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The Future of Food in the Fort

An Interview with Linda Hoffman and a look at the Northern Colorado Regional Food System Assessment.
Written by Charlie Malone
Thursday, 4 November 2010

“The food system is like any other system — it has a lot of parts. A Northern Colorado Regional Food System Assessment looks at the various components of the food system and determines where it is working well and which parts need strengthening.”
— Larimer County Food System Assessment
FoodAssessment

From a purely practical standpoint, I can’t think of anything more worth the time and effort to understand than our food system. We’re talking about the very thing that props up our communities, fuels our day to day lives, and makes our modern existence possible for better and worse. Yet the scope of our food system, or even the conception of it from production, processing, distribution, through marketing, consumption and it’s roll in public health can be hard to grasp. The Northern Colorado Regional Food System Assessment gives us a chance to make sense of all this for the first time.

The assessment is a ground-breaking and massive effort to make all of this comprehensible. Specifically, the project wants to know how our food system shapes our health, the quality of our lives, and our economic development. Gaps in the system are economic opportunities that will strengthen our local food security and limits to the sustainability and growth of communities in Northern Colorado.

To understand the overall importance of this project, look at how a lack of access to healthy foods has shaped the American physique over the last generation; look at countries where food shortages are not uncommon; look at the wheat crop failures across central Asia, or at historical fruit crop failures in California and Florida and their effect on local economies. What would a serious livestock disease, or a hail-battered growing season do to food prices and food access? The point here isn’t to cause a food panic with concerned citizens storming corn cribs, but to highlight the importance of understanding this system.

To help with sorting through all the information being presented at public meetings and available on the website, Matter Daily interviewed Linda Hoffman, the Director of Larimer County’s Planning and Building Division. Here’s that interview:

Charlie Malone: What did it take to put all of this information together? How many organizations, how many people had a hand in this assessment?

Linda Hoffman: Three counties, CSU and two other agencies are involved in the study. Each county appointed a citizen's committee to oversee the effort. These are called Project Advisory Committee. Each one has around 20 people because the food system is so diverse, that many are needed to represent all elements within the system. Total meeting attendance at the various public meetings and open houses the study has hosted is over 200. The project webpage now has over 10,000 hits.

CM: Having access to this kind of information is very empowering. What do you hope citizens--everyday people--take away from this?

LH: The first step in any effort to improve an infrastructure system is to understand what it is and how it works. The food system, despite how critical it is to our quality of life, is not even really recognized as a system. This study is highlighting how land use, agriculture, water availability, food safety regulations, nutrition and public health all are part of the same system. People from different parts of that system have come together through the study and connected in new ways. The conclusions from the assessment will point the way forward to a more robust food system.

CM: Some of these statistics and facts can be interpreted in multiple ways. For example, I look at a 27% increase in market value of products grown in the area and I think, “great, the farmers are making more money” and then I wonder, “or is food getting seriously more expensive?” How can we keep these figures in perspective and not miss some of their importance?

LH: Your question points out one of the reasons we have tried to be as thorough as possible in our data gathering efforts. It's a little like the story of the blind men and the elephant, if you only look at one element of the food system, you'll miss the main point. To your point regarding the relationship between farm revenues and food prices, we found that between 1990 and 2006, the percentage share of the cost of food that goes to farms has decreased from about 23% to less than 20%. We need to find creative ways to keep farmers farming and create more financial incentive for them to stay in agriculture.

CM: What do you make of some of the trends the assessment captures such as having more, smaller farms, or the age of farm operators, and number of new farmers?

LH: These regional trends mimic national trends. The agricultural land base is owned by a generation that is phasing out of farming. New farmers are coming on line. Many new farmers cannot afford the capital cost of entry at a commodity scale which means more farms are smaller, part-time ventures. As new agricultural models such as community supported agriculture (CSA) gain popularity, I believe we'll see these trends continue.

CM: What specifically about Larimer County catches your attention when you look at all this information? (What few pieces of information do you really want people to pay attention to?)

LH: Larimer County is in the middle of the region in almost every way. Obviously, we're geographically in the middle between Boulder and Weld County, but we're also in the middle in terms of agricultural production, consumer spending on food, and food security challenges. Larimer County has a balance that creates both opportunity and challenge. Interest in healthy, high quality, local food is growing. We still have a vibrant food and agriculture industry here. But that industry is under stress. We have an opportunity to make decisions and investments that will strengthen the food system. Our challenge will be to keep balance in the system so that we keep all the links strong from agriculture inputs (such as labor, land and water), to farm production, to food processing, to consumer choices.

CM: What is happening to the land that is going out of production? Do you have any concerns about this?

LH: I suspect that some of the land that shows as going out of production was never there in that the data we're using comes from the County Assessor's office. They have been working on a project to field proof the land that has been assessed as agricultural. They are finding property that was sub-divided and taken out of agricultural production long ago and corrected their records. That drives the numbers down. Still, that explains only a portion of the decrease. Often residential growth can result in a loss of agricultural land. Larimer County is working to counteract that using programs like the Rural Land Use process, conservation developments, and leasing of Open Lands publicly owned properties. The community will need to decide if we should be doing more.

CM: In the US, in this day and age, a lot of us have been comfortable for a long time, a lot of people might not understand how important our food system is, so how do we talk about the dangers of food insecurity of lack of access?

LH: Some of the numbers we found were staggering. For example, in Weld County nearly 1/2 the students in public school qualify for free and reduced meal programs. In Boulder and Larimer County, it's nearly 1/4. When food insecurity reaches these levels, there are certain to be impacts on the community as a whole.

CM: There seems to be a gap between values and behavior. According to the 06 and 08 CSU surveys, 44% of people say locally grown produce is moderately important and 35% value it at great importance. Similarly 37 and 44% want to purchase local produce to maintain local farmland. Yet, 82.9% of our produce purchases come from Supermarkets and predominantly non-local sources. What do you make of this?

LH: I think it means people want to buy locally but something is getting in their way. We're currently doing an electronic survey that asks specifically that question. I'll be interested to see what the results are. It will certainly be important to learn if it's an access issue, or a pricing issue, or something else. Once we know, we can start to fix it.

From here the Citizen Advisory Teams are synthesizing public feedback and the Assessment partners are drafting the final report due this winter. As the participating counties, along with Colorado State University and Extension and the Fort Collins DDA, get the final report it has the potential to shape public policy and land use in significant ways. Just having this information collected and in the public domain empowers us to ask for change and make better decisions.

Part of the problem seems to be our own laziness, we’re suckers for convenience. The Food Assessment clearly shows us the importance of supporting locally grown meat and produce. It also shows that we do a poor job of supporting local food production. Hopefully, the final report and additional surveys will give policy makers, local producers, and creative distributors the tools to close the gaps in food our system.