ams

Cross posted from the Let's Move! blog:

Fresh, nutritious food is a cornerstone of a community’s physical health, but community health is more than physical well-being.  A vibrant, healthy community encompasses both the well-being of consumers through improved health, and the well-being of producers through improved economic outcomes.  Making this connection, and providing healthy, affordable food supplies, are goals of the First Lady’s Let’s Move! initiative.

The Fruit and Vegetable Programs of USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) is intensifying its educational outreach campaign to the industry and consumers.

Customers regularly refer to the Fruit and Vegetable Programs as the “best-kept secret in the produce business” because valuable resources are often underutilized.  The program maintains a lot of beneficial information for the industry, but we had to find different ways to present it.  To improve transparency, we embarked on a communication campaign that now offers an industry newsletter, a series of webinars, and enhancements to our website.

USDA has launched a resource to assist in expanding access to healthy food and eliminating food deserts: www.usda.gov/fooddeserts. As outlined by First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! Initiative, three Federal Departments – Agriculture, Treasury, and Health and Human Services – are working together for the first time to combat food desert issues.  The webpage provides information on available grant programs that support the development of sustainable strategies aiming to increase access to healthy, affordable foods.

Look up Wayne County, Michigan, home to Detroit, in USDA’s Food Environment Atlas and it is obvious that local residents have some significant challenges in accessing healthful food.  An alarmingly high number of households that lack a car in Wayne County are located further than one mile from the closest grocery store, meaning that many families struggle to get access to fresh and healthy food.  Indeed, the closure of two supermarkets in 2007 left Detroit as the largest city in the country without a single full-service supermarket within its boundaries.

One afternoon in the fall of 2003, 36 consumers and several volunteers gathered in the basement of an Oklahoma City church to sort and purchase products from twenty local producers.  They generated $3,500 in sales, and the opening day of the Oklahoma Food Coop (OFC) was determined to have been a great success.

Today, seven years later, OFC has over 3,000 members and processes up to 700 orders monthly. The participating producers – all two hundred of them - generate about $70,000 in monthly sales from 4,000 locally produced products.  The organization manages storage space, a warehouse and owns several trucks. It has transformed from a small buying club to a formal food hub.

One afternoon in the fall of 2003, 36 consumers and several volunteers gathered in the basement of an Oklahoma City church to sort and purchase products from twenty local producers.  They generated $3,500 in sales, and the opening day of the Oklahoma Food Coop (OFC) was determined to have been a great success.

Here at USDA we are looking for ways that we can help build and strengthen regional and local food systems.  As we talk to farmers, producers, consumers, processors, retailers, buyers and everyone else involved in regional food system development, we hear more and more about small and mid-sized farmers struggling to get their products to market quickly and efficiently.  And more and more we hear that these same producers need access to things like trucks, warehouses, processing space, and storage.  These things require capital investment, infrastructure maintenance and dedicated oversight – things that small and mid-sized producers often can’t afford or manage themselves.

One answer to help regional producers may be a ”food hub.”

USDA Farmers Market Directory Counts Nearly 900 Winter Farmers Markets.

The tents are up. The vendors are ready, with proud displays of local produce, meats, baked goods, and other delights. Customers are out – shopping, visiting, and mingling.  It’s a typical farmers market scene, robust with fresh, healthful, local food and lively connections between consumers and producers.

It must be the height of summer, right?

In 2010, the USDA National Farmers Market Directory counted over 6,200 operational farmers markets in the country.  That’s more than a 16 percent growth in farmers markets from 2009. In every state and season, shoppers flock to nearby farmers markets in search of healthy, fresh foods.  Farmers markets can offer it all: from seasonal, fresh produce to local meats, dairy products to locally baked bread and fragrant cut flowers.

This September we announced the 2010 awards for our Specialty Crop Block Grants (SCBG), a program geared toward increasing access to fresh fruits and vegetables by offering grants to enhance the competitiveness of specialty crops.

The Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), which administers the program, funds projects across a broad spectrum of activity, such as research related to increasing crop yields, state marketing campaigns like “Minnesota Grown,”  and improving supply chain management for emerging local and regional food systems.  These grants can propel burgeoning projects to the next level and help drive local economies and assist farmers.  In many cases producers have benefited by diversifying their farms to include specialty crops, such as blueberries and pistachios, to meet consumer demand.