​Many of us are reeling after last night’s election. A representation, a literal count, of the wide gap between our thoughts and values and what, apparently, the electoral college-defined majority of Americans believe. There is no doubt that we live in many different Americas. The divide that strikes me so strongly is that between our urban centers and our rural surroundings. Look at the national maps and the state maps. Rural areas are deeply aligned with Trump’s message while the metropolitan areas are shocked.
 
Here are a few of the best articles I found this week discussing this rift. Please share others as well. 
 
Guardian – Depression

While people do not always realize it, we are usually a top-ten producer of beef, contributing more than $3 billion a year of total economic activity…

It is easy for most people to see Colorado as a skiing state, a brewery state, or even a marijuana state (as anyone who recently traveled out of state and happened to mention where you live can attest), but we do not all realize how import agriculture is to our identity as well. In fact, many of us—industry experts, economic developers, and elected officials alike—did not fully realize the scale and importance of agriculture until the Value Chain of Colorado Agriculture study was published by Colorado State University in February of 2013.

The study highlighted critical economic, community, and ecosystem impacts of food production directly, but more significantly it comprehensively explored, for the first time, the effects of the entire value chain (think supply chain that encompasses all the steps from seed and soil to your plate) of agriculture in Colorado. This expansive view of food and farming emphasized the connections between agriculture production and the rest of our economy. Including barley used in beer production, technological patents for new agricultural techniques, the extensive distribution and logistics systems that help move food throughout our state and economy, and even the incredible cuisine produced by our leading chefs, to name a few. This expansive view also helped shift the view of agriculture from a top-ten industry in Colorado to a top-three industry in Colorado. Agriculture and its links to the rest of our food system is one of the three largest and most economically significant industries in Colorado!

But agriculture is not just big in Colorado relative to other sectors. Agriculture in Colorado is big relative to agriculture in other states. While people do not always realize it, we are usually a top-ten producer of beef, contributing more than $3 billion a year of total economic activity. Equally as exciting is our beer industry, which as of 2011 also accounted for well over $3 billion of total economic activity.

While beef and beer sound great for many of us, what about the vegetarians and vegans in the audience? Well, Colorado is also in the top six largest producers of potatoes, carrots, spinach, and onions, and the top dozen major producers of peaches, cantaloupe, sweet corn, dry beans, and cabbage.

And that’s not all. A recent USDA report calculated that Colorado is the ninth-largest state in the amount of land in farms, and is the eighth largest organic producer in the United States as well, selling over $147 million—of which over $24 million is from organic fruits, vegetables, and nuts alone!

So why is Colorado so good for agriculture? For one, our abundant ranch land has always been home to herds of grazing animals. Good pasture management practices, targeted irrigation, no-till practices, and scientific animal breeding programs have increased the productivity and efficiency of these lands all while creating healthy soils and diversified pastures that are helping us foster sustainable agro-ecosystem.

The same soil and agronomic factors that create robust pastures in Colorado also favor the production of grains on both irrigated and some opportunely located non-irrigated lands. Furthermore, Colorado fruits and vegetables are also improved by our unique climate and geographies. One farmer I met with recently referred to our “high-altitude flavor,” a distinct set of tastes that come from 300 days of sunshine (though state climatologist Nolan Doeskin estimated the real number may be much lower), mineral rich soils, Rocky Mountain water, and the extreme temperature fluctuation between day and night. Our unique conditions have made us a reliable exporter of the highest quality lettuce, cabbage, and fruits since the beginning of Colorado agriculture.

Since the first state fair (hosted outside of Denver in 1866), we continue to grow nearly the full array of the usual groceries purchased by today’s shopper:

• Animal products like beef, lamb, pork, poultry, eggs, and dairy products;
• Grains for food and feed including wheat, corn, oats, barley, rye, buckwheat;
• Vegetables and fruits including potatoes, onions, turnips, sugar beets, beans, summer and winter squash, lettuce, celery, asparagus, melons, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, apples, cherries, plumbs and grapes.

When people suggest it would be painful to go back to, “how we used to eat 150 years ago,” I just think of this list and smile.

More to the point, the pivotal role of agriculture and food in our community and economy is not a new trend. On panels or after presentations I am often asked if local food is just a fad. This question has intrigued me for years: is local food in fact just a fad or is there evidence of some longer-term trend? The most convincing piece of evidence I have found thus far is an op-ed article published in the Rocky Mountain News in April 1859 called “Farming vs. Gold digging.” This article encouraged the development of a more robust local food system to support a growing mining industry, urging entrepreneurs and new arrivals to make a good living wherever the “plow followed the miners pick!”
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While the direct success of that article in motiving farmers is unclear, by the year 1877, eighteen short years later the Colorado mining industry generated $7.4 million of sales (in 1877 dollars) and the food and agriculture economy of Colorado also amounted to $7.4 million of sales. The importance of Colorado agriculture is not new. In fact, it has always been key to the economic success of settlement here.

Depending on who you ask, food either comes from the grocery store or from the ground. But both visions oversimplify the incredible web of our globally interconnected food system. It is a web that operates nearly silently—growing, harvesting, cleaning, moving, packaging, processing, repacking, distributing, and selling the food that ends up in your shopping cart or on your plate at the local cafe.

The complexity of this system is elegant, and yet the system as we know it must change—whether it is due to the incipient challenge of nine-billion-plus people on earth, or to the compounding of unfunded externalities that the global food system throws off including childhood hunger in the U.S. and the millions of tons of food waste we generate (more than one-third of what is produced, by some estimates).

Early food systems in the U.S. were essentially family farms and ranches that preserved much of their food, sold some to each other, and sold the rest to the local processing plant for wider distribution. With railroad expansion across the West, food systems became more complex with producing, processing, and consumption happening at ever increasing distances, particularly for meat-based products. In the era of rapid globalization, food system networks expanded yet again, but this time overseas and using carefully-crafted trade deals and economic incentives to provide year-round access to a narrowing variety of the world’s edible bounty.

While multiple waves of back-to-the-land and environmental stewardship have washed over this newly globalized food system, the local food movement provides perhaps the best opportunity to fundamentally transform how we grow and how we eat. The reason for this is simple: people are paying attention. From stockholder debriefings and corporate social responsibility reports, to signage at farmers markets indicating which fruits are produced out of state, today’s consumers, investors, and leaders care enough to ask the crucial questions—where did this come from? how was this produced?—and then weigh the true value of that purchase relative to how it fits with their beliefs and their vision of the food system they want to help create.

These questions, and the simple habit of asking them, help us refine our consciousness around food. And if we ask them often enough and loud enough, these questions can also help guide our elected leaders and the businesses we support to make difficult decisions about potential tradeoffs in price, quality, and access. Our food system is often more malleable than we expect.

At first blush, our food environment seems immense and entrenched, and in many ways it may be, but when you zoom out and realize that Denver only became a city in 1856—less than 150 years ago—you realize we have a lot more power in shaping our food system and choosing who succeeds than we ever realized. The relatively short history of our food system highlights the power we have. The choices we make over the next 15 years will help us write a full ten percent of our regional food history. Simple daily choices guide an entire, mostly silent, and very complex, food system.
So I invite you to join me in a challenge: Can we each buy one local product we believe in—one a day, one a week, or one a month—to be part of creating a new history and to ensure that this time the history matches our values and beliefs?

Where have all the chickens gone?

Here chicken, chicken, chicken…
Pastured poultry is missing in Colorado. Yes, you can find it sometimes at the farmers market or as an “add-on” to a CSA. But the gap between supply and demand in this state is a gulf, a chasm. And the reason is simple: farmers want to raise and sell poultry, consumers and retailers want to buy and eat poultry, but on-farm, small flock poultry processing is illegal in Colorado. Yes, illegal. The strangest part about this is that on-farm, small flock poultry processing is actually legal from the USDA perspective—they even have a special exemption so that poultry farmers who stay small do not have to deal with the same level of regulations as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).

So why is it illegal in Colorado? Do we not think the federal government has enough farm and food safety regulations so we added our own? No, the problem is a memo--a single administrative memo between two state agencies, the Colorado Department of Agriculture and the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment (CDPHE), that accidentally, perhaps, but effectively eliminates the ability for small flock producers in Colorado to utilize the federal exemption.

Why? The memo from CDPHE simply requires that people follow CDA permitting rules—and the CDA permit does not have allowances for small flock producers, and as a result neither do we.

If the state is serious about helping rural farmers, about fostering innovation, about food as an economic driver then when will they change this and unlock our nascent poultry industry?
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Policies are good when they protect the public or when they protect our rights, but this is not a good policy. I am willing to believe it was an accident or an oversight, but then the question should be: How quickly will you change this? How quickly will you help our small and beginning farmers? And how quickly can I get me some Colorado chicken?