These are our choices, but only when we share our voice.  Elected officials that don’t hear from us have to educate themselves and risk making decisions over short-sited spreadsheets that may be subscribing to development models that just don’t work anymore. We want them to believe that small is beautiful.  Let them hear from us. If we don’t take care of ourselves and our food and water supply, we will be forced to rely on larger, less invested outside interests. What would happen to us then?

Food starts conversations. It brings diverse people to table.  Its’ a security in a past life and an insecurity in our future if we don’t put our money where our small and medium-sized local family farms are. It’s too easy to drive 15 more minutes down the road and throw all of our food dollars to huge box stores and corporations that send it rapidly further downstream. What kind of future do we want to have?

We are at a critical tipping point and we must make our voices heard to ag-related planning boards and our county commissioners. Lynn Sprague got us outside the box, connecting people so we could empower ourselves.  He is one of the hardest working persons we’ve ever seen in a county position.

Let’s keep working hard and keep looking ahead.  Lets’ continue to support and ask for development funding for our diverse, clean, fair, small and medium-sized farmers.  We may not see thousands of jobs through agriculture as its developing now, but we will see hundreds more jobs in the beginning and we will see liberation: local, clean and fair food made more and more available to our community. Right here at home. That, we must always remember, is priceless.