Day 191 -- gratitude for local foods

Met today with a colleague and during our discussions we outlined a few projects to work on in the coming year. The topics deal with building community capacity for a strong local food system. This is an area we've worked in for many years, developing projects, conducting research and sharing learnings. This is a topic that I love, and the local projects have been delightful. We have a community garden program with garden boxes on donated land (and across the town and county on home and institutional land). A local food box program in place for years, provides bi-weekly bags of locally produced foods. The products included have come mainly from micro-enterprises with some from small to medium size enterprises (SMEs), and all have come from our county.

This year the program grew closer to our goal of a local foods store in the downtown core of town. The food boxes are available through a local organization and can be ordered online and picked up the day they are packed. Value-added products (including jams, sauces, honey, meats, eggs, cheese and such) are available to order to add to your food bag, which contains items that are fresh and available on the week bags are packed. This change is a major step towards the local food store, which needs a bit of further funding to implement. All very exciting, and many research and promotional projects exist for further work to allow us to share this with others. I have been lucky to present aspects of the work of past years at international conferences, which included wonderful input from others working in this field from around the world.  I'm excited to have further work in the offing.

The song for today pays tribute to those who produce our food, often without receiving adequate payment for sale of their products. If it were not for farmers, ranchers, and fishers, we'd be in a sad state. I chose this version of the song because the photos in the video reminded my of my grandparents, current relatives and friends who are primary producers on the prairies. Enjoy!

Farmer's Song -- Murray Mclaughlin