Locally Grown Availability for April 9th, 2014

Hey Local Food Lovers,

Almost all the local food farmers in the North Georgia mountains got together last week for a small celebration of sorts. Starting two years and 3 months ago local farmers began having get-togethers at each others farms and discussing how we might all collaborate with one another. We called the group the Georgia Mountains Farmers Network (GMFN) and since then we’ve had 10 total get-togethers, hosted two weekend FARM TOURS, coordinated several bulk orders, and recently incorporated the group, formed a board of directors, adopted Locally Grown as a program, and wrote several grants to help us do things like expand the Locally Grown market to Gainesville

I mention all this because it really demonstrates the importance of building a community as part of the effort to eat local food. This community of farmers has exchanged a ton of information with one another, helped made contacts across a much broader region than we might have otherwise interacted easily, and created a ton of new opportunities, everything from purchasing shared equipment, to co-marketing our whole region as a hotspot for local food production.

I’d say right now we are on the very earliest edges of a local food movement, but many of these early efforts will insure that “farmers have a voice” in how local food and farming is developed in the years ahead. That’s important, as our conventional food system has pretty well eliminated the relationships between food, farms, farmers, and communities.

To celebrate these humble efforts the GMFN shared a meal together at Jamie Allred’s new restaurant in Clayton called FORTIFY. For the last couple of years or more, Jamie has been the single biggest buyer of local food in our whole region, creating the Featured Farmer Thursdays at Lake Rabun Hotel and Restaurant and now at his very own restaurant. It was quite a thrill to all sit together and enjoy a meal with corn meal from Sylvan Falls Mill, tatsoi from Mill Gap Farm, beef from Chattooga Belle Farms, microgreens from Trillium Farms, and a long list of items from farmers all sitting right there in the room together. There were 50 seats taken, and I’d dare to say this was likely the biggest gathering of local food farmers we’ve had in our region to date.

FORTIFY is now open for business, and it will be a business that supports local food farmers for a long time to come, and makes us local food eaters very very happy. Head on over and try it out! But you may want to make reservations as we expect they’ll be very popular for the next many weeks. Here’s a link

http://www.chefjamieallred.com/fortify-1.html

Even though the GMFN is a network of farmers, we’re also a community group that wants to make local foods a growing part of our North Georgia identity. To do that we need as much help from customers, educators, businesses, volunteers, and others who’d like to see the same thing. Last year we had over 30 volunteers for our Georgia Mountains Farm Tour. A few years ago a bunch of UGA students came up for the weekend and visited 4 farms, two each day. After an hour or more tour and talk they put in an hour or more of work on the farm. That was a mightily appreciated day for those participating farms, as you can accomplish a lot with 6-8 hands on a project, especially in late June when the weeds are trying to win.

In other words, there are a dozen ways for folks to participate in this rising tide. The Green Way and Old School Gardens in Clarkesville and Clayton is a great way to develop your own gardening talents. I just spent 3 hours yesterday transplanting asparagus crowns and raspberries and I find such efforts to be the most relaxing and fulfilling kind of work there is. I enjoy the rough dark callouses on my hands after they’ve been in the dirt or on the shovel for a a few days.

In addition to gardening, cooking, eating at local food restaurants there are the following options: write a little story for the local paper about your experience with local food, farms, cooking, gardening; pick your favorite farm and offer to organize a “crop mob” otherwise known as a volunteer work day for them sometime this summer. Even if it’s only 5 people with reasonably strong backs for about 2 hours, I guarantee most farms will love you forever. Post photos of all your local food meals to your facebook and steer people to Locally Grown or our other local markets. Educate people on local food, where to find it and how to prepare it. I bet many of you have ideas of other ways you can get involved that I can’t even imagine. If you’re artistic, help us design a new logo, or do a cool little sketch of some of our farm characters or some aspect of their farm. Develop a cool map of our area showing all the local food hotspots. Find 5 or 10 businesses that would sponsor this years FARM TOUR. Help us design farm tour SIGNS for each location that will stand out and won’t cost us too much money. We’d love to have you involved because each contribution adds character and charm to our efforts. Who knows it may even make the food taste better.

Speaking of that, we’ve got a lot of delicious food this week. We’re almost back up to 200 items listed this week. And more diversity is coming.

SO…..EAT WELL,

Justin in Habersham
and
Chuck in Rabun

Well that’s some good ramblings for the week on local food.