In recent years, chickens have come home to roost in backyards across the country. While the numbers are hard to document, cities and towns all over the U.S. are taking up the issue and modifying their laws to allow backyard chickens. Nearly every week in the news, a story appears reporting another town or city considering amendments to local laws that would allow backyard chickens. Proponents in North Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, and Nixa, Missouri have been working to amend the law; while just last week, local government in Hampton, Virginia and Howard County, Maryland, approved ordinance amendments to allow backyard chickens.

Seeing this trend as an extension of the local, urban food movement, people are realizing that chickens make great, productive pets. There’s evidence that eggs from backyard chickens have greater nutritional value than commercial eggs, and chickens eat pretty much anything – ticks, grasshoppers, kitchen scraps, weeds, you name it. They even have the added bonuses of being adorable and kids loving them. How could you not love that beak?

Photo Credit: stevenljohnson @ flickr

However, in 2012 an outbreak of salmonella that was traced back to several backyard flocks made at least one NPR blogger wary of the recent trend – dubbing backyard chickens “spreaders of salmonella.” A CDC report found that most of the people infected in this outbreak handled live chickens and that many of them had purchased chicks from one Ohio mail-order hatchery. A single hatchery, in this case, was responsible for the outbreak that affected 195 people in 27 states.

The story, unfortunately, focused on the chickens themselves when instead it should have focused on the bigger picture: when outbreaks can be pinpointed to a single source, it demonstrates the vulnerabilities of a large, global food economy. When there’s a problem, like an outbreak, it tends to spread faster, and farther in our interdependent, global economy. For example, in 2010, a salmonella outbreak that sickened hundreds across the country was traced back to one Iowa egg company and the company had to recall 380 million of its eggs.

And this blogger is not a lone voice in decrying backyard chickens. Alongside the stories of municipalities voting to change laws to allow backyard chickens, you will find stories of municipalities voting to ban backyard chickens, often in the name of public safety. It makes me wonder, how have we come so far as a society to be more skeptical of the food produced right before our eyes than food produced primarily behind closed doors and transported more than a thousand miles before reaching our plates?

Industrial food-animal production is largely responsible for the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance, while the lack of appropriate handling of waste at many of these facilities contaminates nearby air and waters with harmful nutrients and toxins. In addition, the focus on profits means animals are raised in as little space as possible and not surprisingly, these cramped, dirty conditions are fertile breeding grounds for diseases. On the other hand, a decentralized, local, scaled-down food economy offers numerous benefits. Local food significantly reduces these types of risks, makes us more resilient, and the food produced tends to be healthier too.

So do backyard chickens pose a public health risk? The facts just don’t bear this out. Consider this: salmonella causes about 1.2 million cases of food poisoning each year in the U.S. The outbreak that was traced back to the mail-order hatchery constitutes 0.01% of the total number of cases.

Photo Credit: edenpictures @ flickr

In addition, research suggests backyard chickens present no more of a health risk than other animals that may be kept as pets. If chickens are well-cared for and are kept in a clean environment, as with all pets, they are more likely to stay healthy. Very few poultry diseases are transmissible to man and salmonella is not an airborne disease (read: salmonella will not simply float from the chickens in your neighbor’s yard into your home). If you do decide to handle a chicken, simply wash your hands afterwards.

For the better part of mankind’s history, food was produced and consumed locally. Prior to World War II, nearly one-third of Americans lived on farms and even if you didn’t live on a farm, you probably bought your meat, milk, and eggs directly from your local farmer. During this time salmonella and avian flu certainly did not run rampant. These diseases that now make the news cycle on a near daily basis – and emerging concerns about antibiotic resistance and indiscriminate pesticide use – are products of our large, industrialized food system. Backyard chickens are a part of a solution that will strengthen our local food economy and at the same time, create foods that are both better for us and the environment.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about bringing backyard chickens back to Rhode Island and paid special attention to the ongoing effort to repeal Woonsocket’s chicken ban. A few days later, the Washington Post ran a feature-length article on low-income Woonsocket residents’ struggles to feed their families.

My last post focused on the ways that historical justifications for chicken bans have become outdated, and also noted some health and environmental benefits of backyard chickens. The Post article casts the Woonsocket chicken issue in a new light: Woonsocket suffers from food insecurity, and backyard chickens can help.

The Post article is worth your time to read (here’s another link to it), but here are a few important takeaways: Every month, the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) injects $2 million in benefits (formerly called food stamps) into the Woonsocket economy. With a local unemployment rate of 12% and only low-paying jobs available to many employed residents, a full one-third of Woonsocket residents receive SNAP benefits. In fact, some local grocery stores make up to 25% of their monthly profits on the first of the month, the day when SNAP benefits are transferred to recipients. Together, these numbers – and the article’s well-drawn profiles of several Woonsocket residents – present a picture of food insecurity.

Backyard chickens are not a panacea by any means, but they can help to alleviate food insecurity and promote economic self-reliance. They can turn food scraps, beetles, and grubs into fresh eggs. And their droppings (if dealt with appropriately) are great for growing vegetables too. They add resilience to a broken food system. You can read more about chickens and chicken care by poking around Southside Community Land Trust’s website.

Once you’re satisfied that backyard chickens make sense, you should come out to Woonsocket City Hall on Monday, April 1 at 7 p.m. to show your support for repealing Woonsocket’s chicken ban!

Local food is all the rage, but how do you affordably and conveniently get that food from the local farm to the local table? It’s a question a lot of people are asking — and one we at CLF Ventures (CLFV) are working to answer.

CLFV explored some emerging models that seek to connect small local farms to customers and allow these agricultural businesses to flourish. After all, farmers need to earn a living wage in order to keep growing the food we love to eat. We sent a survey to restaurants to better understand the experience of sourcing food directly from small, local farms and learned a lot about the opportunities and barriers for small farm businesses.

Some small farms have created Restaurant Supported Agriculture (RSA) models that mimic existing Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Generally, restaurants receive one box of food per week that contains substantially more food than a standard CSA share. However, the RSA model is not necessarily an ideal solution for small growers that want to sell food to restaurants. The typical restaurant purchasing model doesn’t match well with the typical small farm sales model. Additional insight from CLFV’s survey of local restaurants is shown in the infographic below.

Restaurants can be a great market for small farms because they are local and create steady demand. Innovative farmers and restaurateurs continue to seek ways to collaborate to their mutual benefit. However, the complexities of restaurant purchasing and the differences in menu selection and food preparation between restaurants complicate these contractual relationships.

Without innovative solutions it is likely that farm-to-restaurant partnerships will remain one-off endeavors rather than a stable market for small, local farms. That would inhibit growth in an area that we sincerely hope — for the sake of our environment, and our communities — will grow.

A genuine Rhode Island chicken. Image courtesy of eschipul @ flickr.

All over Rhode Island, people want to keep backyard chickens. The trouble is that the law often doesn’t let them.

Until 2010, Providence banned chicken-keeping entirely. That year, a coalition of residents worked together to overturn the ban. These efforts paid off – now, chickens peck away happily at sites ranging from Southside Community Land Trust’s almost-a-whole-block City Farm to my friends’ snug 1700-square-foot lot in the West End.

After this success in Providence, other cities and towns looked more closely at allowing chickens. Swanky Barrington followed Providence. The City Council in Cranston, where I live, repealed the city’s chicken ban; unfortunately, though, our mayor vetoed the repeal so the ban remains on the books (for now). As spring approaches and our thoughts turn to our backyards, a city and town in northern Rhode Island – Woonsocket and North Smithfield – are considering lifting their backyard chicken bans.

The effort to repeal the Woonsocket ban began the same way most repeal campaigns seem to: a Woonsocket zoning officer ordered a responsible chicken owner to get rid of his birds. Alex Kithes says his neighbors didn’t even realize he had chickens until he offered to share some eggs. As word spread, the city found out and issued a citation. Alex is fighting back. He has drafted a city council member to introduce a bill allowing chickens in Woonsocket, and he is lining up individuals and organizations to lend support.

CLF supports eliminating barriers to local food, and that includes legalizing backyard chickens in Woonsocket. When people keep chickens, they can cheaply opt out of industrial egg-suppliers.  A more direct benefit of backyard chickens is that small broods’ droppings make great fertilizer, while concentrated droppings from large egg-laying operations are toxic. Backyard chickens also add resiliency to our increasingly concentrated food system. And backyard chickens can even encourage organic waste diversion, eating table scraps that otherwise might be landfilled. These are the types of broad-ranging benefits that panelists recently promoted at the Rhode Island Local Food Forum.

Legalizing backyard chickens also allows residents full use of their property to grow food and helps to foster community. To better understand these points, we have to take a brief look back in history. Municipal bans on backyard chickens began with New York City in 1877, followed by Boston in 1896. Both cities were motivated primarily by concerns with unsanitary chicken slaughter; wholesale bans on chickens, however, were much easier to enforce than targeted bans on slaughter.

Over time, however, slaughter of backyard chickens has all but vanished (and is still banned in most modern chicken ordinances, though off-site processors may be available for those who want to eat their birds and not just their eggs). Sanitary concerns have largely disappeared (and sanitation is regulated in most modern chicken ordinances). And chicken bans remain on the books primarily due to worries about nuisance and image. But any well-tailored chicken ordinance will take a dual approach to nuisance: both proactive (setting minimum conditions for housing and feeding chickens, and banning noisy roosters) and reactive (allowing neighbors or municipalities to fight actual nuisance conditions). This approach allows people to keep clean, quiet birds on their property if they choose to do so.

And clean, quiet birds not only are perfectly consistent with a positive community image but can in fact foster community. Backyard chickens can be quite stylish (this coop, for example, looks even better in person!) or even all but invisible – I didn’t realize my West End friends had chickens until they paused our daughters’ play date to go outside and feed the birds. Chickens tend to be great with children, and egg-sharing can bring neighbors together. Finally, there are no known data suggesting that backyard chickens negatively affect nearby property values. The fact is that out-and-out chicken bans restrict property rights and prevent environmental benefits for no good reason at all. Everybody loses.

For all these reasons, CLF supports amending the Woonsocket backyard chicken ban. I plan to speak in favor of repealing the ban at Woonsocket’s April 1 City Council meeting, and I hope you will consider joining the growing pro-chicken coalition as well.

CLF and CLF Ventures couldn’t be more excited about the opportunities for innovation in financing that build our regional food system. We’re working to foster greater investment in the innovations that will transform our communities, make us more self-sufficient and resilient to climate change, and build a sector that will sustain us over the long term. That’s why we recently partnered with Federal Street Advisors, a wealth management advisory firm for families and foundations, to co-sponsor a regional summit, Financing a Sustainable Food System for New England. Together with Federal Street Advisors, we gathered a select audience of interested investors and invited both seasoned and emerging entrepreneurs and experts from around New England to tell their stories, focusing on the critical issues in growing and financing sustainable food businesses. The room was full of excitement, stories, and passion for food, and several important themes emerged:

• GROWING DEMAND FOR SUSTAINABLE FOOD:
  

  (L-R) Mass. Agricultural Commissioner Greg Watson and Ed Maltby of Adams Farm Slaughterhouse

  Greg Watson, Massachusetts Agricultural Commissioner, explained that supply currently can’t match demand. He proclaimed that this is not a trend, “this is the future of agriculture!”

• NEED FOR ALTERNATIVE FINANCING:
  Several entrepreneurs, including Ed Maltby of Adams Farm Slaughterhouse and Bill Eldridge of Maine’s Own Organic Milk, spoke of the need for alternative financing that allows the organic growth of their business and matches the timing and return expectations of their business models. While some models do create high value, others are challenging to do profitably, because the value of the sustainable dimension is not yet captured in the economics. For example, farming organically creates the need to certify, but for smaller growers, the “local” advantage can’t compete with large national businesses.

• CONTRIBUTION TO CLIMATE RESILIENCY: 
  

  Dorothy Suput, The Carrot Project

  Many panelists discussed the role of sustainable agriculture in addressing resiliency to climate change, including Roger Berkowitz of Legal Sea Foods, who mentioned fish ranching as a strategy to address the declining coastal fish populations resulting from warming waters, and Henry Lovejoy of EcoFish, who explained, “We don’t need to raise any food that’s bad for the planet.”

• NEED FOR AGGREGATION: Aggregation was a theme — farmers and investors alike can benefit from pooling resources to make innovations, and investments in them, sustainable.

There were many key ideas conveyed, but I have to commend Chuck Lacy of Hardwick Beef for delivering two memorable take-aways:

• “You can’t just show up and get my tenderloins!” (Relationships are critical)

• “If you’re lucky, you will plant a seed that will help change an industry” (to potential investors)

Raw bar, courtesy of Island Creek Oysters

Of course, no sustainable food summit would be complete without good eats, and the Financing Sustainable Food System summit showcased an abundance of local and regional treats, including grass-fed beef stew with panelist Chuck Lacy’s Hardwick Beef, fish and seafood from panelist Jared Auerbach’s Red’s Best, and many donated items, including an Island Creek Oysters raw bar, desserts from Henrietta’s Table of Cambridge, an assortment of prepared foods produced at Boston culinary incubator CropCircle Kitchen, and dozens of other tempting New England products.

CLF has a long history of work on sustainable agriculture issues in New England, including efforts to improve the sustainability of our fisheries.

• In our current Sustainable Farm and Food Initiative, CLF and CLF Ventures focuses on issues of growing urban agriculture, developing innovations to overcome market and policy barriers, here in Boston and throughout the region.

• CLF Ventures is working to regionalize a fish permit investment fund in the Gulf of Maine, aiming at the triple bottom line of social, environmental, and economic benefits.

• And through our partnerships with Federal Street Advisors and others, we are evaluating the sustainability claims and working to bring structure and discipline to the innovation and excitement of social entrepreneurship.

CLF and CLF Ventures have a vision for reinventing our food supply that

• builds on our region’s history and tradition of self-reliance and our roots in fishing and farming;
• leverages our culture of innovation as a firm foundation for our regional economy;
• creates healthier ways to feed ourselves;
• combats climate change; and
• rebuilds the health of our environment.

CLF Ventures co-organized the Sustainable Food System summit to discuss the benefits of investing in this growing economic sector, including greater food security and higher quality food, job creation, and improved quality of life for our urban and rural communities. The need to build capacity and sustainability in our food supply creates an opportunity to invest in sustainable economic growth for our region. Key to this growth is an understanding of the barriers — such as the need to aggregate production and distribution to scale, the need for effective financing models, for policy changes, for new public and private partnerships, for market development — and understanding the extent to which the emerging alternatives unlock the potential.

By design, there was a lot of expertise and activity in the room — from seasoned entrepreneurs and investors as well as from the next generation of innovators. We were fortunate to have generous co-sponsors: Goodwin Procter, Pinnacle Associates, Trillium Asset Management, and Eastern Bank. We are not the inventors of the idea, but we are the ones to carry it forward.

Stay tuned for updates on our urban farming work, triple-bottom-line funds, links between climate change, resilience, and sustainable farming practices, as well as entrepreneur stories, expert advising and more.

Last week I attended the Ninth Annual Rhode Island Local Food Forum, organized by Farm Fresh Rhode Island. The forum’s theme was “Center of the Plate,” reflecting its focus on local protein production. Particularly enlightening was a panel discussion whose moderator, academic chef Bill Idell, posed questions that resonate across the region.  These questions ultimately boil down to two big ones: First, what does a sustainable food system look like? And second, how can we make one happen?

The panel’s meat experts – local guru Pat McNiff of Pat’s Pastured and Mel Coleman from national good-meat powerhouse Niman Ranch – agreed that sustainable meat means raising animals in their natural habitats (not concentrated feedlots) and in a way that feeds both animals and soil. The panelists also highlighted that sustainable food systems require local capacity because geographically concentrated animal operations are at risk from extreme weather: last summer’s drought, for example, “force[d] livestock producers to liquidate herds because feed [wa]s too expensive.” All this means that local meat is not just grown in a place, but it also grows that place by enriching both land (ecologically) and community (economically).

Building capacity for local meat is tough, however, when farmers have limited access to land. This is the case in Rhode Island. Not only is land itself expensive here (as throughout New England), but property and estate taxes can make it almost impossible to keep productive land in agricultural use when it is more valuable as land for development (and is assessed as such for tax purposes). We at CLF are looking closely at this issue.

Moving from the land to the sea, the discussion yielded different insights from the panel’s seafood experts.  “Eating with the Ecosystem” founder Sarah Schumann and seafood-aggregation specialist Jared Auerbach of Red’s Best noted that sustainability means something much different for seafood than for meat, because so many fish and shellfish stocks are wild. They agreed that a sustainable seafood system should be biodiverse – instead of a singleminded focus on cod, for example, a sustainable system would mean sending more fluke, skate, scup, and squid to market. Diversifying the types of seafood we typically eat would allow overfished stocks to recover, and would also contribute to the resiliency of ocean life in the face of climate change and ocean acidification. Furthermore, a sustainable seafood system would mean – to borrow from Sarah Schumann – eating with the (local) ecosystem. Seafood brought in to local ports is easy to trace and to verify species, boat size, and fishing method – factors that are federally regulated but relatively easy to lose track of as more steps are added to the supply chain. Encouraging demand for diverse seafood products, localizing seafood markets with robust tracing and verification systems, and streamlining state and federal fisheries regulations would all help foster local, sustainable seafood systems.

All four panelists, farmers and fishers alike, agreed on another point: we need local, sustainable food systems both to limit and to respond to harms wrought by carbon dioxide emissions. These emissions cause climate change, leading to droughts and other extreme weather that disrupts agriculture; these disruptions, in turn, require robust local systems to add resilience to the global food system. And carbon dioxide emissions also cause ocean acidification, which poses an immediate risk to shellfish and a long-term risk to all ocean life.

All this highlights the importance of CLF’s farm-and-food and climate-change programs. Our work shutting down coal-fired power plants and promoting renewable energy helps to limit emissions that threaten our current food system (not to mention our planet). And our farm-and-food program promotes local and regional food systems that provide a broad range of environmental benefits. As CLF’s newest staff attorney, I am excited to be joining these efforts here in Rhode Island. The Local Food Forum made it clear that there are many good ideas brewing here – we just need to do the work to get our food policy right.

Grounded in our Colonial history, America’s harvest feast – Thanksgiving – is a quintessentially New England holiday, a time to be grateful for our region’s rich agricultural traditions of hard-fought bounty and community-minded collaboration.

As we head off to celebrate with our families (as the famous New England poem goes), it is worth remembering that many of our neighbors in New England are struggling, day in day out, to cobble together three meals of good, healthy food. We know that, here in my relatively prosperous state of New Hampshire, more than 1 in 5 households with children experience food insecurity, and more than 130,000 people turn to emergency sources of food like food pantries every year (a number that has more than doubled in the last six years). Hunger and poor nutrition pose special risks for children, who may experience lasting damage to their health, educational outcomes, and economic opportunities.

The stark reality of childhood hunger is one of the driving forces behind CLF’s Farm and Food Initiative, our ongoing work to build a thriving, sustainable food system that grows our region’s farming economy – in rural and urban areas alike – to benefit all people in New England.

In this spirit, CLF is grateful to be a part of a new effort in New Hampshire to tackle childhood hunger, which was formally launched yesterday. Spearheaded by Children’s Alliance of New Hampshire and a diverse coalition of stakeholders known as NH Hunger Solutions, the effort – New Hampshire’s Roadmap to End Child Hunger – has identified three key goals for the state: (1) increase access to healthy food by expanding the number of families that benefit from school meal, food assistance, and nutrition programs, (2) strengthen New Hampshire’s food systems with policies that improve the availability of affordable, local, healthy foods for families of all economic groups and that strengthen farmers’ connections with schools and community food programs, and (3) ensure overall economic security for all families by enhancing public financial assistance for those in need. Yesterday’s rollout of the Roadmap was a terrific event in the gymnasium at Henniker’s Community School, featuring a number of community and food system leaders. You can read more about the event in this NewHampshire.com article.

We at CLF are particularly gratified that the Roadmap recognizes the importance of a strong, resilient food system that connects all people to healthy, affordable foods produced locally and sustainably by New England and New Hampshire farmers. As we noted on Food Day last month, CLF and others are hard at work identifying the policy and practical barriers to this kind of system and developing recommended solutions.

As implementation of the Roadmap begins – in collaboration with the companion efforts of Food Solutions New England to build a statewide Food Advisory Council – we look forward to helping New Hampshire achieve the Roadmap’s ambitious goals. As we share Thanksgiving with our families, CLF and our partners are committed to living up to New England’s heritage of sharing the harvest.

Fifty years ago this week the world was gripped by the Cuban Missile Crisis, then unfolding. It was the low point, perhaps, of the cold war, a several-decade period in which hundreds of millions of people got used to the idea that absolute, global catastrophe could be just 20 minutes away.

Or at least we tried to get used to it. I recall being very confused, as a first-grader in the early 1960’s, about why sometimes when the alarm bell rang we quickly went outside, and other times we hunkered down next to the thick brick walls deep inside the school, and waited.

Fortunately, that catastrophe hasn’t happened. However, the mindset that most American baby-boomers grew up with – the entire world could change very drastically and permanently, during our lifetime if not during the afternoon – is still embedded in our psyches. It gave many of us nightmares when we were young.

We need to tap that well of concern, now. The world is changing dramatically. It’s happening more slowly than ICBMs delivering nuclear warheads over the North Pole, but it is speeding up. Everybody who goes outside knows that. Unlike the destruction-in-a-flash that many of us grew up imagining, it’s now change-within-a-decade, or change-by-next-growing-season. And we’re not only imagining. We’re seeing it.

So what’s an American Boomer to do? Wake up. Accept responsibility. Our resource-gobbling lifestyle has caused this mess. Suburbanization has wasted US resources for two generations. Change it, now. And use your still-massive influence to change regressive policies. It’s outrageous that both major candidates for President fully endorse dramatic expansion of drilling for fossil fuels. Don’t stand for that. Demand that we change course, and lead the world in doing so. If we don’t, large parts of our planet will become as inhospitable as we feared in our nuclear nightmares as children. Only then it will be a reality for our grandchildren and their children.

Then, set the table for the next generation, and get out of the way. The “Millenials” are intuitively heading in the right direction. Whether they are reacting to the ecological mess we are leaving them or the economic constraints they feel matters little: they’ve got the right ideas. They are investing their time and money locally.  They want smaller living spaces. They own fewer cars and use transit more. They are much more inclined toward sharing – cars, space, resources, goods, politics – than exclusive ownership. They are fond of repurposed goods.

And this is not just urban hipsters. All sorts of 20-somethings are living with their parents, shopping on Craigslist and launching businesses through crowd-sourced investment platforms like Kickstarter. They are revitalizing places across New England that Boomers and their parents left behind: from cities like Boston, Providence and Portland, to towns like Portsmouth, NH, Winooski, VT and Pittsfield, MA. They are eating food grown closeby by people they know. And all of this will create – in the decades to come – a way of living in New England that is healthier for all, lower-carbon, and more resilient to our changing climate than the way we have lived in this country since 1945.

It’s time. As the cold war has fizzled we’ve not been sure what would follow. Globalization, the rise of Petro-states, the incredible growth of China as an economic power, increasing inequality of wealth, climate change – these are centuries of chickens coming home to roost. There’s a lot going on. But at least it’s happening more or less in front of us, in the public eye, and in a way that offers opportunities to actually do something about it.

In that way, it’s a different kind of crisis than global nuclear annihilation. We all felt powerless to avert that. Perhaps that’s part of why it was so scary.The forces imperiling the planet now may be even more powerful, as they emanate from many different places and have quite a head of steam.

But they are not impenetrable. Smart, inspired and hopeful people all over are finding ways to bend those forces toward a better future. It is our responsibility, fellow Boomers, to help them.

I am reminded  of the story of the so-called Big A dam on the Penobscot River in Maine – a project that, after much debate, was never built.

Twenty five years ago CLF and others opposed this ill-advised project, advancing the then-novel argument that energy efficiency could satisfy the power needs of the time better than a dam that would have turned two outstanding reaches of river into a slackwater impoundment. A nice summary of the controversy and its context is here. The author, David Platt, a long-time journalist who covered the story, notes that it “became a fascinating discussion about energy, engineering, corporate power, the rising influence of non-corporate interests, the need to protect the environment, and the changing nature of the paper industry and the economy in Maine.”

A generation later, and amplified 1,000 times, that is our story – the story of our challenges and our opportunities at the beginning of the 21st century. At the end of this century we will and should be remembered as much for what we started as for what we stopped, as much for what we were for as for what we where against. At this time in history, while several generations – and people from many perspectives, not only the environmental movement – share the stage, it is imperative that we come together and get it right.

On October 24, CLF will join with people around the country to celebrate Food Day as part of a nationwide movement for healthy, affordable, and sustainable food. This is a time for us to gather and reflect on the agricultural abundance our region can provide, and the importance of making sure that our food systems not only supply bodily nutrition, but  also contribute in a healthful way to our community ecosystems.

At the smallest scale, CLF’s Boston staff will celebrate Food Day by breaking local bread (and cheese!) from Allandale Farm and sharing in the story of one urban community fighting for food justice: we’ll be getting together to watch The Garden, a documentary about the community’s fight to save a14-acre community garden in South Central Los Angeles from being sold for development. This important story reflects the struggles that many of our communities of color and low income communities face in order to gain access to a basic right: nutritious food. (For more on CLF’s Farm & Food work, check out this page.)

But CLF’s celebration of healthy, affordable, and sustainable food is not limited to October 24th. CLF attorneys working on our Farm and Food Initiative work year round to protect, expand, and improve our regional food system, tackling some of our region’s most pressing environmental and health issues, and making our region more resilient to the impacts of climate change already underway.

From our efforts in Vermont working with farmers and other professionals to demystify community-financing tools available to farmers seeking to start, or grow, their farms, to our study of policy and market barriers related to urban agriculture in Greater Boston, CLF and CLF Ventures’ Farm and Food work is both advocating sustainable farming practices and unlocking the economic development potential of agricultural development. And this is just the beginning: over the next two years, CLF will engage in the most comprehensive regional policy analysis that has ever been done for commercial agriculture in New England, leading to a suite of policy recommendations that will enable our region to develop a self-supporting food system.

CLF understands that food lies at the intersection of many of our most pressing problems – the obesity epidemic, soaring healthcare costs, a faltering economy, climate change, and social inequity. We hope you’ll not only join CLF in celebrating Food Day on October 24 (check out activities in your area here), but continue the journey with us as we advocate solutions that bring healthy food to all of New England’s communities using sustainable farming practices and reducing the impacts of climate change.