Sustainable Agriculture at W.C.

Last night, Ohio Agriculture Director Robert Boggs and Senior Program Manager for Ohio Sustainable Agriculture Amalie Lipstreu addressed a crowd of almost 100 community members at the Kelly Center on the Wilmington College campus. The presentation, as I mentioned in the previous post, delt with the benefits of creating a strong, local food economy in Ohio's rural and urban areas.

"We're in the middle of a bio-revolution," Boggs said to the crowd of farmers, AmeriCorps* volunteers and residents involved or interested in the local food movement. He pointed to water shortages in Colorado and rising levels of the Ganges in Bangladesh as evidence of global climate change, framing the issue of sustainability on a multinational scale.

Boggs then quickly brought the discussion back to Ohio, where he said there are some troubling statistics on hunger and food production.

"It makes no sense to have 12% of the (state) population going hungry when we are throwing away food that is safe for consumption," he said.

The primary focus of the night seemed to be that Ohio is well-positioned to act on localizing our food system, which Lipstreu highlighted in detail.

"We have a real advantage within the local food movement," she said. "We have 16 metropolitan areas completely surrounded by farm land and local agriculture. We've lost a lot of our farmable land due to urbanization, but because of that we now have 16 direct markets for healthy, locally grown food."

She also talked briefly about the growing popularity of community supported agriculture programs, or CSAs, in which people pay up-front for individual "shares" of a farmers harvest, which is doled out weekly as the food is gathered.

The part of the discussion which I thought to be the most interesting was the growing number of Food Policy Councils in Ohio-- 10 or so-- which address these same issus on a regional scale and make recommendations based on community and expert opinion. The largest of these councils is central Ohio, and is overseen by the Mid Ohio Regional Planning Commission. The closest to us, though, is in Cincinnati. Clinton County is actually bordered by two counties who are involved in a FPC, Clermont and Fayette.

"I can't emphasize enough how well-positioned Ohio is for sustainable agriculture," Lipstreu said toward the end of the presentation. "I see this whole sector as a sleeping giant of economic development."

Ohioans spend some $37 billion a year on food, and of that, only 1% is grown or produced in Ohio. If we shift our daily spending to 10% of locally grown food, that would keep some $7 billion within our state each year.

After the discussion, the crowd was given the opportunity to directly address Boggs and Lipstreu with questions or concerns about localism. Overall, I thought the presentation went well, and it's definitely reassuring to see such a strong interest in this topic here in Wilmington. The state has a large number of resources for cities and towns who are making an attempt to shift back to local food, and that, too, is reassuring.