February 2010
In this issue
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- Grant Opportunity: Healthy Urban Food Enterprises
- Value Chain Toolkit Now Available
- Kansas City Alliance Backs Good Food for Good Health
- Food Safety Report
- FamilyFarmed.org Building Online GAP Consultant
- NGFN Gets Strategic
- NGFN Resource Highlight: Webinar Archive
- Add your profile to the NGFN Database
- NGFN Media Outlets
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Stories
Grant Opportunity: Healthy Urban Food Enterprises
The Wallace Center's new Healthy Urban Food Enterprise Development Center (HUFED) has announced a program of grants for business-oriented solutions to the problem of healthy food access in underserved communities.
Grants will range from one-year grants in the amount of $10,000-$25,000 to three-year grants up to $100,000. Technical assistance will also be available to successful grantees. Over three years, the Wallace HUFED Center expects to support approximately 30 projects representing a broad range of strategies.
The Wallace HUFED Center is now accepting Letters of Interest from non-profit and for-profit organizations. Due March 8, the letters must be brief and clear, presenting the project concept comprehensively and succinctly.
The Center requests those responding to review the complete grant guidelines first and then submit their letters through an online submission form. A technical review panel will evaluate the Letters of Interest and recommend a subset for full proposals. The Center will then invite this subset of applicants to submit full proposals on, or around March 22.
The grant guidelines contain instructions for writing and submitting a Letter of Interest, as well as further information about the purpose and goals of the Center and greater detail on grant types. The guidelines are available at www.wallacecenter.org/hufed, through the Wallace HUFED Center Help Line: (703) 531-8810, or via email at hufed@winrock.org.
The Wallace HUFED Center is made possible by a $900,000 grant from USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). Announced by USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan at a recent forum on community food enterprises, the grant comes from provisions in the 2007 Farm Bill.
Specifically, the HUFED Center will focus on the need to make more healthy and affordable food available in low-income areas; to increase market access for small and mid-sized agricultural producers; and to promote positive economic activities generated by attracting healthy food enterprises into underserved communities. Through grants, technical assistance and other activities, the Wallace HUFED Center will seek to build local capacity to serve food needs in urban and rural low-income, historically excluded and underserved communities and communities of color.
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Value Chain Toolkit Now Available
Everybody needs a mentor. Now one of the most experienced values-based food supply chain efforts in the country has put its nine years of learning, along with insights from others, into a practical guide for those just getting started.
Appalachian Sustainable Development (ASD) founder Anthony Flaccavento is the author of the step-by-step story in Healthy Food Systems: A Toolkit for Building Value Chains. It's told through the real life journey of Appalachian Harvest, the brand and marketing network of organic produce farms in Virginia and Tennessee that ASD manages.
Appalachian Harvest is a case of smaller, limited resource farms transitioning from a tradition of commodity tobacco production to new crops and new markets. They've found strength by working together to plan and coordinate their production, move their products through packaging and other market steps, and then communicate to consumers the full environmental and community-building value of the locally grown produce.
In this process, they've helped define how a value chain differs from conventional supply chain. As Flaccavento describes it, the difference is in " ... the type of farming, the degree of local ownership or influence, and the distance to market. There is also more transparency and “feedback” among the different parts of the chain."
The toolkit is valuable to anyone trying to move from supply chain to value chain because it tells how that can happen. The toolkit walks practitioners through value chain approaches to the three main parts of any supply chain: 1) building the supply of producers and products 2) navigating the steps between production and consumption, which involve activities like processing, aggregation, and distribution and 3) working in different markets, ranging from grocers to restaurants and schools.
Healthy Food Systems: A Toolkit for Building Value Chains is available for $15. To order a copy, contact Appalachian Sustainable Development directly at asd@asdevelop.org or 276-623-1121.
You can also sit in on a recent National Good Food Network webinar about value chain development, led by Anthony Flaccavento. This webinar includes results of a national survey of value chain practitioners.
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Kansas City Alliance Backs Good Food for Good Health
On March 2-3, Kansas City business and civic leaders will not only host a major conference on the relationship of farming and food to health. They will also celebrate the fact that the two-day event represents some very powerful community-wide and cross-sector collaboration.
The Good Food and Good Health conference, and the new Good Food Good Futures alliance behind it mark a new chapter in the city's good food story. Healthy, green, fair, affordable food is now a top item on the to-do list of some of the region's most influential leaders.
This comes after years of pioneering work by enterprising farms and food buyers, as well as food justice and health activists in the Kansas City area.
The Kansas City Food Circle was one of the first civic activities, with a guide to area farms, promotion of first-adopter restaurants, and efforts to connect rural producers and urban churches. The Good Natured Family Farms cooperative of some 150 farms built further recognition with Buy Fresh Buy Local marketing and with its branded, broad line of products sold at Hen House and Price Chopper grocery stores. The KC Healthy Kids organization is taking an active role by hosting and building the Greater Kansas City Food Policy Coalition. The Coalition has brought together a broad range of people and organizations focused on making the healthy food choice the easy and accessible choice for everyone.
Two newer entrants are Cerner, the nation's largest health care information technology company, based in Kansas City, and the American Royal Association, a 110-year old civic institution that grew out of the city's Old West cattle days and still hosts nationally prominent livestock shows and other events.
The American Royal Association recently formed the Good Food Good Futures alliance to help provide recognition and leadership from executive thinkers and doers across the region.
The alliance states that it believes the best way to alter a community’s future is to change the food landscape from one that supports obesity, heart disease, diabetes, hunger and malnutrition, to one that supports the economic, ecologic and personal health of the community and its citizens. The ability for Kansas City to create this legacy is a strong motivating factor for the alliance’s civic and business leaders.
The March 2-3 conference is just the beginning of this new chapter in Kansas City’s Good Food story.
As Karen Siebert, spokesperson for the Greater Kansas City Food Policy Coalition, notes: "The more people we have involved, the more groups raising issues from all sorts of different angles, the better off we all are." She said the Good Food Good Futures alliance adds influential business people to the mix, which is an important voice to add to the chorus so that decision makers, like local government officials, can hear.
John Fisk, Director of Wallace Center at Winrock International will follow the keynote plenary to update the audience on the work of the Wallace Center, partnerships developing with USDA, the role of the National Good Food Network and Regional Leadership in building regional food systems and partnership work with the Kansas City region. NGFN Leads Ron Doetsch, Michael Fields Institute and Warren King, Mindspring, LTD, will represent the NGFN as presenters and panelists at multiple sessions during the conference.
Please join us at this event. Get more information on the convening, and register now!
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Food Safety Report
Each month, Steve Warshawer, food safety coordinator for the National Good Food Network, writes a regular column on the status of new and changing food safety regulations. A farmer and food distributor, Steve is focused on the challenge of developing food safety rules that work for food producers as well as food regulators.
Food Safety Conference Call and Mailing List
You can dig into more detail on these topics by participating in the NGFN's monthly food safety calls or by listening to recordings of past calls. The calls are the second Tuesday of each month. The next meeting is March 9, 3:30 - 4:30pm. Call in number is: (712) 432-0850; Access Code: 475325#. Each topic below has a link to a recording of the Feb. 9 call, with a note as to where in the recording to find the relevant information.
If you would like to be reminded of food safety calls, as well as other relevant news, add your name to our Food Safety Updates mailing list.
Regulatory update
The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) and the National Organic Coalition (NOC) have been continuing to lead the discussion in Congress on behalf of “good food” producers. Currently the focus is on making the Senate Food Safety bill (S510) friendly to “sustainable" and "organic" food and farming. Read more about NSAC’s priorities.
Resources: NSAC S510 talking points, NSAC Food safety position paper, NSAC action alert, Food safety call recording, fast forward to about 50:30.
GAP Harmonization update
As I wrote in the December Food Safety Update, United Fresh Produce Association, at the behest of a group of major produce buyers and producers, facilitates a “technical working group” (TWG) charged with gathering Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) standards from willing standard owners, and “harmonizing” them into a “universally acceptable GAP” that addresses all of the core elements of GAP. This ambitious undertaking can, if successful, stem the tide of “Supermetrics;” that is, buyer-driven one-upmanship in GAP standards which can unduly burden producers with expensive, conflicting, and redundant requirements.
Nearly all private standard owners from the mainstream industry are working together in the harmonization effort. Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) has added its GAP program to the harmonization mix, and other alternative GAP programs are encouraged to join. The Wallace Center/NGFN Food Safety Coordinator is actively involved in this process. The technical working group's harmonized GAP is expected to be scalable, support diverse farms and commodity farms, as well as organic and alternative production methods.
Resource: Food safety call recording, fast forward to about 7 minutes.
Farm food safety planning tool
Familyfarmed.org has assembled a technical working group of diverse stakeholders from industry and alternative venues and is developing a tool to assist farmers with the creation of a farm food safety plan. Eventually this tool will be available on the internet so that farmers can individually, or with the assistance of local service providers, develop their own on-farm food safety plan and training manuals and standard operating procedures (SOPs). Wallace Center/NGFN is supporting this project and will offer information on timing and availability of this tool.
Resources: See story below, Food safety call recording (fast forward to about 45 seconds)
GlobalGAP and Group Certification
At present in the United States, smaller farms are at a major disadvantage under what is known as the “one farm – one field – one audit” approach to food safety. Larger farms will employ a food safety coordinator who interfaces with external auditors, presenting internal audit information and assuring compliance with food safety plans, possibly across many fields owned by the single large farm. But smaller, single-owner farms are not able to spread their food safety investment across many fields.
The “group approach,” pioneered in Europe by GlobalGAP, offers an alternative model in which groups of producers are able to emulate the approach of larger, individually owned farms with multiple fields. NGFN is working in cooperation with GlobalGAP to test the group certification approach. The effort is enlisting the further support of USDA and private certifiers, along with SYSCO and other major buyers, to develop pilot projects in 2010 for groups of smaller producers who market together as an aggregating/distributing entity. If successful, this approach will bring high standards of food safety training and oversight to places where farmers market and work together as groups.
Resources: Food safety call recording (fast-foward to about 22 minutes), An Introduction to GlobalGAP Group Certification.
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FamilyFarmed.org Building Online GAP Consultant
While Congress and food industry lobbyists wrestle with new food safety regulations, farms are on the line now, trying to do the necessary paperwork as soon as possible and as affordably as possible.
This need is particularly acute for smaller and mid-size farms. A project now underway at FamilyFarmed.org could help. The Chicago-based nonprofit is developing a free online interactive tool to help farms put together the food safety plans, including actual documentation, that they need to pass certification audits.
In collaboration with the Wallace Center and the National Good Food Network, FamilyFarmed.org expects to have a test version of the tool available by late 2010 and a final version available in early 2011. To learn more or offer suggestions, contact contact@ngfn.org.
The tool is based on the Association of Food and Drug Officials (AFDO) Good Agricultural Practices standard (GAP) but will pull from other applicable standards, as well. Documentation that the tool will help farms complete includes the farm-specific training manuals and recordkeeping forms that certification requires. The heart of the project is an interactive "decision tree" that helps users investigate the costs, benefits and other implications of various options.
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NGFN Gets Strategic
At a recent meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the National Good Food Network began a strategic planning process with its current advisory council, comprised of representatives from its ten regional lead teams and other consultants and leaders in the good food field.
Regions shared how they were enabled to do all manner of project work that would not have been possible without the cross-regional connection to people, organizations and funding the Network provides. Much thought went into organizing the innovative ideas on how the Network’s support could go even deeper and wider. Key leverage points emerged for the NGFN to focus effort to most effectively scale up good food across the country.
The strategic planning process will continue and the following three goals, which the Santa Fe meeting zeroed in on, will guide it:
Goal 1: There is abundant good (healthy, green, fair, affordable) food to meet demand at the regional level.
Goal 2: NGFN is the go to place for regional food systems stories, methods and outcomes.
Goal 3: Policy makers based policy decisions on results of the NGFN work that enact policies to further network goals.
To learn more or share thoughts, those interested in the NGFN strategic planning process, please e-mail us: contact@ngfn.org.
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NGFN Resource Highlight: Webinar Archive
Each third Thursday of the month at 3:30pm Eastern, the NGFN presents a webinar on a topic relevant to scaling up good food. The best-of-the-best practitioners candidly share their learning so that we may all be more successful in our efforts, wherever they may be. The next webinar, on Thursday, Febraru 18th at 3:30pm is all about Third-party Certification. Read more about this webinar at ngfn.org/webinars.
You may have missed a past webinar that is relevant to your work. We have archived each of our webinars so you can review them, or share them with others who may find them interesting. Here is just a sampling of our archive:
- Anthony Flaccavento, founder of the innovative Appalachian Sustainable Development, presented much of the inner workings of this operation. Find out why he bought trucks, how his large distribution center works, and how he thinks about backhauling. View the webinar.
- NGFN partner, National Farm to School, presented all about how their organization supports nascent and more established farm to school programs. An inspiring presentation from a Vermont farm to school program illustrates some of the wonderful potential of this program. View the webinar.
- According to USDA-ERS over 90% of the food that Americans consume at home is purchased at retail outlets. Hear three totally different takes on getting good food to retail customers, from the small, to the medium-sized to the very large. View the webinar.
- ... and more! View the whole list.
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Add your profile to the NGFN Database
Are you part of a food and farm initiative that more people should know about? Are you skilled or knowledgeable in an area of this work and ready to be part of it? Do you have some research to share? Then create your profile on ngfn.org to make sure your work shows up in the National Good Food Network's database of experts, organizations, and information. The database is just starting. Help it grow into the comprehensive clearinghouse we could all use!
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NGFN Media Outlets
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