Local Agriculture, is it out there?
These past few weeks have been busy for us with a lot of research going on and quite a few new revelations about the direction of the project. We have just scheduled one interview with someone who can hopefully give us a little more insight into local agriculture and our project. We will post an update about this interview and another possible one that has not yet been confirmed on the next blog.
Our initial research revealed that farmers are becoming an increasingly rare “species” because young people seem to want to work in cushy office jobs that pay far more than farming. Any agricultural career tends to be very physically intense and stressful with very little monetary reward. Farming in this nation has also become largely industrial and small diversified farms are seeing a significant decrease. (Schlosser, Fast Food Nation) Organizations such as FFA in schools seek to encourage young people to pursue careers in Agriculture. (www.ffa.org)
Locally there are several organizations such as the FIG program on Maverick Farms to hire interns to learn about farming and connect them with available land to start their own farms. The Appalachian Sustainable Development organization seeks to promote sustainable and/or organic farms that will provide food to locals and business to local farmers. (http://www.asdevelop.org/sustainable_agriculture.html)
“So what’s the problem then?” you might ask. Well, as wonderful as these programs are, they are not implemented everywhere, and farming really isn’t right for everyone. Also, land is becoming rarer either due to expense or past farming practices that render it unusable for future agriculture. We have found that these are just a few of the problems associated with local agriculture and its promotion within communities.
If we were to completely ignore the steady decline of locally available agriculture, we might one day see a food shortage. Even within a nation as developed as America, we still need local agriculture to keep us going. Should the problem persist unaddressed one day there may be very few or no food producing farms as farmers are aging out, losing land to government projects such as highway construction, and tending to plant “cash crops” that can’t be consumed (such as trees for building or Christmas decoration; or plants like tobacco and cotton).
In Watauga County some of the barriers preventing more farms from starting include lack of funding or lack of affordable farmable land and lack of interest in general about the profession from younger generations. However Community Supported Agriculture organizations (CSA’s) promoting sustainable local agriculture and farm-to-table co-operations that get local agriculture into restaurants and grocery stores are another good solution to this problem. Organizations like these help local farmers by promoting agriculture within the community and providing people in the area with fresh local foods.
Promotion of local agriculture by advertising farmer’s markets, creating CSA’s and teaching youth about farming are all good feasible solutions for this area. During the next few weeks we are going to be looking into these solutions more and collecting more data on how available these types of things are to Watauga County residents.
