The Perfect Pairing that is Conservation Planning and Organic Management
Interconnections are Key to a Thriving Regional Economy By Elena Gutierrez Byrne and Amy Halloran The popular notion of local food suggests that regional eating is a simple choice. Just go to the farmers’ market and fill your arms. Yet there is a dearth of easily accessible breads, beers, and other grain products with local ties. The commodity grain system that’s developed over the past 150 years severed connections between farmers, millers, maltsters, bakers and distillers. In modern context, these parties rarely have opportunity to meet, let alone develop close, trusting relationships. That’s what the Artisan Grain Collaborative (AGC) is working to change. AGC is a network made up of Midwest stakeholders throughout the grain value chain. Members range from grain breeders and farmers, to intermediary processors like mills and malthouses, to chefs and brewers, to organizations involved in strengthening agriculture and food systems. When the group was conceived of in 2016, there was an interest in linking farmers and end-users such as bakers, and including grains as part of the local foods movement. Now with Organic Broadcaster | 16
a membership of 200 individuals, businesses, and organizations from across eight states, fostering connections is key. Relationships and collaborations are crucial to many types of support—from information sharing, to building a sense of community, shared values, and friendship. Trust-based connections are fundamental to establishing an ever-stronger regional grainshed. We think a lot about how to do our work. There’s no playbook for reviving regional grain systems. Communities and enterprises can’t turn back the clock and reconfigure 19th century approaches to doing business. Everyday life has changed too much to simply reinvigorate old models of agriculture and food production. Plus, the past is full of exploitations, of people and land; there is no perfect grain moment to seek and restore. Instead, folks are weaving new fabrics. Alternative food—especially grain—involves many hands, requiring new looms to join many threads. AGC’s loom construction is thoughtful and deliberate. In imagining our organization, we use a phrase to describe the breadth of our membership: the “grain chain.”
How can we serve the people in the grain chain? We know one important answer to that question is to help make the grain chain more visible. To this end, we set out in 2020 to make a visual aid to illustrate what the grain chain encompasses. With the creative skills of Amy Sparks of A Visual Spark in Minneapolis, MN, AGC’s Education and Outreach Working Group developed an infographic entitled Our Regional Grain Chain to depict the variety of grain chain roles, as well as the importance of collaborations across those roles. Making the infographic was a multimonth act of weaving together many ideas, and trying them out on members to see where we hit and where we missed. We are pretty pleased with how it turned out, and so are our members, who have distributed thousands of copies of this infographic as cards, and hang posters in their businesses. When we rebuilt our website, we embedded the infographic. Its style and content have become a foundation of our messaging. As we developed and used the graphic, we – and by we, we mean AGC as a network of members, not just paid staff – saw we needed