Posts Tagged: local

UCCE advisor sees cultural shift toward urban ag in Los Angeles

Parkway gardens, neighborhood nurseries and schoolyard veggies can be found throughout Los Angeles County, but there is not good way to track it all, blogged Rick Paulas on the KCET Food Rant. Things are changing and Paulas got all the details from Rachel Surls, UC Cooperative Extension advisor in LA County.

Surls is the "client" for a group of UCLA students that are tracking Los Angeles' urban ag. She said the students, called Cultivate L.A., contacted the county's 88 cities to investigate their municipal codes related to food production.

"Are bees allowed? Are chickens and other kinds of poultry allowed? Are goats allowed? So that's one of the outcomes of the project I'm very excited about," Surls said.

The information has been incorporated into a map of LA, which allows users to navigate local municipal codes and find out how urban ag is taking shape in their neighborhoods.

Surls hopes the information can be used to establish "best practices" Los Angeles County cities can use in adapting planning codes to become more consistent and more rational in their approach to urban agriculture.

"People are very interested in this. So there's been a cultural shift towards wanting urban agriculture and having more opportunities for very small scale food production," Surls told Paulas. "But the codes and the policies have not been keeping pace. Hopefully, all the research that's been done by the students will help urban planners and city officials update the policies."

Trending: Urban agriculture in California

Volunteers are turning a food desert green in the Los Angeles Del Aire neighborhood as they plant more trees that will bear fresh fruit for the community, said an article in the LA Weekly Fruit and Vegetable Blog.

Twenty-eight fruit trees and eight grapevines were planted in Del Aire park, near the intersection of freeways 105 and 405. A sign declares, "The fruit trees in this park are public. They are for everyone, including you."

The story noted that UC Cooperative Extension is part of the urban agriculture trend. Writer Chris Chiao reported that the Fruit and Flowers Freedom Act passed unanimously in 2010 by the L.A. City Council, with the help of the Urban Farming Advocates and Councilman Eric Garcetti, and that UC Cooperative Extension launched the Grow L.A. Victory initiative earlier that year, designed to teach Angelenos gardening skills.

Retailers find wiggle room in the definition of 'local'

The “locavore diet” originally focused on supporting small farms and protecting the environment, says the blog Triple Pundit, however, large grocery store chains and big box discount stores are now writing their own definitions of “local.”

Their definitions include:

• Grown and sold in the same state - Walmart
• Grown within an eight-hour drive of the store - Safeway
• Grown within one day’s drive - Whole Foods
• Produced either in that state or that region of the US - Krogers
• Grown in regions as broad as four or five states - Supervalu (Albertsons, Lucky)

The Triple Pundit post, written by Lesley Lammers, was prompted by an article in the Wall Street Journal published earlier this month. The WSJ withholds most of its content for subscribers only. But Triple Pundit, quoting the Journal, said such loose definitions have sparked criticism from small farmers and organic-food advocates that the chains are just capitalizing on the latest food trend, rather than making real changes in their procurement practices.

Lammers suggests usage of the term “local” may be a passing marketing phrase for the retail food industry that may soon be supplanted with “seasonal.” However, with consumers shopping for tomatoes even in the dark days of winter, even the term “seasonal” raises questions.

Director of the UC Agricultural Issues Center at UC Davis, Daniel Sumner, told the Wall Street Journal, “I really don’t think Wal-Mart is going to tell customers, ‘This is not in season, you have to eat cabbage and turnips for the next three months.’ ”

Retailers are writing their own definitions of local.

Local food blazing a trail on Napa County map

Responding to Napa County's higher-than-average interest in healthy foods, sustainable principles and wellness lifestyle, the board of supervisors last year created a Local Food Advisory Council. Now the council is looking for citizen input to pursue new initiatives, according to a blog on the Napa County Register website.

Monica Cooper, director of the Napa County University of California Cooperative Extension, is an ex-officio member of the council. Cooper is the county’s viticulture farm advisor and a big champion of expanding local food production, according to a previous article in the newspaper.

“It’s important to have more crop diversity,” Cooper was quoted in the story, and she sees that in small plots, not wide swaths of the county.

Napa's Local Food Advisory Council has identified three priority areas and is seeking volunteers to serve on subcommittees for:

1. Education and Outreach: Help design communications networks to encourage public involvement and information sharing, such as advocacy programs, printed materials, events, website, social media, etc.
2. Local Food Production and Distribution: Help develop mutually beneficial food supply systems linking local farmers to community kitchens, markets and residents;
3. Food Policy: Help influence and communicate county rules, regulations and fees for growing, selling and/or donating food products by both home and commercial producers.

Napa's soil, climate, natural resources and culture position the community to make a positive impact promoting locally grown food and healthful consumption.

Local food and farming conference a sell-out

Nevada County's first Sustainable Local Food and Farm Conference, slated for this Saturday, is already a sell out, testifying to the growing interest in local food production in this Sierra Nevada foothill community.

Strong grassroots efforts to link consumers with farmers are making Nevada County a force in the foothills, according to an article about the conference in The Union.

“It's one of the more advanced areas. There's kind of that mindset already here,” the article quotes Roger Ingram, county director and farm advisor for UC Cooperative Extension in Nevada, Sierra and Placer counties.

Keynote speaker at the event is Joel Salatin, a self-described "Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic farmer." Salatin's Virginia farm is featured prominently in Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma and the documentaries Food Inc. and Fresh.

Salatin’s philosophy of farming emphasizes healthy grass on which animals can thrive in a symbiotic cycle of chemical-free feeding, according to Wikipedia. Cows are moved from one pasture to another rather than being centrally corn fed. Then chickens in portable coops are moved in behind them, where they dig through the cow dung to eat protein-rich fly larvae while further fertilizing the field with their droppings.

According to the Union article, the Nevada local food movement gained steam in 2005 when a small band of farmers, advocates and citizens - including UC Cooperative Extension in Nevada County - started the Local Food Coalition, and from that Nevada County Grown.

“There just seems to be this great burgeoning interest in this,” said Jeri Ohmart, Food Systems and Organic Outreach Program Assistant for the University of California's Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, based at UC Davis.

Nationally known farmer Joel Salatin is a keynote speaker at the local food conference.

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

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