Thank you for joining us on our very first blog post. My name is Neena, Education and Events Intern and the first author of Farmshed’s official blog series. This is an exciting new addition of communication where we can dive into a variety of topics about our local food system. Each article will be released on the third Friday of every month. This year, we will explore what it means to shorten your food chain, and some easy ways we can all make a difference in our community. This theme reflects the efforts Farmshed takes to empower community members, farmers, and local food businesses to thrive in Central Wisconsin.
What is Your Food Chain?
Is your food making a short trip to your plate from your garden? Is it purchased at a farmer’s market or delivered in a CSA? Or is it flown halfway across the world to be processed and packaged and delivered to a grocery store. Where you buy determines the length of your food chain. Simply put, your food chain is the number of “steps” food takes to get from the farm it was grown on to your plate. Decreasing the number of destinations or miles your food travels to your plate helps strengthen your local food economy and helps you receive the freshest food your community has to offer.
Image courtesy of Pickle-Wix Web Design
Where Should I Start?
There are many things you can do to start shortening your food chain, starting with supporting your local food producers. As a consumer and part of the Farmshed community, you have the power to change your local food economy by choosing which products to spend your money on. When a product is in higher demand, more of it is produced and it becomes available to a wider range of people. Every small purchase made from a local farm helps keep that farm growing. There are multiple ways to buy directly from local farms: shopping at a summer and winter farmer’s market, signing up for a CSA or becoming a working CSA member. These are all great ways to access fresh local produce. To find a Farmer’s Market near you, click here!
Purchasing a CSA is like investing in a local farm. You, the consumer, pay the farmer up front for a ‘share’ of the season’s fresh produce. That share of produce will be packed in a box and typically delivered on a weekly or biweekly basis for as long as the growing season lasts. By paying up front, you invest in the farm and aid in its growth. Many local farms offer CSAs, and some of them even offer customizable boxes, so you can choose which seasonal vegetables you want in your box. To see Farmshed’s Farm and Business Member’s who offer CSAs, check out the Farm Fresh Atlas.
Farmshed can help you continue to support local agriculture even after the end of the growing season through our Frozen Assets program. Frozen Assets come in 10 varieties of frozen vegetables harvested and frozen at the peak of the season. Since Wisconsin has a short growing season, preserving the food grown during the summer is an important part of eating local throughout the year. We work directly with the local farms Cattail Organics, Red Door Family Farm, and Whitefeather Organics to contract produce ahead of the season and set a fair price. Farmshed’s wonderful volunteers help process and freeze over 11,000 lbs. of fresh produce, preserving nutrients and their taste to be enjoyed throughout the long winter. You can purchase a full or half share, individual 1lb Frozen Asset bags, or learn more about the program on our website www.farmshed.org/frozen-assets.
Fruits and vegetables aren’t the only way to support your local farmer. There are many local producers of eggs, meat, dairy products, syrup, coffee, baked goods and beer to be found year round at Farmers Markets, online, or in their own shops. To see Farmshed’s Farm and Business Member’s who produce these products, check out the Farm Fresh Atlas.
Benefits to Shortening Your Food Chain
By shortening your food chain, you ensure that you are dining on the freshest food possible. According to the organization have a plant, the nutrients within fruits and vegetables slowly begin to break down after they’re first harvested. This is why frozen or canned fruits can be more nutritious than “fresh” produce if the preserved food was processed hours after harvest. Don’t get me wrong, any vegetable, whether canned, frozen, from the farmer’s market or the grocery store is much better for you than no vegetable. The extra nutrients in the fresh produce brought to your local farmer’s market is just an added bonus.
Buying food produced locally also helps your community develop a resilient local food economy. When farms receive more business, they can grow more and become a stronger, more stable facet of the community. This means that by eating fresh local food, you help ensure that sufficient food can be produced locally to feed your community even in the face of adversity. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how fragile long food chains can be. According to the Soil Association, “Having short, regional supply chains, alongside longer supply chains, bolsters food security so that we're better prepared for times of uncertainty.” While we still rely on our long food chains, when we purchase from our local farmers, the whole community will reap the benefits.
Image courtesy of basmati
Thank you for joining me this month to learn how to shorten your food chain, and some ways we can all help support the local farms that feed us. See you next month!
Stay curious,
Neena
If joining a working CSA sounds interesting, but you’d like to learn more, you may enjoy our upcoming webinar on CSA Working Memberships. We will have a panel of two working members and a farmhand join us to answer questions and describe their experiences working with farms. To learn more about this event and others, check out Farmshed’s Event Calendar!
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