Appalachian Staple Foods Collaborative Meeting Notes
Monday May 18, 2009 5:30-7:30 PM @ ACEnet
NEXT MEETING THURSDAY, JULY 9 6:30-LOCATION TBA
These notes are posted on Ohio Food Shed. Please join!

Attending—
Michelle Ajamian
Sarah Conley, Athens Farmers Market Manager
Larry Burmeister, OU Global Leadership, Rural Sociologist
Ronda Clark, Director Community Food Initiatives
Robin Stewart, Voinovich School of Leadership

Project Updates
GRANTS updates-
For starters, we thought we would model transparency and give you all a flow chart that shows our funding sources. Look at the attachment named ASFC flow chart along with the funding updates below.
SugarBush Foundation-
            Update:  -Collaboration of CFI, OU Mech. Eng., and Brandon/Michelle—
In case you didn’t know, we’ve been presenting to the SugarBush Foundation, an OU affiliated group that funds university departments and community partnerships. With CFI as a fiscal and program partner, we are working with OU Mechanical Engineering to fund student design work on appropriate scale threshing/seed-cleaning/de-hulling for the Appalachian region. This piece of the project also includes the coordination of participating farms and community/school gardens.
Next Step: Decision to be made in July.
Questions/Who’s involved? Brandon Jaeger (farmer), Ronda Clark (CFI), Greg Kremer (OU Mechanical Engineering Chair)

 Athens Foundation –
          Update:   -Through RA, we received $3,100, which will go to storage infrastructure
Next Step:
Questions/Who’s involved? Brandon Jaeger

Ohio Farm Bureau Foundation-
Update- Dale Arnold, the Director of the Ohio Farm Bureau Foundation, visited our farm on May 14. The Farm Bureau Foundation awarded our project $3000 through Rural Action to round out funding we received from the Stinner Foundation to create a demonstration processing for seed cleaning and milling this year.

SARE-
          Update:   -In late March we learned Brandon’s group farmer rancher proposal was funded $18,000 to work with other farmers (Kip Rondy and JB King) to grow larger plots of staple crops this and next season. SARE has invited us to present at the Small Farm Conference in Missouri in November.
Next Step: Planting this week at Kip’s and in the coming weeks at JB King’s
Questions/Who’s involved? Brandon Jaeger

CENTER FOR FARMLAND PRESERVATION & INNOVATION-
This grant funds Michelle to support for the formation of  The Athens Food Policy Council as a whole and a committee to research policy that can support using publicly owned and managed agricultural land within both the city limits and in the county to grow bean, grain, and seed staple crops, while promoting sustainable farming practices. Another component of the project is to assess what the costs would be to produce a high nutrition cereal at the regional food bank and distribute that cereal to families through a school backpack program. Michelle is working with OU interns on this project. The project was awarded $11,000 through the Center with $5000 of that coming from the ODA. Another $2500 is match money-half from the City of Athens and half from the Athens County Commissioners, with both bodies offering an equal amount in in-kind participation from the City and County Planners. Rural Action is the fiscal agency on this grant.
Next Step: Many—we are looking for involvement to read both the city and county comprehensive plans looking for opportunities to insert language about incentives to use public land for these crops as well as promoting a commitment to sustainable (i.e. organic) practices. We are working with Jared DeForrest on research about how organic does or does not impact well head protection areas. The study on the food bank will get underway in the summer and completed this fall.
Michelle, Sarah, and Rose will attend a meeting of food policy councils from around the state in Columbus at ODA on May 27.
Questions/Who’s involved? Michelle Ajamian heads this project and works with both the city and county planners, Rose Mary Roe and Tom Redfern from Rural Action, Quadia Mohammed, journalism student and Kim Criner, Environmental Studies grad student.

SOCIOLOGICAL INITIATIVES FOUNDATION GRANT
              This grant funds our work to look at the network for building a staple food system in the region by working with area farmers, buyers and nonprofit food system supporters.
Update:   A network survey is being developed with June Holley and after a few rounds of writing and testing the software; we have redesigned the survey into three parts–one for farmers & landowners, one for buyers & distributors, and one for food system supporters. We will send it to you soon, if you have not already completed it. Your answers will help us create a network map that can point us toward success in building the food system around beans, grains, and seed staples.
Next Step: We will complete the full survey first round by our July meeting, and revisit it next spring.
Questions/Who’s involved? Michelle leads this project and works with Rose (from Rural Action) Tom Redfern (Rural Action), June Holley (networkweaving.com), and Robin Stewart (Voinovich School). All members of AFSFC are advisors on how to move this piece forward.
Fitting into this work, we were glad to be invited to a small group meeting with Rich Pirog of the Leopold Center at ODA before his public presentation there about Leopold’s Communities of Practice work. We learned a great deal about how they brought farmers and buyers together to create a collaborative system and what makes collaboration a key factor for systems change. (See other attachments for charts on risk and gains of collaborations and a comparison of local food systems vs. the current system).
Next Step: Michelle is applying for an Honorarium to attend a two-day workshop at Leopold in July.

OTHER FUNDING-
We want to look into the Value-added Producer Grant Coming up. Is anyone in the collaborative interested in digging in with us?

FARMING THIS YEAR
Farm & Seed
         Update:  -Finally found viable, appropriate quantity of seed for Heirloom meal corn, Adzuki and Black Turtle bean.
Next Step: -Amaranth, millet, and beans to be planted at Green Edge this week, meal corn and beans to be planted at King Family Farm in the coming weeks.   
Questions/Who’s involved? Kip Rondy, (Green Edge Organic Farm), JB King (King Family Farm), Brandon Jaeger (Farmer), Bob O’Neil and Christine Hughes (buyers-Village Bakery), Michelle Wasserman (buyer-Casa Nueva and Cantina).

PROCESSING
Facility
Update:    -Look over the attached spread sheet and draft proposal to ACEnet-
          - We have a lead on an appropriate mill that may be self-contained, therefore dust-free, so we may be able to put it into a certified kitchen with no regulatory issues.
          - Most likely site for this year’s demo is ACEnet kitchen, with possibilities in Logan, the Plains, Nelsonville, Glouster, and Eclipse.
           - BIG ADVANCE! Rather than buying grain bins and finding a permanent home for them this year, we will be storing the crop in some combination of gravity wagons, and food grade tanks and barrels.
Next Step: Investigate the mill we have learned about; present proposal to ACEnet and other sites and make a decision in the next month.

Visit to Hance
    Update:  -Visit to Hance (Columbus-based makers of seed-cleaners and other small-scale machines, family owned since the 20s) Hance has offered a 20% discount on a seed cleaner, in support of this project.
    Next Step: Giving seed samples so that they put together the right screens for cleaning the crops we will be growing. Deciding on the correct model seedcleaner.
Questions/Who’s involved?

RESEARCH AND NETWORK UPDATES
1-Brandon and Michelle were invited to join the Central Appalachian Network conference on local food systems in Roanoke WV last month. We learned a great deal about other community solutions to marketing and distribution and discovered that no one else is doing a project to target organic and commodity farmers to grow beans, grains and seed.
1a-Out of that meeting, a regional group has formed having met only once there is not much to report yet.
Next Steps- Michelle will attend a mapping working group session on May 21. Leslie Miller will organize next meeting.
2. We connected Hance with our network which led to two exciting advances-first that Hance will be visited by Steve Bosserman and a design consultant for John Deere, who is beginning to look at how Deere can create machines that fit the needs of small-medium sized farms and two, Brandon will lead both men on a tour of several farm in our area to assess opportunities for John Deere to meet their needs on May 27.
3. Most exciting, most recent–a colleague who works for ATTRA sent us a link to a group in Oregon who are the only other farmers and collaborators we have found to be working on a similar system. We had a two-hour phone conversation with Harry McCormick on Sunday, May 17. He’s into his fourth season, so we have a lot to learn from him. The great part is the feeling that we all had in the conversation that there’s finally someone else, somewhere else we can compare notes with. Harry gave us the tip about the dust free mill, a variety of quinoa that did better than others, and ideas about storage; we told him about success with Amaranth, working with mechanical engineering, funding through SARE, and our up and coming demonstration mill.
As promised at the meeting, you will find their reports at Ohio Food Shed soon.

-Break & Food-15-

Being a Collaborative-10
Michelle presented several charts about  the benefits of being a collaborative. They are posted here.
Discussion-15
We discussed strategies for our group, including policy, marketing, outreach, and funding. We will look at ways to offer tastes of the unusual crops we are growing at the Market and continue to try to find good interns to help with policy and market research needs.
We also looked at the map that Voinovich School has created, which will be the subject of a meeting on Thursday at the Ridges. Sarah suggested that the map come to market to update data from vendors and allow folks to see what is going on in the region.

How Does the Collaborative Operate? 15
We made some decisions about our group---Please let us know what you think!
-How frequently do we meet?
___Once a month        
___Every six weeks    
___On an as-needed basis        
X _Other: Every two months

-Who meets?
    X _The whole group meets to discuss each project area
    ___Each project area has a committee that meets individually
    X _Each project area gets help from different council members as needed, ad hoc
X _Other ideas: Working groups can form around particular pieces of the project and meet as needed. Suggestions for working groups include—Food Policy as it connects to farming and processing bean, grain, and seed staple food crops and sustainable agricultural practices, Outreach to farmers and buyers, Marketing to gather information about the regional market opportunities (looking closely at potential buyers and distribution channels).

-What is the lifespan of this organization?
    ___As long as it takes to complete the project areas designated (finite)
    ___In perpetuity, with new issues to tackle over time (infinite)
    X _Other: It depends. Too early to say.

-How do we communicate?
    ___Meetings only
    ___Wiki site
    ___ Ning site
    X __Meetings and Wiki/Ning We will all join Ohio Food and use it as a way to keep in touch between meetings. Michelle will start a group on the site to which you will all be invited (Appalachian Staple Foods Collaborative)

-How do we keep record?
    ___Designate a minute-taker each meeting (rotating)
    ___Designate an official Secretary
    ___Digitally record meetings
    ___No records kept
    X _Other: Rose from Rural Action will be in charge of notes

-Should we recruit more participants?
    ___Yes, keep group open to new participants, no cap or commitment length
    X _Yes, but establish a commitment timetable (1 year, 2 years, etc)
We didn’t decide on the commitment timetable so we will take that up in July or through the Ning site.
    ___Other options:

NEXT MEETING – Public Event to Present Network Mapping First Round.
July 9-Thursday 6:30-8:30PM
Location TBA