No Title 2212
Supplement to “Strategies for Sustainable Farming”
HOOK ME UP
Anyone interested in buying or selling local food—farmers looking for customers, restaurants looking for local cheese—should check out the Kentucky area of the MarketMaker database at www.marketmakerky.com, which is, as its home page says, “An interactive mapping system that locates businesses and markets of agricultural products in Kentucky, providing an important link between producers and consumers.”
Its tabs allow users to search for businesses, to find a fruit and vegetable market in Winchester, or for market characteristics, for example, the average expenditures on seafood in Bath County.
UK’s Lee Meyer notes that the database contains demographic data that can, for example, identify Mexican restaurants in an area—valuable information for, say, a farmer raising goats for meat.
KEY SUSTAINABILITY CONSIDERATIONS
The National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, which is managed by the National Center for Appropriate Technology and funded under a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture’s Rural Business-Cooperative Service, outlines the themes or principles to consider for sustainable farming:
- Know your markets
- Protect your profits
- Add value to your products
- Build soil structure and fertility
- Protect water quality on and beyond the farm
- Manage pests ecologically and use minimal pesticides
- Maximize biodiversity on the farm
Go online to www.attra.ncat.org for a detailed listing of considerations under each theme and for a wealth of other sustainability agriculture information through ATTRA publications.
The ATTRA Project (Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Area) is the only federally funded entity charged with developing and delivering sustainable agriculture information. Two other groups that do similar work are the Alternative Farming Systems Information Center (AFSIC), a part of the National Agriculture Library, and the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN), a part of the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program.
To read the Kentucky Living January 2010 feature that goes along with this supplement, go to Strategies for Sustainable Farming
