could do other low-acid foods, too. That throws the door wide open to all kinds of canned vegetables. We could fill the grocery stores with locally produced, identity preserved goods, if only someone would package them for us.

Best of luck, though, to Mr. Leard and anyone who gets in on this new fruit cannery co-op.

Wayne Shingler
Frijolito Farm
Columbus, OH

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Renee Hunt
To: oeffaco_oeffadirect@oeffa.org
Date: Wed, 20 May 2009 09:18:49 -0400
Subject: [oeffadirect] [Fwd: Fwd: co-op cannery]
Anyone interested in forming a cooperative cannery, read on… This was originally sent and distributed to the OEFFA Athens Chapter. Best, Renee

*From: *”Ray Leard” <rayleard@purelyamerican.com >
*Date: *May 17, 2009 11:03:01 AM PDT
*To: *<perkaber@juno.com >
*Subject: **co-op cannery*

Hi!

I own Purely American, a specialty food manufacturing concern located in the Poston Station Road Industrial Park – www.purelyamerican.com . I am trying to determine the interest among the region s’ farmers for the creation of a cooperative cannery in which the farmers would contract with my company to provide certain fruits raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, apples for the production of a premium brand of creatively designed fruit based preserves. I would invest the required funds in building the commercial kitchen, product design, marketing, promotion, and distribution at the national level through my existing channels I have already established. The press attached release explains the basic idea.

Wanted to know if, as a member of the Athens Farmers Market, you (or other fellow farmers that you know) might have an interest in becoming an owner/member in our new cooperative. The main purpose in creating the co-op will be to enable the area farmers to join forces to obtain a fair and consistent price for their premium quality fruit. The fruit will be used in a line of preserves that will help establish the Athens region as one of America’s premier locally grown food artisan regions. This will be achieved by maintaining the level of “Athens Grown” fruit in the line of products at 100% thereby creating a product line similar to great wines in which all the grapes are from a certain winery or region. In the preserve world as a company gets larger and larger they start compromising on quality and begin sourcing their fruit from outside the region where the idea started thereby compromising the integrity of the product.

I would appreciate your serious consideration in this matter. Please feel free to ask any and all questions. Don’t have all the answers yet but will work with each of you to make this something we can all be proud of as we proceed.

See you at the market!

Ray Leard and dedicated foodcrafters

Purely American

5991 Industrial Park Road

Athens, Ohio 45701

740-592-3800

740-592-4610 (fax)

rayleard@purelyamerican.com

–
Renee Hunt
Program Director
Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association
41 Croswell St., Columbus, Ohio 43214
Ph: 614-421-2022 Fax: 614-421-2011
renee@oeffa.org

This was originally posted as a reply to Sam Rose’s question on Ohio State University’s Local Food Systems network.

“So, the question is: how can we plausibly increase the amount of farmers? The answer seems to be to take farming to where most of the people are at: in the cities.” –Sam Rose

I very much agree. In bringing farming to cities, we face two major obstacles, neither of which are insurmountable.

The first is that, even with intensive models such as Square-Foot gardening, Grow Biointensive, or SPIN, farming still requires land. A person aiming only to feed his or her own family might find a backyard sufficient, but someone trying to grow enough to earn a living is going to need either a lot of land on which they can grow during the regular growing season, or a more modest space with a greenhouse in which they can grow all year.

For all romantic and idealized notions people may have about farming, most urbanites who have a steady paycheck coming in, especially from a white collar job that they’ve obtained through many years of college and career climbing, aren’t likely to chuck it all for a risky entrepreneurial venture that’s bound to mean less money (especially at first) and a life of hard, dirty, sometimes smelly, often uncomfortable, physical labor outdoors.

Of course, not all city dwellers have such cushy lives. Many are poor and/or unemployed. Many already perform physical labor with no hope of advancement. For these people, farming offers the promise of a better life. These people, however, don’t have the capital necessary to start, and usually aren’t financially savvy enough or well connected enough to get it. Even peasants farming in developing nations on plots of an acre or less have more land than most of America’s urban poor can afford to buy.

In a nutshell, those who have the means to farm generally don’t want to, and those who want to generally don’t have the means. This is true all over, but the problem is exacerbated in the city because of higher real estate prices. Community gardens are not the answer. They’re a good way for people to learn horticultural skills and to put some extra nutrients in their diets or a few dollars in their pockets, but the average community garden plot doesn’t come even close to what’s necessary to feed one person, let alone provide an income for an entire family.

This is where I put in my plug for Local Matters and offer high praise for the work Michael Jones and his colleagues are doing. They are developing a system to connect landless farmers with landowners willing to let others use their land. I am the beneficiary of their first test of this idea. They connected me with a man who owns about five acres in Columbus, maybe three miles from my home. In exchange for donating some produce to local food pantries and agreeing to manage a community garden on the front acre, I’ve been given access to the back acre for my own use. I worked out a similar deal on my own with another township’s community garden, and I’ve been leasing a vacant lot for $1.00 a year from the city of Columbus for the past few years. In aggregate, I now have around two acres on which to farm. This year, I’m offering a CSA for the first time. My gross sales to date this year (as of May 7th) already equal over 70% of my total sales for all of 2008 when I had only a half-acre–and the season is only starting!

I said there were two big problems. Getting land into the hands of the people who want to work it was the first. The second is the morass of municipal regulations criminalizing agriculture. I’ve written extensively about this elsewhere, so I won’t belabor the point here. Suffice it to say that in neighborhoods where hanging out laundry is prohibited and everyone’s Christmas lights have to match, the controlling authorities frown upon having livestock and hayfields next door. Until we can change urban sensibilities enough to eliminate or at least loosen up some of the agri-phobic codes and regulations presently in place, we can’t grow food in the city on a wide scale without constant harassment from health departments, zoning officials, and homeowners’ associations.