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?
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?
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?
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?
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