mangrumsNet

I found a lot of good sense in this article at the Idaho Statesman.  The Treasure Valley has a history in agriculture.  That industry is shown to be shrinking.  There are roughly 700,000 people who live in this area and $2 billion a year is spent on food or food production that comes from somewhere else.  Over $1 billion of that is food that is eaten at home.  If we bought locally instead, that has the potential to infuse the local economy with hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

A region built on deep agricultural roots is sending $2 billion a year outside the area for food and food production costs.

That's money that could turn the economy around if it were spent here at home, said Ken Meter of the Crossroads Resource Center in Minneapolis, who put together a report on the local food economy.

Meter found that if Valley families purchased from local farmers just 15 percent of the food they eat at home, it could produce $165 million of new local farm income.

The $2 billion loss is more than the value of all the commodities produced in a nine-country swath of southwestern Idaho and southeastern Oregon, a region the size of Indiana, Meter found.

"This is a substantial loss that you endure," Meter told about 100 people gathered at a recent public meeting in Boise to discuss the report and the state of agriculture in the region. "You can't outsource a local food economy ... as long as consumers are loyal to it."

Meter has studied 50 regions in 22 states and one Canadian province.

The purpose of the report, paid for by the nonprofit Treasure Valley Food Coalition, was to look at the local food economy from the level of community, not just the number of farms or acreage, he said.

"We need good data to make good decisions," said Nampa farmer Janie Burns, local food chair of Sustainable Community Connections of Idaho. She called the Valley's current food economy "a dismal, dysfunctional system."

The global commodity market doesn't care how many farms the Treasure Valley has, Meter said.

Since 2002, farmland has decreased 14 percent in Ada County and 4 percent in Canyon County, the report shows.

More than $1.7 billion is spent on food from outside the area by the region's nearly 700,000 residents, the report found. About $1.1 billion of that is spent on food to eat at home. The rest of the total $2 billion lost each year goes to the "inputs" that farmers have to purchase from elsewhere - like petroleum, fertilizers, seeds, feed and migrant labor.

Read the whole story