Demand Booms for Local Produce as Fuel Prices, Safety Concerns Increase

This is a great article about the benefits of eating locally grown foods. I recently made a post on The Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World. Not only is eating locally grown food better for the environment, it is better for your community!

PalmBeachPost.com
Monday, May 19, 2008

Link to Article

Although the business of factory farming has made just about anything we want to eat available almost as soon as we want it, some are starting to question whether it's really the best thing for our communities, our health or the planet itself. In this occasional series, agriculture writer Susan Salisbury examines aspects of this switch-over and what it means for the future of food.

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It's something he's done every day for 60 years.

"This is like giving ice cream to kids," White says, throwing handfuls of corn feed to several dozen honking, hissing geese crowding around him on a recent morning.

Because White, 80, runs White Enterprises, a farm off Old Dixie Highway in the middle of a residential neighborhood in Lake Park, the casual observer might think he's a quaint holdover from a time long past.

But looked at another way, James White actually is the face of the future.

Long before the "buy local" movement started becoming trendy, White was raising local food. And these days, he can't keep up with demand.

"People buy everything I've got," he said.

In the past year, the clamor for the eggs from his free-ranging chickens, ducks and geese — and for the birds themselves — has reached deafening proportions.

Goose eggs fetch $2.50 apiece, and brown chicken eggs are $2 a dozen. Live birds can be had for $10.

"I can't raise enough of them," said White, who also donates dozens of eggs to a local church each week.

"People know they are good eggs. They taste so much better."

Nationwide, swiftly rising prices for food at the supermarket coupled with worries about food safety and the environment are contributing to the growth of the buy-local movement, local advocates say.

More people want to eat fresh, seasonal foods as part of a healthy diet and to support small-scale growers, said T.A. Wyner, who operates the Palm Beach Gardens and Abacoa green markets and heads the local Slow Food chapter.

The number of Local Harvest members in Florida, which includes farmers markets, family farms and other sources of local foods, has jumped to 250 this year from 68 in 2004, said Guillermo Payet, founder and president of Local Harvest, which is based in Santa Cruz, Calif.

U.S. membership is more than 13,740, almost triple the 5,412 members in 2004.

"I've been saying for years that the buy-local movement will really take off when the price of agribusiness-produced and long-distance-transported foods goes up substantially due to high energy prices," Payet said. "That's starting to happen."

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"We buy it because it's fresh and because it's local. They're good vegetables, way better than what you get at a store," said Sarah Fannin, 22, a Florida Atlantic University student who lives in Abacoa.

Renee Shirley, 12, said the "cuteness factor" of kid-grown vegetables draws people in, but what keeps them coming back is the taste and freshness.

"They realize the produce is better than what they can get in the store," Renee said. "Now, they are learning about things they never knew existed, like purple beans."

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Much of the more than $239 billion in crops and livestock the U.S. Department of Agriculture says the nation's farms produce each year is trucked great distances so that consumers can have what they want around the clock, any day of the year.

Most U.S. produce is picked four to seven days before being placed on supermarket shelves and is shipped an average of 1,500 miles, Local Harvest says.

The industrialized farming model is adding to the cost of food and contributing to air and water pollution, said Tony Corbo, legislative representative for Food & Water Watch, a Washington-based advocacy group.

"With local foods, you are reducing transportation costs considerably," Corbo said. "Setting up local supply chains may be the wave of the future."

Food prices are up 5.3 percent in the last three months, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and staples such as milk are up 13 percent in the last year, partly because of record fuel costs.

The renewed emphasis on local food, and the economic crisis, have brought one farm family back into the business.