Locally Grown Food and the Farm Bill
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- November
- 27
I’m just catching up from the holidays (and all of our blogs have been down due to mysterious technical problems). On Sunday, my colleague Julie Alterio had a nice Page One piece on locally grown food and its connection to the proposed federal farm bill. Here’s a link to the article.
A few tidbits from Julie’s piece:
“The farm bill’s effects are far-reaching – extending not only to the pasture and field but also to the school lunchroom, the food stamp program and ultimately the grocery store. It’s no accident that the price of soda fell nearly 25 percent from 1985 to 2000, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables rose nearly 40 percent. The high-fructose corn syrup that sweetens soda is subsidized by roughly $9 billion a year that the government pays to corn growers, while produce farmers get almost nothing.”
“Though New York’s farm economy produces $3.6 billion a year – planting the state roughly in the middle of the field – less than 1 percent of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s farm subsidies flow here. That’s because New York – and especially the Hudson Valley – produces a lot of fruits and vegetables, which the farm bill mostly ignores. ”
And I had no idea we have so many farmers hanging on here in the Lower Hudson Valley:
“But even here, in between subdivisions, farms abide. The last agricultural census in 2002 found 129 farms in Westchester County that produced $8.85 million in crop and livestock sales. Rockland’s 29 farms generated $3.2 million, and Putnam’s 52 farms yielded $2.4 million.”
Let’s continue to support these local farmers as much as we can by buying (and eating!) locally. Their stuff tastes so much better, too.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 10:05 am by Bill Cary.
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Bill Cary grew up in Louisville, Ky. His gardening was limited to growing parsley and impatiens on the windowsill of Manhattan walkups until the mid-1990s when he bought a rundown old chicken farm on 8 acres in the Hudson Valley. Now he spends his weekends chasing deer, hacking away at invasive shrubs and vines and wondering why he doesn`t have more meadow and less lawn.
