When the Star Tribune’s “Dollars & Sense” columnist is writing about how to buy locally-produced meat, you know that the local food movement is more than a passing yuppie trend. As another sign that this movement has some legs under it,  this year LSP’s listing of farmers who direct-market food in the region celebrated a decade of existence (it started out as a listing of family hog farmers taped next to a fax machine). The 2009-2010 LSP Stewardship Farm Directory is hot off the press—just in time for Thanksgiving.

John Tuma’s Capitol Update – The Fall Version

The third installment in a series about Minnesota’s role, now and in the past, in the local food movement. This week John traces the history of a little-known legislator’s efforts more than a century ago to protect the rights of farmers to sell their products.

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Will Steger, Representative Paul Gardner, Mike Kilgore and Sheila Smith took home Conservation Leadership Awards from the Conservation Minnesota Voter Center Monday night. These four people have done much for our outdoors and environmental policy and funding.

The USDA received a bit of a surprise this week when a letter with over 25,000 signatures was delivered to Secretary of Ag Tom Vilsack. The letter calls for a suspension of Farm Service Agency direct and guaranteed loans to new or expanding specialized hog and poultry facilities. Given the nature of the livestock markets these days, maybe it’s not a surprise that tens of thousands of people signed this letter. Perhaps the real surprise is it took a petition like this to communicate the obvious: we don’t need more factory farms pumping out more product. (more…)

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency today issued a news release about its updated “What’s In My Neighborhood?” web application. It’s designed to make it easy for any Minnesotan to find out about nearby pollution permits, old dumps and other environmental information. It’s well-intended, but a check of my neighborhood revealed terminology that a layperson has a difficult time understanding (small to minimal hazardous waste QG). It’s a good try — but what do you think?

John Tuma’s Capitol Update – the Fall Version

The second installment in a series about Minnesota’s role, now and in the past, in the local food movement. This week John writes of the history of farmers’ marketing in Minneapolis and one farmer’s fight against an unjust ordinance limiting his ability to sell to city customers.

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John Tuma’s Capitol Update – the Fall Version

The first installment in a series about Minnesota’s role, now and in the past, in the local food movement.

“In California, in British Columbia, in Minnesota and Oklahoma and numerous other places, consumers are daring to eat dangerously and confine themselves (gasp!) to ONLY eating locally grown food. In California, a group of “concerned culinary adventurers” called Locavores committed to eat only foods grown or harvested within a 100 [mile] radius of San Francisco for one month, August, 2005.”*

—Christopher B. Bedford, “Meeting the challenge of local food,” In Business, January 2006

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While leading a group of natural resource professionals through one of his dairy pastures last Tuesday, Martin Jaus made it crystal clear he farms the land for more than a milk check. “Every day we see something that just amazes us,” he said with a smile. “One day I was making hay and I had four raptors strike mice within 20 feet of the tractor. It was two red-tails, a swainson’s and a kestrel. A lot of people don’t get to see that.” (more…)