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PEC's Buy Fresh, Buy Local Guides Will Go to 230,000 Homes

Cliff Miller's farm in Rappahannock offers a vision of the kind of place a strong local food network can produce. Miller's family has owned Mount Vernon Farm since 1827, but when his turn came to take over, he decided to make some changes. "I care a lot about my animals," he says, "and I didn't want to sell them to where I knew they were going, which was to the feedlots and then the slaughterhouse facilities and the traditional market." So he started raising grassfed animals -- cattle, sheep and pigs that graze on tall grass in hilly pastures overlooking the Blue Ridge. He says that simply feeding his sheep and cattle grass their whole lives prevents illness and improves the nutrition of their meat. A ruminant's digestive system isn't suited to grain, so livestock in feedlots require frequent doses of medication. But Mount Vernon's meats are raised without vaccines, antibiotics or growth hormones. Miller calls himself a grass farmer, focusing on straightforward -- though labor-intensive -- techniques that keep his pastures healthy and abundant. He practices rotational grazing, moving the animals to fresh grass every day or two. Between grazings, the grass gets a chance to recover. And the animals' manure, rather than synthetic fertilizers, enriches the fields. A point of particular pride for Miller is that they feed the animals little to no hay. Instead they set aside pastures for winter grazing -- bypassing the fuel- and machinery-intensive processes of growing, harvesting and transporting hay. Miller took further steps to improve his farm environmentally. He protected 600 acres with a conservation easement -- preserving the striking view of large hills rising from a meadow that travelers on Route 231, a Scenic Byway, see as the road joins Rte. 522 near Sperryville. He also used CREP funding from the state to fence livestock away from all the stream corridors creasing his hillsides and to plant saplings there. Deer bound up the steep ravines to reach the woods at the crown of the hill, and the water flowing down runs into the swift, clear Thornton River, where native brook trout thrive.

Doing Well
"This kind of farming does several things," Miller says. "It's good for the land because we don't put any pesticides or a lot of chemicals on it. It's good for the animals because they're treated humanely the whole time they'realive. It's good for the consumers because they're eating something that's a lot more healthy than what they could get otherwise. And it's good for the farmer because he's living in a healthy environment." His meat costs more than the average cut at the grocery store, but he has plenty of customers at the farm store and at buyers clubs and farmers markets in nearby cities, because people find that it's worth it. Similarly, at Waterpenny Farm across the road, Rachel Bynum and Eric Plaskin find that they can make a good living selling fruits and vegetables grown using organic methods. While many farmers are hard-hit by a system that pays them only $0.22 of the average dollar that Americans spend on food, Bynum says that their farm can get a fair price by selling directly to local customers. "There's still an image of farmers as being beleaguered and always having hard luck and never quite making it," she says. "And that's definitely a story that still happens. But the potential is there, if you use a little savvy and you're willing to sell directly to your customers, that you can have a quality of life that you enjoy as a farmer -- a quality of life that you would want your kids to have." What if more farmers lived this way -- prospering from their work selling good food to local people? What if less fertile land was under pressure for sale and development because farming doesn't pay? What if that land was cultivated instead by committed farmers who can imagine that the next generation will want to continue this way of life in this place? What would it take to make that happen? Overcoming Obstacles Both Miller and Bynum say that demand is not the problem; supply is the problem. They say customers are ready to buy good, local food when farmers are ready to grow it and sell it. But Melissa Wiley, director of PEC's Buy Fresh, Buy Local program points out, "A lack of communication between growers and buyers results in a lack of confidence on the farmers' side." And some customers -- including institutional buyers like schools, universities, hospitals, and service boards for the elderly -- are deterred by the inconvenience of shopping for local products. In general, there's little infrastructure in place to support the processing, marketing and distribution of local food. So, PEC is working with community partners to overcome these obstacles. Last year, we published our first Buy Fresh, Buy Local food guide, listing farms, markets, grocers, restaurants and other businesses that sell local food inthe Charlottesville area, including Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene, Louisa and Nelson Counties. This spring, we've updated the Charlottesville Area guide and expanded with two more -- a Loudoun County guide and a Northern Piedmont guide serving Culpeper, Fauquier, Madison, Orange and Rappahannock. In May and June, we'll send these guides to every household in eight counties -- a total of more than 230,000 homes. Last year, PEC was honored as the best new chapter of the Food Routes Network, which helps groups throughout the U.S. produce similar guides, because our guide reached so many people and sparked interest across the state. Only one year after we kicked off Buy Fresh, Buy Local in Virginia, three more chapters are in the works, including a Shenandoah Valley chapter and planned chapters for the New River Valley and the Richmond area. PEC maintains a website, www.buylocalvirginia.org, where visitors can search listings from Buy Fresh, Buy Local food guides across Virginia.

Next Steps
We're also collaborating with various partners to advance the local food movement by improving public policies and by establishing needed infrastructure. PEC and other local food advocates are working toward the creation of a Virginia Food Security and Food Policy Council that would help coordinate state policies with the goal of promoting local food. This goal makes sense for Virginia, since a thriving local food network can benefit local and state economies (see p. 7), lower public health care costs and improve our environment. Other innovative projects are underway. For instance, PEC and partners in the Charlottesville area are pursuing the possibility of a 24-hour online farmers market. PEC's Melissa Wiley says, "Say you're giving a dinner party on Friday and you'd really like to buy local beef and local asparagus. You could go to your computer at 11:00 at night, search for it, place your order and make plans to pick it all up at an arranged time and location." In Loudoun, Fauquier and Rappahannock, surveys by the Virginia Cooperative Extension point to a need for more resources like processing facilities, local food stores, and central distribution centers. As Matt Benson, a Community Viability Specialist with the Extension, puts it, "Dealers aren't going to want to deal with one dozen eggs from Farm A and one dozen eggs from Farm B. They want to buy them all together." Along similar lines, advocates in the Charlottesville area are interested in creating a food center that would provide a USDA-approved kitchen and facilities for canning, bottling and meat-processing so people can make value-added local products. While many customers will still want to buy delicious food directly from their favorite farms, the center could coordinate sales to large-scale buyers, so that more people can enjoy the bounty of our home landscape.

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