LOCAL Food &
YOU
Turning “Food System” into “Food Web”
by Wendy Allen
An amazing number of people — kids and adults — believe milk and bread simply come from the store shelf. What they were beforehand … well, does it matter? Yes. It absolutely does matter. “Food system” conjures the image of a classic beginning-to-end structure, where each entity has a single job, and that’s the only place they touch the process: Farm g Buyer g Processing Plant g Warehouse g Retailer g Consumer g Landfill It’s one long line and you — the consumer — are a blip toward the end of it. On the other hand, a “food network” looks much different. Imagine yourself in the center of a big spider web, and each string connects you to a place your food comes from, and other strings connect those places to other services, and some of the strings are two-way streets:
La Crosse County farms Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)
Local restaurants
On-farm, backyard or community compost
Food co-ops and other grocers that carry local foods Mississippi River and trout streams
Farmers markets Backyard gardens; trades with neighbors
It’s our local food web, and instead of a blip on the timeline looking at only the retail shelf and landfill on either side, you are in the center of it all, able to see every link of the web, every point your food touches.
And you have the ability to influence it all. Step one: Shop Your Local Farmers Market. The Cameron Park Farmers Market has 35 farm and artisanal food vendors, all from within 100 miles of La Crosse. Nell Saunders-Scott, market manager, says farmers markets are an important part of a healthy local food system because they not only provide a direct connection between the farmer and consumer, but they give people “independence and the ability to make decisions about how they eat. If they have a healthy farmers market with a variety of vendors close to them, it’s easier to choose to eat locally and healthy.” Step two: Join A CSA. “Ask me. Come see,” says Aaron Kane of Knapp Creek Farm (www.knappcreekfarm.com) near Westby. He and spouse Andrea grow more than 100 varieties of certified organic vegetables on 6 acres. They have been 12 April, 2015 // ofKlutchChronicle.com selling at the Viroqua Farmers Market and are now embarking on their first year Community Supported
Agriculture (CSA). The idea of a CSA is that everyone shares in the successes as well as the burdens of food production. In a linear food system, when one part fails, the next point in line compensates so they don’t lose money as well. For instance, if there’s a drought and farmers don’t get a good crop, the buyers will compensate by jacking up prices so at least they still make money. We see our food prices go up at the store, but we’re so far removed that we can’t see the faces affected by the drought. As part of a CSA, members have a personal stake. They pay upfront in spring for a share of the harvest all season and Aaron Kane of Knapp Creek Farm receive a box with locally grown food each delivery. Just as it’s important for eaters to put a face to their food, “it’s really gratifying to us as farmers to know the person who purchases our food,” says Aaron. “It’s both: Know your farmer and know your customer.” Step three: Meet A Local Farmer. On the other geographic side of our food web, Steve Fruechte raises pastured bison at his farm, Buffalo Hills Bison (www.buffalohillsbisonmeat.com) in Caledonia, Minn. He has been a vendor at the Cameron Park Farmers Market since 2004 and is the market’s current board president. He started out with about 12 bison in 1993 and has since grown his herd large enough to create a sustainable, interesting source of meat for our area. “Once you have the fences built, they’re easier to raise and more disease resistant than beef cattle,” says Steve. “You can kind of leave them alone and let them do their own thing.” Meat can be a polarizing subject these days, but livestock are as important as vegetables to a healthy local food network, especially in the Driftless region’s hilly landscape. “To help conserve the soil and prevent erosion, we have contour strips, where every other strip is grass,” says Steve. “If you’ve got this land that you can’t do anything with, it just seems a no-brainer to put some animals on it and let them graze it.” Steve & Linda Fruechte of This concept goes for any pasture-based animal, but bison are Buffalo Hills Bison unique in more ways than the obvious. Steve says bison digest feed more efficiently than beef cattle, so farmers can make use of lower-protein pasture that wouldn’t be suitable for cows. Bison meat is also lower in fat, calories and cholesterol, and higher in protein, iron and vitamin B-12. He sells his bison online and to some area food co-ops, stores and restaurants, as well as directly to consumers at the Cameron Park Farmers Market. “It’s fun to be [at the market] and visit with the customers,” he says. “You get to know them, and when they don’t show up on a Friday, you wonder where they are. That’s one really nice thing about the market.” ____________________________________________________ Andrea Kane says, “It’s like a web. You’ve got your vegetable people and your bakers and your meat people, and they do all kinds of work together.” Aaron continues, “And you have the local restaurants and the co-ops and all the people making prepared foods who need ingredients. It’s really vibrant.” “It’s all interrelated,” says Andrea. Food flows to us from every direction — apples from La Crescent and Gays Mills, fish from the Mississippi and the Driftless area’s exceptional trout streams, fresh vegetables from every county that touches ours. Even in winter, we have so many small businesses and farms that provide preserved and stored foods. La Crosse’s local food web is rich with variety and personal connection. Aaron puts it perfectly: “It’s a journey that keeps progressing and keeps getting better.”