Related to the previous post , SOYMB finds details of the US state of Minnesota.
Question: What’s the current situation – how much of our food is produced by local farmers?
David Abazs: Our UMD research team, Stacey Stark, David Syring and myself, identified eight counties in northeast Minnesota and seven counties of northwestern Wisconsin as our local Western Lake Superior Region. About 7 percent of the food we consume in this region is locally produced. Most of that is the milk produced and consumed in the region. The other 93 percent of the food is imported into our region.
Question: How much local food production is possible for the region?
David Abazs: About 83 percent of our current diet can be grown in our region. Our research team designed a new, healthy diet that would address some of our concerns with obesity and diet-related diseases that could also be grown 100-percent in our region. The new diet would require 350,000 acres of farmland and over 7,000 new farmers in our region, in addition to the 5,602 that are currently in the region. We have 1.69 million acres of land (about 10 percent of the total land area) that is suitable to grow crops and livestock.
As someone who lived in Duluth (where UMD is) for five years, I know that it is remarkably hard to find fresh, local food in the area. There are a few places to find it, but you have to be prepared to spend more money to buy it and a lot more time to find it. It is even worse in the small wisconsin FARMING community that I grew up in, you see farms every time you drive anywhere but at the store everything has been prepackaged, highly processed and been shipped from far away.
ReplyDeletePeople need to take responsibility for finding wholesome, local food but (as I am sure you know) it frequently just isn't available.
You would think that a push for locally grown organic food would be huge, it would improve health AND create jobs. Ugh, its frustrating.