A New Resource from SARE:
Farm to Table: Building Local and Regional Food Systems. This topic room was created to provide information for farmers, ranchers, ag professionals, community organizers and others who are striving to reconfigure the nation’s food system so more value stays in food-producing communities. Dig deeper to find educational resources on the following topics:
Business Issues | Marketing and Markets | Distribution and Aggregation | Food Safety | Food Processing | Strong Communities | Training Resources for Practitioners
Getting Started: Hear from Farmers
Farmers in the Portland, Ore., area discuss the opportunities and barriers associated with selling produce to eager urban consumers. Their issues—difficulty finding land, accessing capital, competing neighboring land uses, confusing regulation and zoning laws, and coordinating with distributors and processors—are common in local and regional food systems around the country.
Portland’s Urban Farmer Barriers and Opportunities from Pdxfoodshed on Vimeo.
The Portland metropolitan area is well known nationwide for its cutting edge sustainability vision, urban development and farmland protection framework. The region has a large number of productive small farms within and near urban areas. There is a growing interest in, and support for, locally grown, sustainable food. This interest is driven by rising concerns over public health, food security, transportation costs, climate change, economic turmoil and the search for a more community-based, sustainable lifestyle. There is growing support for farmers markets, community supported agriculture (CSA), community gardens, local healthy school food programs and institutional purchases of fresh, locally grown produce. However, farming in and around the city has its unique challenges.
This Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education grant project identified key challenges that face our foodshed growers and producers and developed strategies for both planners and growers to overcome them. Small and new farmers around the Portland area have issues different from rural farmers such as difficulty finding land, accessing capital, competing neighboring land uses, confusing regulation and zoning laws, and coordinating with distributors and processors to get products to market. This project has attempted to help find solutions to address these unique challenges for both existing and emerging urban farmers.
This video was developed as part of a SARE-funded project to develop a toolkit of strategies to support the growth of Portland foodshed.
Learn More: Resources from Regional SARE Conferences
Western SARE’s Strengthening Agriculture’s Infrastructure conference was held in December 2012. Available resources include a conference report, session recordings and more.
North Central SARE’s Scaling Up Local Food conference was held in September 2010. Conference organizers developed a list of educational resources.
