Community FarmShare Helps Address the Local Food Procurement Challenge
By Lara Fu
If you were to visualize our national food growing and distribution system as a spider’ s web, you might imagine a perfect orb web: symmetrical, orderly, efficient. But the real system is far more complex, like a hybrid of an orb web and a tangle web. The dominant national and international producers and distributors form the long, central threads, while the countless small farms, farmers markets, co‐ops, and you— the local shopper— create the dense, three‐dimensional cobweb that surrounds and supports it.
The industrial“ orb” system is efficient by design, but that simplicity makes it fragile. Local food systems, like tangle webs, gain resilience from their complexity: many strands, many connections, many ways to absorb and adapt to disruption.
When Montgomery County became the first jurisdiction to join the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments( COG) Local Food Procurement Challenge, small-scale local farms in and around the Agricultural Reserve realized this could be a unique opportunity to benefit from intentional political will to support local food production. Recognizing the vital importance of all farms in the region, the Chair of the COG FARM Committee, Councilmember
Andrew Friedson, who initiated the Challenge, said,“[ This Challenge ] is about resiliency in the face of a rapidly changing and uncertain world when it comes to food, when it comes to agriculture, and when it comes to our broader economy”.
The Challenge is designed to both strengthen the tangled web of local food producers as well as weave those strands together with the broader regional stakeholders to foster food system resilience and achieve the four goals of the Challenge outlined below. While one aspect of the Challenge focuses on facilitating procurement efforts for larger institutions, another aspect of the Challenge is the role that hyper-local small farms play in the local food system, particularly relating to addressing nutrition insecurity.
Big Challenges Affecting Small Farms in the County
In Montgomery County, there are about 50 table-crop food producers, with very few producing on over 10 acres. These small-scale farmers are the face of resilience in action: passionate about growing food for all— food that is highly nutritious and tastes better than anything in the grocery store— and yet these farms face incredible challenges.
The current industrial food system is not set up to help small farms grow and thrive. Small farms that invest in regenerative practices have little chance of competing on price against“ Big Ag”, which is supported by large-scale subsidies and externalizes environmental costs of pollution and soil degradation.
The barriers to entry are even higher when taking into account the cost of land and labor in Montgomery County. While small farms often face challenges accessing institutional sales due to lack of larger acreage; significant investments needed in irrigation systems; field equipment; labor, packing and processing equipment; and cold storage, small farms are integral to so many other sales channels that bring their good food from farm to fork. Addressing these challenges requires support from both effective policy decisions and grassroots organizations who are“ doers”.
Six years ago, one“ doer” nonprofit, Community FarmShare( CFS), was founded with a simple but powerful conviction: local small‐scale farms are essential to a healthy food system, and nutrient‐dense local produce is essential to community health— particularly for low-income residents lacking access to that fresh, local food. CFS’ s story is shaped by the paths of small farms, by community connections through schools and healthcare partners, and by each family who shopped at a Mobile Farm Market near their home, picked up a local peach, a crisp cucumber, a forest-green head of broccoli, and smiled.“ While small farms face many formidable challenges, our‘ M. O.’ involves sitting down with farmers
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