Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Developing local sources of food is critical for the future, when the costs of transportation will drive the price of food high, according to area residents attempting to develop a local “food web.”
“The concept was started by Harry McCormick who runs Oregon Tilth, which inspects farms and certifies them organic, said Brandi Hawkins, owner of the Periwinkle Provisions. “He did a study in Linn, Benton and Lincoln counties (with combined population of more than 305,000).
“Of the food that’s consumed, anywhere from 85 percent on the low end to 95 percent travels more than 1,500 miles before it hits the table.”
For every calorie of food consumed, “it costs 15 (calories) to get it to you,” she said. “We can’t sustain that, almost, I want to call it irresponsible, but that might be too much.”
Eventually, Hawkins believes, the price of gasoline will drive up the cost of food so much that it will create a food crisis.
By 2015, fuel will be so ridiculously expensive that food won’t travel the way it does now, she said. That’s a crisis.
With food resources available from the ocean to the Cascades in these three counties, she thinks the local population can be fed locally, if the people are prepared.
Linn, Benton and Lincoln have everything they need, from farmlands, to pasture to the ocean, Hawkins said.
“Why aren’t we using that better and bringing that number down to, ideally zero, but in the real world probably like 25 or 30 percent?”
To this end, she and a number of others in the Sweet Home area are working in a number of groups to set up what they call a “food web.”
“We’re educating,” Hawkins said. “I’m looking at what we can do at Periwinkle’s.”
Locals are working with the Northwest Co-operative Development Center, a nonprofit based in Olympia, Wash., Hawkins said. “They help you look for funds for education, for equipment, strategic planning.
“What we’re hoping is if we can find the means to change our structure a little bit and maybe become a co-op,” she said. “We wanted to get a grant to support more local producers.”
Periwinkle already has hosted a local organically grown foods co-op for two years. The store currently carries local cheese, eggs, bison and chicken along with a variety of other products, she said.
“What we’d like to do is have more local produce, and we’re going to start doing some prepared foods.”
Seventy-five percent of the prepared foods will be made with what is in season, she said. “We need equipment. We don’t have the equipment we need, specifically refrigeration.”
Locally grown food is better than conventionally grown and transported food too, Hawkins said. Conventionally grown food may be genetically modified, for example. Tomatoes purchased at a grocery store are picked green and grown to stay green for the two weeks it takes to transport them to the shelf where they can ripen on time for purchase.
“You can’t take what’s made really darn well and make it better,” Hawkins said. “I’ve always been leery of genetic modifications.”
Also, only 19 cents of each dollar spent on food goes to a farmer or rancher, she said. The rest goes to labor, transportation, energy, packaging and advertising. Buying local food means more of the food dollar gets to the local farmers and ranchers and stays in the local economy.
The food web group is attempting to get a local network distribution service up and running, Hawkins said. Members have noticed that some local producers are showing up at the same places making deliveries. They think it might cut costs if they can start a delivery route to places that buy food from local producers.
“It eliminates a serious amount of the fossil fuel being used,” Hawkins said.
About 35 or 40 people met the first part of February at the United Methodist Church on Sixth Avenue to begin organizing the local food web.
“We brainstormed,” Hawkins said. “We had producers. We had consumers, and we had people that are passionate about the concept.”
Locally, they are coordinating with Ten Rivers Food Web in Corvallis, which functions as a hub of which Sweet Home’s co-op would be a spoke, she said.
Hawkins explained the concept this way: If she goes out to Joe Farmer and says she uses 200 pounds of oats each year and asks whether he would grow 200 pounds of oats each year for her, it wouldn’t be economical or feasible for Joe Farmer to do it. But if she knew someone else who used 200 pounds of oats and another person who uses 1,000 pounds of oats, then it becomes more feasible for the farmer to grow those oats.
Members of Sweet Home’s co-op and other communities can coordinate through Ten Rivers to provide a local demand for local farmers.
“All of the sudden, economically, there’s a reason for that farmer to stop growing rye grass and grow oats or blueberries or whatever,” Hawkins said. Ten Rivers’ goal is to get a co-op functioning from the Cascades to the coast.
She and the others are looking toward the Oklahoma Food Co-op for inspiration, she said. It has 1,000 members and offers 1,700 items, all made or grown in Oklahoma, and provides delivery and pick-up schedules to members and producers.
“I think that Sweet Home has the potential to sustain itself,” Hawkins said. “If there’s ever a crisis, we could survive here in Sweet Home by being a community.”
The idea is to get land into production before the crisis unfolds, she said. “Some people who are not using their land might need to put it to work.”
It is better to manage a crisis before it occurs rather than try to adjust during the crisis, she said.
The food web effort includes a number of splinter groups. Among them is a children’s mentoring program, run by Janet Nielson of Fraga Farms, which produces goat cheese locally.
Children are often disconnected from where their food comes from, Hawkins said. The education component lets them learn that food does not come from a supermarket. The program will expose children to agriculture, ideally through the school system and field trips.
A distribution group is tackling the idea of a local distribution route.
A community garden will be used to provide food for community meals programs along with the people who participate in it and shut-ins who are unable to grow their own food.
Classes also will be offered on subjects such as pruning trees and explaining what to do with all the extra apples and walnuts that fall off of backyard trees.
The composting group is among the more interesting, Hawkins said. The group will provide a list of compostable materials to area residents and then eventually collect it for use in local community gardens.
“It is being handled well because there are little groups of people taking on individual tasks,” Hawkins said.
Change is coming, she said. “The people who can handle it are the people who have a system in place.”
For information, call Hawkins at 367-6614 or visit Ten Rivers on the Web at http://www.tenriversfoodweb.org.