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Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Okay, guys,
I think we're going to start.
Welcome to a forum in which we're going to talk about Know
Your Farmer, Know Your Food.
Secretary Vilsack and I have been going around the country,
and we like to say not every family needs an accountant,
not every family needs a lawyer, apologies to my husband who
is one, but every family needs a farmer.
And then we like to add on the tag line, do you know yours.
We had a very exciting week last week.
We released the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food compass,
a geospatial mapping tool.
And Jon Carson, who is here in the White House working with the
President, heads up our Office of Public Engagement,
is here with me, and we want to talk about the tools that we
released, and all that you can do to find out more about ways
USDA and the government as a whole can help you in the work
that you're doing to build local regional food systems.
So I have some ground rules first.
I'm supposed to say.
Usually when you start these things,
you can say turn off your cell phones.
In this case, don't.
I mean, this is really supposed to be, you know, your phones,
whatever your electronic devices are, we're tweeting,
we're tweeting all over the place.
You can post pictures, live blog, using the hashtag,
hashtag KYF2.
Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food, KYF KYF, KYF2.
If you're watching online and you don't have a Twitter
account, we still want to hear from you.
Send our team email at knowyourfarmer@USDA.gov.
Know your farmer being no spaces in between those words.
If you're in the room, and we're going to have conversations,
we will get you to a microphone when speaking,
and when we call on you, tell us who you represent, if anyone.
And we have seven different themes that we have in the Know
Your Farmer compass, and we'll go through those sequentially as
they appear on our website.
But we can take breaks and talk about whatever the
room wants to talk about.
Today's video feed will be available later on on
YouTube.com/whitehouse.
So those are my -- those are my marching orders, Jon.
But I just want to say that things are really,
really exciting.
We introduced the Know Your Farmer,
Know Your Food compass via live webcast.
Secretary Vilsack and I are plowing new ground doing that.
We didn't know how it worked, but we had about 3,
200 people watch us live, and now it's going to be on YouTube
so people can get that introductory tool to the
compass any time they want.
We've had probably over 14,000 people actually dig deep into
the compass document in the geospatial map,
and we just released it on Wednesday afternoon last week.
So I think that people are finding it of value.
And what I'd like to do is talk a little bit about it.
But first, I want to say that you and I
have something in common.
Director Jon Carson: Yeah.
Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan: Yeah. You grew up on a farm?
Director Jon Carson: I did.
Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan: And I grew up in a
farming community.
Now, my dad, he was a schoolteacher,
we were not on the farm, but on the weekends, he in the summer,
he worked at Agway, he sold farmer supplies.
So it was part of my family income.
Grew up next door to a farm, a farm that eventually gave way
to commercial development, which was really sad.
But at a certain point I did know my farmer,
his name was Mr. Roberts.
And you grew up on a farm, so we're connected because --
Director Jon Carson: Yes.
Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan: -- we were both really
close to the land.
Director Jon Carson: I did know my farmer, Kathleen, he was my grandfather.
Just this last summer, my parents got to go to the
Wisconsin State Fair where they received a plaque for the farm
being in the family for 100 years.
And I keep a picture of that farm on my desk
here in the White House.
So I just really want to thank the Deputy Secretary for putting
this together for the folks who are in the room.
We -- and those of you watching on whitehouse.gov/live.
We do a lot of different events here, but this one,
for the reasons we just talked about,
is so exciting to me personally.
And it's also an issue that we need everyone's help
getting the word out about.
As you said, we deal with a lot of different issues here at the
White House, some are interesting to people,
some have very niche categories, but everyone cares about this.
Everyone, if they don't know their farmer,
they should know their farmer.
And I also think this is just such an incredibly exciting
example of how government works best.
Government being a partner with businesses,
government being -- the federal government partner with local
governments, and really highlighting and making concrete
what this is all about.
I, having grown up on a farm, the first paycheck I ever got
was for baling hay at my neighbor's farm.
My grandpa didn't pay me, that came with being in the family.
And to this day here living in D.C., I do
know my farmer now as well.
We're part of a local -- a local food organization that our
milk is actually delivered.
I got to take my 3-year-old and my 1-year-old to South Mountain
Creamery to see where that milk comes from.
So the support that USDA is giving to these efforts across
the country is fantastic.
Should we take a look at the map?
Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan: Yeah, let's take a look.
So first I want to tell people what's right behind me is
the website for the Know Your Farmer,
Know Your Food compass document and geospatial map.
You got a little opening video there where, among other things,
I was at Butler's Orchards, and we'll talk
about that momentarily.
And then you'll see the whole compass guide.
On the left, that navigation tool,
you'll see the different themes that we'll talk about in the
course of this hour-and-a-half meeting that we're having.
Really these are great documents,
they are full of case studies, proof points,
and they're going to be regularly refreshed.
So don't think if you look at this document it's
an one-time look-see.
Intentionally we didn't print out any copies.
We downloaded a few copies for the Hill,
they wanted a traditional report for Congressional members,
but this is meant to be an electronic document that will
constantly be repopulated as new stories come our way.
So I do want people to realize this is a continuing
resource for you all.
So we'll talk about the compass, and it's been a work of the Know
Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative which is an
USDA-wide task force.
Every agency and major state staff office is involved.
So it's had many, many hands, but it's very lush visually,
it's very beautiful.
I think people will enjoy reading it.
And there are tons of hyperlinks embedded in the document,
so it brings you to various studies that are relevant,
resource guides.
There's a lot of richness to it, so people should take the time.
But what I'd like to do, Jon --
Director Jon Carson: Yes.
Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan: -- is actually go over
to the geospatial map, if my crack staff pulls this off.
And I understand you're from Wisconsin.
Director Jon Carson: Yeah.
Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan: And we'd like to see
where you're from.
Director Jon Carson: Right there.
And I believe the Westby Co-op Creamery is part of the Know
Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative.
That's cheese curds in Wisconsin, by the way.
Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan: A little advertisement
I suppose.
So this is the geospatial map if people haven't seen it.
What you do is you can go right to your county,
I've spent a lot of time in Massachusetts where I am,
and you can see the dots in the map are various kinds
of USDA investments.
I just want -- Amanda, if you slow down there.
See, it says 3 of 3, you can go back.
Go back here.
And so I want people to realize that you need to sometimes go
through, if you hit that point and one slide comes up,
you need to pay attention to that number in the corner,
because there might be multiple things on that dot.
So this is telling us about Seasonal High Tunnels,
how many investments at that Zip code.
And you wanted us to go down to another one, though.
Okay, we'll go down to another one.
Jon, where is your dot that you wanted us to see?
Director Jon Carson: This one right here.
Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan: That blue one there?
No, one more down.
Director Jon Carson: One more down.
Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan: There we go.
Director Jon Carson: A little further down I think. Or maybe it's the next one.
Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan: It might be the next slide.
There it is.
Director Jon Carson: There we are. The Westby Co-op Creamery.
So with what did they receive?
Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan: All right.
If we go down, we scroll down, we receive -- they received a
$300,000 value added producer grant from the Rural Business
Service, which is part of our Rural Development Mission area,
and this helped them to put in some infrastructure.
And if go back up a little bit, that's the end of that scroll,
right?
Yeah.
If you hit more information, what do we hit, guys?
We hit that hyperlink.
Okay. You go right to the place.
So these hyperlinks, when you go to the map and it says more
information, if that place actually has a website and we're
able to find it, it will bring you there and you can find out
more information on your own.
In some cases, it will bring you back to the USDA program where
the funding was received.
In all cases, you can also go to the Know Your Farmer,
Know Your Food blog, which you also see in that navigational
plane when you engage that website for the first time.
And on the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food blog,
under resources, and actually on the navigation plane, too,
where it says -- where is it?
There you go.
Grants, loans and other resources,
that's a -- that will bring you to a lot of hyperlinks that will
talk about what USDA programs are available for help in
local regional, and give you some ideas about how
they've been used before.
Director Jon Carson: And I would just like to take this moment to encourage
everyone here in the room with us today,
everyone following on whitehouse.gov/live,
anyone joining us via Twitter, help us tell this story through
your personal connection.
Following what's happening where I grew up in Western Wisconsin,
an area that really saw the devastation of the farm crisis
in the early 1980's, and seeing what this approach to
agriculture has meant to the local economy.
Organic Valley is now the number one employer in the
county where I grew up.
The whole notion of organic farming sustainable the local
food movement not really being something we ever even discussed
in the early, early '80's when the farm crisis was hitting.
So I'm going to take these links, take this story,
take the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food website,
and spread it to out to the circles of people that I
interact with, whether they're interested in these issues or
not, and really encourage each and every one of you,
find that local story that connects to you and
help spread the word.
Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan: Now, one of the questions
that the Secretary and I got on the webcast,
we didn't get to all the questions,
they were coming in fast and furious, was from Bob Pursell,
the question was, are only USDA participants
listed in this compass.
Currently the answer is yes.
So what this first generation of the map does,
and Stephen Lowe is with me who is our head geospatial
information officer at USDA, and he and his team did a marvelous
job on this, what this shows is USDA investments.
So all of these dots or in the shading,
the density shading where we're talking about EBT capacity at
our farmers' markets, those investments,
or if we're talking about seasonal high tunnels,
which is also you can see by density shading,
those are all -- USDA has had a real role in it.
But that's the first iteration of the map.
We expect that we will soon get to phase two.
Phase two of the map, we plan on embedding these investments in
some USDA data sets we have.
So for example, we have a farmers' market directory,
and we have over 7,000 farmers' markets,
people volunteer the information,
we have that database.
Well, some of those USDA had a role in, many more we did not.
But wouldn't it be nice if you're interested in a local
regional to have that context for the USDA investments.
So we have many, many data layers that we plan on putting
on in the second phase of the map.
We have a team working together talking about what
those layers should be.
We have -- come with a final vetting.
But we'd like to see that.
And Stephen is all nervous, I'm going to say a date.
It would be a month that begins with the letter M,
and it's not March, would be our hope.
So people see what the context is.
And then later on, to go to Bob Pursell's question,
can producers update their own pages or will USDA.
Well, of course, if you have been the beneficiary of USDA
help and your website is there for more info,
you can always update your website.
But in terms of actually putting yourself in different ways on
the map, we haven't crossed that bridge yet.
So --
Director Jon Carson: Well, and just one final
point I want to make sure to mention is how
excited the President himself, the First Lady and the whole
team here at the White House is about Know Your Farmer,
Know Your Food.
The President made sure there was a quote for the report,
which is I think on the front page of the website.
And of course, here at the White House,
we also know our farmer as well with the First Lady's vegetable
garden that she's put on the South Lawn,
oftentimes when reading at the White House Mess,
they'll make sure to mention that some of those greens or the
vegetables of the day came straight from the First Lady's
garden, which I think has really had an impact on us here and
helped her inspire others to be a part of this.
I know our White House chef, Sam Kass, feels the same way.
So we'll all be anxiously checking for updates as well.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Great.
All right, well, Jon, if you don't mind,
let's go through some of the themes and the documents.
So the first thing that you -- after we sort of lay out the
case, why should you care about local foods, you know,
what does it mean for farmland preservation,
particularly with 40% of our farmers now in metro counties,
it is a very important way that you maintain farmland.
Why is it important in terms of job creation,
we have some studies from our economic research
service that we cite.
Why is it important to get healthy food access
(Inaudible)
We have the basic opening salvo
that sort of describes why local foods, why does it matter.
But then we go into specific themes.
And the first one is infrastructure.
And we've had 54% growth between 2008 and 2011 in farmers'
markets, and a lot of us cite that statistic,
but it's much more than farmers' markets.
When we're talking local regional food,
the Secretary always likes to say, someone needs to grow it,
someone needs to process it, package it, transport it,
market it, sell it at retail, and all of this can contribute
to a local economy.
But it is resource challenging.
We've got a lot of different programs,
farmers' market promotion program,
food hub program that we're working on,
a lot of effort at USDA to help farmers build cooperatives,
which can be a really important strategy.
In the report we talk about some of our investments in commercial
kitchens, which can help small guys who don't quite have the
capacity to do their own commercial-scale kitchen
to use and share equipment.
There's a great example in Nevada,
I went to Nevada once and said Nevada, but you don't do that,
you say Nevada.
The whole audience hissed at me, it was really something.
Nevada where a rural community economic corporation got money
to purchase two trucks through our RBEG program in rural
development.
And sometimes there will be things in the report where
it's not USDA actually being a funder,
but where we're a customer.
The Virginia food hub, the food hub in Virginia in
Charlottesville, we're a customer,
we buy some of their food in our USDA cafeteria.
So there's a lot of great things for people to look at.
I would say that the Value Added Producer Grant program
is a really great tool.
We have a big food hub piece of work that's going
to be released next week.
Again, keep going to the website and to the compass,
because this is -- this is an evolving document.
But I really wanted to call on, if she's here, Amanda Oborne.
Is Amanda here from Ecotrust?
Okay.
And Amanda, I don't know where the mic is,
how this is going to work.
Who is going to -- do we have a mobile -- do you have a mobile
mic -- it's -- okay.
Someone had to pioneer here.
Okay, there's one on each side.
Amanda, I just wanted to know a little bit about what, you know,
in terms of your expertise, you're in Oregon with Ecotrust,
knowing the work that you've done,
and you got this big food hub effort,
tell us a little bit about it, a couple minutes,
and tell us what you think some of the key challenges are that
USDA can help -- help people with.
Amanda Oborne: Absolutely.
Thank you so much for the invitation to participate today,
I'm thrilled to be here.
I work for Ecotrust, which is a nonprofit based in Portland,
and we have a project called Food Hub that I manage.
That's capital F, capital H.
Not to be confused with food hubs generally.
It's basically a virtual food hub, but,
according to the USDA's definition.
And it's a tool where chefs, restaurateurs,
school food service directors or hospital school -- or hospital
food service directors can get online and find producers,
farmers, ranchers, fishermen, dairies in their area and
make contact directly.
So the biggest challenge that we've found in building up Food
Hub across the six states in the northwest that we cover is
distribution and infrastructure.
So I'm really glad to hear that that's one of the main focuses
on the department right now.
So we help buyers and sellers find each other and connect and
do business, but those buyers and sellers still need to work
out their own distribution system between the two of them.
So our hope is that as we look at collaborating with other
innovators across the country, that we'll be able to develop a
distribution system that supports the Food Hub network.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: So let me ask you,
we've had one of the subcommittees, so to speak,
other Know Your Farmer task forces been on food hubs,
I know we have a website now in the AG marketing service
specifically for food hubs, hopefully they've been
talking with you.
Amanda Oborne: Yes, it's -- I think we're getting to know each
other and finding all the different innovations that are
going on around the country.
So yeah, I'm excited about that.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: For those of you --
thank you very much.
For those of you who may not be totally familiar with food hubs,
the older version may be market terminals.
We also have a really important study underway at market
terminals across the country trying to figure out where
capacity may be for people who want to find a place where they
can aggregate product, process it, do some light processing,
get it into the scale, the size that institutional buyers need.
And so that's part of our work.
And we've had a team really working very, very *** that.
I don't know if that's come across in any of your
conversations, Jon, about infrastructure needs,
but it's big for us.
Director Jon Carson: Well, one thing when it comes to the
approach that you're taking, we're talking to a lot of other
agencies who have -- who purchase food across the country
to make sure as often as possible they are part of these
solutions as well.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Great.
Also I know I have Nancy Creamer here.
Nancy, you've been involved with the 10% Campaign
in North Carolina.
So tell us a little bit about, from where you sit,
what the challenges are in infrastructure and what's going
on in North Carolina.
Nancy Creamer: Yeah.
I'm with the Center for Environmental Farming Systems,
and we're a collaborative between North Carolina State
University -- North Carolina
(Inaudible)
university and the Department of AG.
The 10% Campaign is asking individuals and businesses to
pledge 10% of their food dollars to local food,
which would mean $3.5 billion to the state's economy.
So we have big businesses, universities,
county governments all signing up for that.
And USDA has been instrumental in -- they didn't fund that
program, but they're funding all the work that's going around
that to develop the infrastructure and
those kinds of things.
We have a beginner farmer's grant that is working to develop
a network of incubator farms with county governments,
a new farmers' market promotion program grant to increase food
access, and an AFRI
grant pending to work on the infrastructure in particular.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Thanks.
I have a 10% campaign T-shirt, I believe,
that I sport around in the gym.
I hope I don't do discredit to your great cause there when I'm
wearing it, I'm trying to work that treadmill.
Nancy Creamer: Yeah, cooperative extension is a big
part of that campaign, and they have designated a local food
coordinator in every county in the State of North Carolina
is working on it.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Well, great.
Well, we'll with get you back up here, Nancy.
I want to remind people that you can ask questions
via hashtag KYF2.
I'm going to take a couple of questions on infrastructure
after I tell one tale of one of my favorite projects.
So, Jon, I'm from Western Massachusetts,
right near the Vermont border, so I'm as close to Brattleboro,
Vermont as I am to -- well, that's the big city
where I'm from.
And, anyhow, I was really excited that the Brattleboro
food co-op, which is a $17 million business,
it's not a little tiny co-op, they already support 142
farmers, they got a business and industry loan guarantee,
they are constructing a huge building right on the corner,
the foot of Main Street down from Sam's Army and Navy where
my family buys a lot of stuff, and it's beautiful,
and it's going to mean many more retail opportunities
for local farmers.
So that's an opportunity, business industry loan
guarantee, which Congressional folk in the 2008 farm bill put
a 5% set aside in for local and regional food.
So we've so far only achieved about 2% spend out on that
program for local regional.
We need to get up to 5%, so we need some more demand.
Director Jon Carson: These are definitely some of the best
success stories that we're seeing in small town and rural
America across the country, and would encourage folks following
along online, send us those stories just like the Deputy
Secretary did, and we'll help post them on obviously the Know
Your Farmer, Know Your Food web page and the whitehouse.gov
blog as well.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Okay.
So now I'm going to -- oh.
So anyhow, okay, I'll blush and I'll be a fan.
So a little bit before we started this at Jason Mraz,
Jason Mraz said, I'm stoked about Know Your Farmer,
what can I do to help?
And if you don't know who Jason Mraz is, out of here!
So, I'm one of his biggest fans, that's really great.
What can we -- what can he do to help,
what you all can do to help is get the word out.
This has been a coming out party in some ways for USDA in terms
of the investments that we've been making over the last three
years in local regional, and we need people to know about it.
And we also need people to connect the dots literally.
So if there's not a dot in your area and you want a dot,
this is a resource, it explains to you how people are
utilizing USDA programs.
It's also going to be an incredibly great resource for us
internally at USDA, because we don't necessarily know across
all the different agencies what each other is doing,
but now we see it in a very, very transparent way,
so it's transparent externally, it's also more transparent than
anything really we've done internally, too,
because all of the 17 agencies at USDA and the many staff
offices can see what their -- what their investments mean
across the whole panoramic work of USDA.
All right, now, I've got all kinds of questions here.
I don't know if there's any order that you want
me to take these in.
Anything in particular on infrastructure?
They are all mixed in.
Okay. All right.
At FHCASA, are there plans to add features to the grants loan
page calendar of deadlines searchable by type of
program eligibility.
That will be -- that information will continue to be pumped out
through the KYF blog.
So the compass will continue to be more of a results document
and hyperlink you to important studies.
The map will be things that have happened.
But in terms of grant announcements,
you'll continue to look at that on USDA's main page, USDA.gov,
but also the KYF blog where we try to hype whatever available
grants are out there and deadlines.
So, for example, I assume -- I know for certain that soon we
will have a grant announcement on farm to school,
a result of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act our
First Lady worked so hard to get passed.
There's a farm to school program in that,
and so we will have a grant availability announcement,
I'm not exactly sure, but sometime this spring so schools
can apply before the school year ends.
We would feature that on USDA's website,
but we would also feature on the Know Your Farmer blog.
And people can go in and they can sign up RF -- RSS feed.
I know, she's trying to teach an old dog new tricks,
it's not easy.
So that way you can always have that alert system in your
email box if you'd like.
Director Jon Carson: And just one broader website I'd mention
for folks interested in how the federal government can be
a partner is grants.gov, www.grants.gov,
a much more cross setting -- cross-cutting section of
opportunities.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Here is a question at
HBOTTEMILLER.
A lot of consumers think local food tends to be safer.
As local and regional food grows,
how is food safety part of the conversation.
For example, even though many small farms are exempt from the
forthcoming food safety legislation,
FDA gap is still important.
Yeah, well, certainly no one gets a pass in food
safety in my mind.
I don't care if you're the biggest farmer in the world or
the smallest, we all have to achieve very high levels
of food safety.
The President -- in fact, my boss, Tom Vilsack,
always -- well, I got the boss, the big boss, and then,
you know, yeah, so Secretary Vilsack,
get myself in trouble here, Secretary Vilsack said one of
his first meetings, if not the first meeting with the
President, was talking about the importance of food safety.
So this White House, this administration takes food
safety very, very seriously.
But there are different ways of getting there.
And one of the things that we funded that -- through the risk
management agency, was working with familyfarm.org,
it's one of many things that we've done,
and what they did was they developed a food
safety planning tool.
It's free to farmers, so you can go onto the website and you can
-- it will ask you questions, kind of like Turbo Tax,
if you ever used Turbo Tax when it's tax filing season,
as some of us know, and it asks you particular questions,
you fill it in, and at the end, you hit print and you get
your food safety plan.
And it really helps farmers navigate,
get the kind of stuff together, it makes them think,
triggers all the questions.
So we are doing a lot, I think, to help small farmers,
because if you're vending into school,
farmed institution situation, or -- even if you're just doing
direct at a farmers' market, of course you want to have high
levels of food safety.
So we're trying to develop tools to help people out.
Jon, I'm going to go to our next theme.
Director Jon Carson: Excellent.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Stewardship.
So we want to make sure our conservation portfolio is
accessed by and works for local growers.
And Chief Dave White of the Natural Resources Conservation
Service came to me early on and said, seasonal high tunnels.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
They are called hoop houses where I live.
These temporary greenhouse-like structures -- in fact,
you know what, if you guys can roll that video of
Zach and Georgia.
This is a farm, ladies and gentlemen,
in Virginia where we announced the Know Your Farmer,
Know Your Food initiative back in 2009,
and a picnic table with a bunch of bloggers.
They were on leased land, and things have changed for them.
But I'm going to show it to you because it shows what hoop
houses look like.
♪(music playing)♪
Zach Lester: Hi, Deputy Secretary Merrigan.
This is Zach Lester.
We're here at Tree and Leaf Farm in Unionville, Virginia.
It's been two and a half years since I've seen you.
We were trying to get an USDA mortgage,
and obviously we got the mortgage.
Hit the ground running, put up our tunnels,
went through the craziest winter ever to keep our greenhouses up,
and we were back at market in April 2010.
We're growing year-round, things are going well,
our winter markets are really strong,
we're vitalizing and remineralizing our soil,
so we're happy.
Thank you very much.
Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food, that's me.
And this is my son, Owen Lester.
♪(music playing)♪
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Couldn't get better
than that story, huh, Jon?
Director Jon Carson: No.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: So, we have helped farmers
across the country through our
Environmental Quality Incentive Program put these hoop houses on
their land, it lets them get the crop in earlier,
keep some crops in later, so you extend your growing season.
Great for local regional.
It's also really important as a conservation tool,
because it helps with input, so you don't need as many,
nutrient management, nutrient flow.
So they're really a great, great thing.
We've funded about 4,500 of these across the country.
It started as a pilot program.
Just recently we announced it's going to be a permanent
practice nationwide.
So farmers in every state should be able to get access to these.
We also have the Farm and Ranch Land Protection Program,
where USDA partners with states and tribes, local governments,
local land trusts, to try to preserve farmland,
which is really, really important.
The compass will also talk about agriforestry.
The head of our agriforestry at USDA likes to say,
"It's the right tree at the right time for the
right purpose."
But it's, as a strategy, as a diversification strategy in this
country, probably underutilized.
Talks about people's gardens.
We are trying to get people's gardens across the country.
USDA took a jackhammer to the parking lot at the corner of
our building and put a people's garden.
The First Lady, I think, did a little bit better,
her garden is a little bit better,
but don't tell the secretary I said that.
Director Jon Carson: I won't.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: It's a beautiful
garden, both places.
But we then asked all of the USDA employees to try to put
people's gardens on their properties and then we have
a lot of community partners.
So we are now seeing thousands of gardens.
And there is a place on our website where you can register
your people's garden, if it's something that you're
doing with a community, a community-based garden.
We are also doing a lot of research on local seeds and
breeds, which is really important,
adapting to the local place.
I wanted to call on a young man, whose farm I visited recently,
who is also in a video on the main website when you
first come into the compass.
Tyler Butler of Butler orchards.
So there's a farm, a family farm that's been doing direct
sales since the 1950s.
Tyler, tell us a little bit about your operation.
Tyler Butler: Yes.
So you go to the farm and we filmed an awesome commercial.
And my high tunnel wasn't full of anything quite yet.
But we have a 300 acre pick your own fruit and vegetable
farm that started in 1950.
And we are so lucky to be so close to D.C. and we have such a
great population of people that are interested
in knowing their farmer.
So as a young grower, I realized that there's not
much of us out there.
And I really appreciate everything that the government
is doing now for all the young farmers who
don't have what I have.
I have a family to come back to, a business
already in the ground.
But getting this funding for high tunnels for most people out
there, that's great.
It's an easy program, and got tomatoes going in mine.
And soon enough, hopefully I'll have more than that.
I'll have five tunnels and we'll be doing organic soon.
So there's lots of room to grow.
And the help that you guys give us is really great.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Well, great.
Now, tell me, you are a 2008 graduate from the University of
Maryland, as I recall.
Tyler Butler: Yes.
So I graduated from Maryland in 2008 in horticulture and
crop production, came back to the farm,
and I have all these ideas.
And I couldn't use them.
And then we got this grant.
And they said, okay, since you are getting some help,
you can do it.
And so now I got leverage, I'm ready to go,
and there's lots of things that are going to be coming here
soon.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: And your brother,
you have a brother in school?
Tyler Butler: I've got a brother and I've got my sister back on the farm.
And so we're -- everyone's there,
and we do pick your own fruits and vegetables and we used to do
pick your own potatoes and all kinds of stuff.
So what we do at our farm is we get people out to our farm so
they can get the experience, and they really -- they really get
to know the farmer, get to know the land.
So it's a really great thing that when we see somebody from
D.C. or from other areas around the country,
they have no idea where their food is coming from, and, hey,
this strawberry plant is right down there and that's what you
are eating and go after it.
Because I don't want to pick it, I want you to pick it.
So they have fun doing it, we have fun watching them,
and it's a great experience for everybody.
And that's what we really do at our farm.
It's experience and it's great.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Great.
Director Jon Carson: I'm going to have to get your
address so I can bring my kids up there.
Tyler Butler: Sure, right down the road.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: You've got to tell
John, what is that thing you do with the pumpkins,
you blast them, or what is this?
Tyler Butler: Oh, yeah.
We can shoot a pumpkin pretty far.
We have a big --
Director Jon Carson: I'm definitely coming for that.
(laughter)
Tyler Butler: We'll put you down by the targets.
Director Jon Carson: Excellent.
I just want to take a minute to thank USDA for their leadership
on the whole issue of stewardship.
On Friday, Secretary Vilsack, Secretary Salazar and the
President hosted a conference on conservation across the country.
And what I think is so exciting is that I think the old way of
thinking of land conservation was taking land and putting it
out of bounds and keeping people away from it.
But the new conversation, USDA is front and center playing a
leading role, and that was what was so exciting on Friday,
seeing the conversations taking place between farmers and
ranchers, them being part of the solution to land conservation,
everything from keeping the Chesapeake Bay clean to
projects like this.
So thank you for your leadership on that.
And anything we can do to help highlight that would be great,
too.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Well, great.
Well, you know, it's not just local farmers, all farmers,
just really keeping farming in business is really important to
our environment.
I remember many, many years ago at Tufts University we hosted a
conference, Kate Clancy's in the room, I think you were involved,
Kate, called Environmental Enhancement Through Agriculture.
A lot of times people think it's like this.
Director Jon Carson: Yes.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: But not necessarily,
it doesn't have to be.
And when you look at the, just the Chesapeake Bay and you look
at the storm drain runoff from urban communities versus either
the runoff on farms, we all need to do better.
But it really makes the case that you want to keep those
farms in business.
Director Jon Carson: Absolutely.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: I have a couple of questions
that have come my way.
Are you able to search educational farms and farmer
incubator programs with the new compass feature?
Sophia Marvel from Brickyard Educational Farm.
Hey there.
Yes, you are.
Things that have been funded through are beginning farmer
and rancher program.
Those grants are up on the website.
And a lot of those are funding educational programs.
And you actually are sitting next to Stephanie Richie,
who has done a marvelous job in collaboration with the Farm
Bureau, the American Farm Bureau Federation to have a program
called Start To Farm, which is also a great tool for people on
our website to turn to.
So there's a lot of interesting beginning.
And now I am looking at the screen, okay.
Jody Mason says: Our research shows U.S.
consumers yearn to know who grows their food but they shop
most at supermarkets.
What can supermarkets do for KYF, too?
I've got a lot of ideas.
So a recent study by the National Grocers Association
found that 85% of Americans factor in whether their grocery
offers up local food as a factor in deciding where they shop.
So it seems like smart business means figuring out a way to not
only bring in food from your local growers,
but finding a way to hype it.
I think local groceries, groceries could have days when
they bring farmers into the store,
they could posters up about their farmers,
they could have a farmers market on their lot.
When I first heard that HEB in Texas did this, I thought, well,
that's taking away from their own produce department.
They found it just got people in the produce mode and they
actually sold more.
There's all kinds of things.
They can use community rooms.
A lot of grocery stores have community spaces where they
could bring in USDA field staff.
They'll host seminars about how to access our resources.
There's all kinds of things they can do.
Grocery stores are major pillars in our communities and we want
them involved.
Director Jon Carson: I'll tell a quick personal story that backs you up there.
Another farm story.
When I was eight years old -- the pumpkin story reminded me
of this -- I learned about capitalism that way.
I sold to our local supermarket all the pumpkins I raised on our
field for $1 apiece and then was surprised when I showed up at
the supermarket to see them for sale for $3 apiece.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Um-hmm.
Director Jon Carson: But I did tell all my friends at
school to go buy those pumpkins, because they were mine.
So it does work.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Excellent. Excellent.
Well, of course the local regional thing is real important
for farmers, bottom line.
ERS regularly updates, we call it the food dollar,
and it will show you what percent actually goes directly
to the farmer, and it varies between 13 and 18 cents.
But when I'm spending that dollar at the grocery store,
not so much is going necessarily back to the farmer.
And that's one of the things that we're trying to deal with.
The next section of the report thematically is local meat.
And I remember early on in my job as deputy,
I went to a meeting up in new England and they were talking
about it might take 18 months to get an animal to
a slaughter facility.
Hard to grow out an animal that lives a very short period of
time to the right size and all for 18 months.
And also, a lot of interest in mobile units up in my
part of the world.
And they found that the food safety inspection service at
USDA wasn't saying green light.
They said, no, they got mixed messages at best.
So in further research on mobile units, I found out that, yes,
they're okay, but at that time, USDA rules were unclear.
And in terms of the meat capacity, it's complicated.
It's complicated.
And when you turn to the compass,
you'll find out that we started in this initiative by doing a
mapping project where we tried to map all the slaughter
capacity around the country to figure out where the holes are.
And that map is available up on our website.
And in that second phase of the mapping when we started to put
context data in, that will be one of the things that we
will flood into the map.
I think it will really help.
But when I recently looked at the 2011/12 Sayer report from
the field that just came out, they highlighted a graduate
student, *** -- I'm going to butcher his name --
Simbomeri, he was Iowa State.
He got Sierra funding for his research.
His hypothesis was that there were too few small-scale
meat processors.
But what he found was, it was also more of a coordination
issue and resource issue.
You've got aging food processors in the slaughter facilities,
they're -- the people -- like everything in agriculture,
they're aging.
And they also have the extreme boom and bust for the
seasonality of meet, which you are very familiar with --
Director Jon Carson: Yes.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: -- in Wisconsin,
because that's probably one of the places that has the most
small slaughter plants in the country.
He leveraged his initial Sierra grant because of all
the interest in this into $500,000 for his research.
And when he became one of the people who started the niche
Meat Processors Assistance Network,
he put out the Whole Animal Buying Guide,
and Sierra put out a guide, "How to Direct Market Your Beef,"
all great resources that you can find in the compass.
We also talk a lot about mobile meat.
We put out a compliance guide so people would know what the
rules were, clear, black and white, not gray.
We did webinars on what these rules are and also what RD,
rural development money might be available to help
people fund these local slaughter facilities.
And we have a lot of success stories in the compass.
In April 2011, you'll see a study that's in the compass
where in Iowa, they explored small-scale meat processing and
they found that for every $1 million in small meat processor
output, they required 13.3 jobs.
So they did a whole analysis, what does this mean for the
local economy, that people can read.
So local meat for me, it's jobs, diversification strategy,
for risk, it's finding out how to recouple animals and
livestock, animals and crop production for nutrient cycling.
And it's a place where I don't think there's any greater need
for that national discussion about where your food comes
from, because people are really -- they've romanticized or
disconnected with the farm and livestock agriculture.
And so I think it would really help if we
have that conversation.
Now, I want to call on some people in the audience.
But before we do that, I want to -- I saw Sam Kass
is in the House.
And Sam is one of our dear friends.
He leads the First Lady's food policy efforts.
And we've got a mic for you.
Pull up a chair.
Yeah, you got some time for us?
Sam Kass: I got time for you, always.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: All right.
Put him right in the middle, sandwich him.
Sam Kass: How is it going, everybody? Good, good.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: We're having a tweetup, Sam.
I'm 52 years old and I'm doing it.
Sam Kass: I love tweetups.
I tweeted for the first time just a couple weeks ago,
if you can believe it.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Jason Mraz is in the House.
Sam Kass: Nice.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Yeah, he's tweeting with us.
Sam Kass: Nice. That's great. It's been great.
This is exciting, huh?
Director Jon Carson: Yes.
Sam Kass: Can I say just a couple of things?
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Yeah, please.
Sam Kass: So that one of the very first things that the First
Lady did when she got to the White House was plant a garden
on the south grounds, which today seems like, you know,
of course she did that, right.
It seems like you can't imagine the White House now without a
vegetable garden.
But back then, you know, it was not the conventional wisdom.
And this is something that she wanted to do because she knew
firsthand as a mom the importance of kids and families
knowing where their food comes from,
highlighting the role of the people who grow it and the hard
work and dedication that it takes to grow food and feed this
nation, and how the relationship between those people and
families who consume food are so important.
And she, you know, she would take kids to the farmers market
in Chicago and really they started cooking and really
learning about all this kind of -- all this kind of stuff.
And that really shaped her perspective and is why it's
been such been, you know, her priority.
And out of that garden grew Let's Move and all the work.
And Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food is exemplary of all this
dedication and commitment by the administration to this set of
issues and to just how fundamentally important these
connections are to ensuring that our nation is vibrant,
both in our economy and in our health.
So Kathleen, I want to congratulate you on just amazing
set of work over the last three years.
It's been just extraordinary what you've -- what you guys
have accomplished over there, and to the Secretary, as well.
And I think this is just the beginning of a
lot of great work.
And this is, you know, we're keeping up with the
rest of the country.
This is happening all over the nation.
There isn't a city or a town or mayor who we talk to who isn't
working with a set of stakeholders to deal with all
kinds of different requests from community go.
We just met with leaders from Jackson, Mississippi,
the mayor has made a commitment that in each neighborhood there
will be a city supported community garden where they are
giving the seeds to the community.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Wow.
Sam Kass: That's Jackson, Mississippi.
I mean, every time we meet with leaders,
this is what we're hearing.
I have a good friend who tore up a football field in Texas to
plant food to help support community college.
This stuff is happening everywhere,
and it's just really exciting.
So we're deeply connected and we feel like there's a lot of great
work yet to be done.
But we're really proud of what the Administration has done to
support this effort.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Great.
What are you harvesting in the garden right now?
Sam Kass: So we are harvesting a lot of kale we grow
all year round.
We have low tunnels out in the garden.
So we are harvesting, we just harvested incredible spinach,
kale, chard, let's see, bok choy, some amazing bok choy,
mustard greens.
I have the most amazing mustard greens ever over
the last few weeks.
And we have broccoli that's just about to be taken out.
Collard greens.
And lots of lettuce, tons of lettuce.
And we'll be -- we're getting ready for our spring planting.
And so the other thing that we'll see in the coming months
is the First Lady has written a book called "American Grown,"
and it's going to be a book that highlights and tells
her story and evolution of these issues,
but also the story of what's happening all over the country
and highlighting amazing, amazing work happening
everywhere that we run across.
Sometimes we go to highlight it and sometimes you just come upon
it, an amazing garden that a science teacher built with her
class, or a faith leader who's dedicated extra land to helping
to grow food and improving access to healthy,
affordable food.
So, you know, we're going to be -- this book is going to be
beautiful and amazing, filled with recipes,
how-to tips about how to plant a garden,
how to plant a children's garden, how to do it in your windowsill, how to do it in your back porch,
how to do it in your backyard, how to do it in a school.
And it's just going to be both a great tool but also a great
visual and a great story.
So we're very excited.
So stay tuned for that.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: That's exciting.
Sam Kass: Yeah, it's very good.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: All right.
Well, when you came in, I was just about to call on -- then
stick for a minute because I want to go to farm to
institution, which you have so much to say.
I wanted to call on Drew Peters, who is the owner of Sunnyside
Farm in Dover, Pennsylvania.
I know a PASA member.
Sam Kass: Nice.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: And Drew, you've been involved
in the local meat issues.
So tell us some perspective from where you stand.
Drew Peters: We use a small local butcher.
I actually dropped off two pigs this morning on the way here.
And then we also process on farm.
We are exempt from the -- we operate under
that USDA exemption.
And we have great success having people come out and help us.
We have great success with people who want to eat food,
meat that's been grown on grass.
We find that through the methods that we use of having cows and
chickens on the same grass, the grass grows at an incredibly
high rate of speed.
And so as we move the animals around the property,
everybody gets fed well.
The end result is lean meat that's really delicious.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Great. Well, thanks, drew.
Good luck with that.
Drew Peters: Thank you.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: I also want to call on
one of my colleagues at USDA, just because it's just such a
stark juxtaposition, I think.
So Colleen Rossier. Where is Colleen? Is she here?
All right.
This is your moment, baby.
So she's on the local meat committee.
Sam Kass: She's blushing.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: She is blushing.
She works in the chief -- office of the chief scientist in
our research agency.
I'm not sure if that mic is working.
Is that mic working okay, do you think?
So anyhow, yes, she is actually thinking about the whole animal,
okay.
So one of the things that we know from our colleagues over
in farm credit is they say they go around,
they talk to young people and they say how many of you want
to be a farmer, you know, when you get out of school,
and all the hands go up.
And then the next question is, how many of you have
a business plan?
And only two or three hands go up.
And so there's really, you have to figure out the whole piece.
And so the thing that I wanted to ask Colleen is,
I know one of the things that the local meat committee is
looking at, and perhaps not everyone is talking about it in
a big way, but it's the whole rendering part of the industry.
So Colleen, do you want to give us a little insight in some of
your discussions?
Colleen Rossier: So yeah.
So I did not know I was going to be talking to you all today but
hello and welcome.
I started working at USDA in May of 2010 and met Luke Knolls,
who was at that point helping out with the Know
Your Farmer initiative.
And one of the first things he asked me to look into was
rendering.
And I did not know what that word meant.
But being very interested in-kind of looking at wave
streams and inefficiencies and better ways to use them,
I found the rendering industry to be quite an interesting one.
For those who don't know, rendering is what happens to the
parts of the animals that we don't eat and how they're made
useful in certain ways.
There's a lot of different ways to dispose of the leftover bits,
composting is one, burying is another.
But rendering was an interesting one for me to look at,
as my first task on the Know Your Farmer team.
So we looked at how consolidation in the industry in
a lot of different ways has been problematic for processors,
for producers, and one of the issues that we found is that
a lot of renderers have been going under around the country,
and that leads to problems for processors.
So yeah.
So we're looking into that.
But there's a lot of different ways that people are handling
that issue and it's different in each part of the country.
But it's definitely something that's on our radar
here at USDA.
So thank you.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Thanks, Colleen.
Got to talk about it all.
Sam Kass: Got to talk about it all.
And speaking of it all, I know there's a young
beekeeper in the house.
Oren, where are you? How is it go?
Oren: Good, how are you?
Sam Kass: Good. So you keep some hives?
Oren: I do.
Sam Kass: How many do you have?
Oren: I have four.
Sam Kass: Four hives.
So one of the first year we planted the garden --
great to meet you.
Let me shake your hand. Great to meet you.
We also put the first ever beehive on the
White House grounds.
And our beekeeper, Charlie, who is actually a carpenter and been
a carpenter in the White House for now 29 years, I believe,
kept bees in his home, just like you.
How long have you been doing it for?
Oren: I've been doing it for about two years now.
Sam Kass: Nice. And it's been amazing.
I think we may need to do a little honey competition,
because I feel pretty good about how tasty my honey is.
But you look like you might produce some pretty good honey.
Oren: Yeah, it's pretty delicious.
Sam Kass: It's pretty good.
(laughter)
Sam Kass: All right.
We may have to -- did you bring any honey with you?
Oren: I don't believe I did, but we can get that --
Sam Kass: You can get some for us, all right.
We may have to swap some honey at the end of this.
Oren: All right. Sounds good.
Sam Kass: But it's been amazing.
So maybe you'll come down and check out our hives,
make sure we're doing okay?
Oren: Yeah, that would be great. I'd love it.
Sam Kass: All right. We'll do that afterwards.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: He's also a big chicken guy.
Sam Kass: So I joke with the secret service that the next
thing that's coming is some chickens down there.
(laughter)
Sam Kass: And they look at me like, you're crazy,
but are you that crazy?
So, no, we're not going to do chickens.
But that's pretty amazing.
Well, congratulations.
The honey has been amazing.
We have taken out incredible numbers in terms of the amount
of honey we've gotten.
It's incredible for the kids who come to see the garden to see
the pollination, see the whole process,
really learn what it really means and how important
pollinators are and bees are to what we eat,
and it's been delicious.
So it's served a lot of purposes.
Oren: Yeah, they're great.
Sam Kass: They're great, right?
Oren: Yeah.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: So Oren, way up there,
and you got the mic, you know, one of the big things that we're
struggling with is we have an aging farmer population.
30% of farmers, 65 years of age or older.
We have this major transition that's going on in our working
lands around the country.
And the Secretary has said this will is one of the
major challenges for the forthcoming Farm Bill,
to try to figure out ways to incent the next generation to go
on our working lands.
Oren: Yeah.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: From where -- now
you're from my part of the world, by the way.
I'm from Massachusetts.
Oren: Yeah.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: From where you stand,
what do you think some of the challenges are,
things that we should be doing or do you think you would
actually be a farmer full time in the future?
What's your thoughts?
Oren: I'm not quite sure if I'd be a farmer when I grow up.
I haven't thought about it, or my business plan.
(laughter)
Oren: But at least at my old school and now I'm a freshman in
high school and I'm starting -- at my old school,
I started a farm club, which has now been continued on.
And actually, just got out on spring break yesterday.
But when we get back, our bees will have arrived,
all the bee suits, all the equipment.
So we'll get those set up.
So I've started bee clubs and I think definitely doing fun
little things to get kids involved is definitely,
it's definitely key, because then it kind of gives them a
little taste of what it's like.
Because definitely, I mean, having at least a bee club,
it allows people to go out and see what bees are like and,
you know, eventually be able to harvest some honey.
So getting kind of the youth and kids kind of just seeing what
it's like, and the kids who like it will really like it and
the kids who don't, you know, you can't really
change them very much.
But definitely, I think, at least the way I think of it is,
well, if I can start a club then I can maybe get some other kids
interested and, you know, maybe then it will go on from there.
But yeah, that's kind of at least what I've done,
which I think so far has been pretty successful.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Well, great. Thanks for coming.
I'm talking to Sam about trying to get you to see the beehive
before the day is through.
That would be great.
Sam Kass: We'll work on that.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Get out to the garden, okay.
Well, you gave me a perfect segue to talk about another
theme in the report, and that's farm to institution.
We're talking K through 12 schools, we're talking colleges,
hospitals, large institutions, like our cafeterias here
in the government.
It's a great idea.
Have that farm, that direct farm to the institution,
to borrow a term from Massachusetts, it's wicked hard,
WH, wicked hard to do.
You've got issues of scale, you know,
how do you get some of the small and mid-sized growers their
product aggregated to the quantities that you need.
You've got a lot of times institutional demands that
would be like processed.
You've got seasonality challenges when it
comes to schools.
And then you've got littler problems, just billing cycles,
how it's done, having trucks on campus,
food safety certifications.
We love it, though.
Because it's money.
Better income for farmers, particularly those mid-sized
farmers, you know, little too big to be just at a farmers'
market, not big enough to be in the export business or the major
travel ways of food, can be a real economic foothold for them.
And so we have a number of things in the compass that talk
about farm to institution.
We also talk about ag in the classroom.
And I'm really big on ag in the classroom, always have been.
Trying to get kids when they're young, like Oren, to talk about,
you know, the club stuff that you're doing,
the kind of connecting kids early on with how
their food is grown.
Some of the research we did at Tufts University we found --
Michelle Radcliff found that kids who are engaged in
garden-based learning, their willingness to try and their
actual consumption of fruits and vegetables increased beyond what
was grown in the garden, just because it was that entree,
that thinking moment.
So we're really excited about it.
And I know that you mentioned your friend here, who is,
I'm going to call on him in a minute in terms of healthy food
access, as a college president, I know there's a
lot of stuff going on.
But I also wanted to call on David and Nick Marvel,
who are very involved in national farm to school efforts.
I think they're way in the back there.
You've got both kids with you, your daughter, too.
You guys going to come up with your dad, or are you hiding?
This is your moment.
You can be live streamed from the White House.
It's your 15 minutes of fame.
There you go.
Help your dad out.
Sam Kass: He may it. They look so excited.
(laughter)
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: So tell me what's going on.
From your perspective, what are the opportunities in
farm to institution?
What should we be thinking about?
Well, farm to school or farm to institution, you know,
the biggest thing is distribution and being able to
connect the farmer to the institution,
whether it's school or hospital.
But in that is our opportunity.
And people who are finding ways, Derek Kilmore from West Virginia
is here, and he's also found ways -- he's a farmer who's been
able to connect other farms to his farm and be able to
collaborate and be able to bring local product to an institution.
So he's, you know, in Delaware and across the nation,
I also represent the national farm to school network,
we're looking at people who basically were picking on the
low hanging fruit where, you know,
we're working with anybody who has some kind of distribution
already involved or already running and then work with
farmer who don't and try to commingle that product and keep
its identity.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Excellent. Excellent.
So we're really moving.
One of the things we started early on at USDA is set up the
farm to school team.
They went around the country.
They tried to document what works, what doesn't.
We've got a report on that on our website.
We have a whole website on farm to school.
Our national ag library put together an annotated
bibliography so people don't have to reinvent the wheel.
And so there's a lot moving.
So I really thank you for your leadership,
and I bet you are looking forward to us getting out that
request for proposals for the farm to grant program.
David Marvel: Yes, we are.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Farm to school program.
David Marvel: And I'll commend the farm to school team,
because they went around the country looking at small and
medium and large operations in schools, and really, you know,
got the consensus of the country.
So thank you.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Thank you, very much.
Thanks, guys.
If you're skipping school I'm sorry that I outed you.
(laughter)
Live from Delaware. Hello! Hello, Principal So-and-so.
Thanks for coming.
So I have a question that Amanda is showing me on the web.
Farm institution, how can we assure -- maybe you guys and
have some thoughts on this, too -- how can we assure that
limited English and immigrant farmers participate in this
important revenue stream?
I'll start and maybe you will add.
We certainly do have, a lot of our programs at USDA,
if you're a beginning farmer or rancher,
or if you are from a traditionally underrepresented
population, socially disadvantaged population in
terms of getting the largess of USDA's resources,
you get higher cost shares.
So, for example, when I was talking about the seasonal high
tunnels that we saw that's at Butler's Orchards and elsewhere,
if you were a mainstream farm you get 50% cost share.
But if you are a socially disadvantaged farmer,
you could get 90% cost share.
So we do have ways that a lot of our programs are weighted.
We do need to do better at USDA in translating a lot of our
materials and trying to get out more into immigrant populations.
It's something we're working on.
And I'm just going to take that as a challenge.
Jon Carson: Well, and Kathleen, it gives me an idea.
I think what we can do at the White House,
we work with so many different organizations,
many of those working with recent immigrant populations,
we can make sure they know about, "Know Your Farmer,
Know Your Food" and know about this whole sector, I think,
is a real opportunity for job creation.
So my advice would be anyone looking for help on that,
reach out to those institutions who maybe don't have anything
to do with food or nutrition generally,
but they would be happy to be partners.
And if I could just give a shout-out to everyone tweeting
with us here today, we've done -- I'll ask the White House team
and Chessie, we have done tweetouts on everything
from women's issues, to environmental issues,
to -- I don't think we have ever had this kind of participation
before.
We're -- keep tweeting!
We're probably on our way to a record here at the White House.
(laughter)
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Cool!
I got a question submitted by Kate Clancey here in the room.
In the future will you be able to separate local from regional
and index the latter for those interested in working
at a larger scale?
I'm going to go to an even more basic question this prompts.
Kate, a lot of people ask me, well, how do you define local?
Should we define local in law?
And I say, no.
I don't think we should, because local is going to depend
on where you live, what crop, what season.
And it's also evolutionary.
Right now there are some places that can do more local and
regional because they have infrastructure,
because they have taken advantage of some of these
programs, because they've had some very exciting
food entrepreneurs that are working there.
And there are other places where it just --
it's not happening yet.
And so we just have to be respectful of that.
On the other hand, I come from New England and local food is
not necessarily confined by state borders,
and it makes a lot of sense for regions to work together.
In the case of New England the six agriculture,
commissioner of agriculture -- Commissioners of Agriculture,
blah, blah, blah, they came together and said we care about
local regional food up here; let's work together.
And then they got together with their governors.
It became part of the New England Governor's Association
Strategic Plan about how to build local food.
We gave them up there a $250,000 cooperative grant, big money.
They turned it into millions through
the philanthropic community.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: So USDA's tiny dollars leveraged. But it wasn't really,
I don't want to make a big deal of what
turned it all around, but it was about people coming together and
figuring out what could we do as a region.
So I think it's going to evolve in different places,
in different time periods, in different ways.
And I think that is okay.
I want to talk about healthy food access.
Jon Carson: Let's do it!
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: And particularly instead of
starting off with my own little jazz here,
I'm going to call on our local expert in the room,
local via Dallas, Texas.
Michael Sorrel is here.
And Michael is the President of Paul Quinn College --
I'm going to bring you right up to the mic,
sir -- which is a small traditionally
African-American college.
And I know you have been doing some exciting things on campus.
So if you could give us a little glimpse, that would be great.
Michael Sorrel: Sure.
And I want to thank you for the opportunity.
And Sam, it's always good to see you.
Chef Kass: Good to see you.
Michael Sorrel: My name is Michael Sorrel,
and as the Deputy Secretary said,
I'm President of Paul Quinn College.
And we are a small, historically black college in Dallas, Texas.
We are 12 minutes from downtown Dallas and we are firmly
entrenched in the food desert.
There is no grocery store for four to five miles
from our campus.
My students walk to the grocery store if they need
food after hours.
There is no Walgreens, there's no, I mean, no nothing.
Right?
No healthy food restaurants.
Nothing.
And so we spent a couple years trying to get people to engage
around this project.
We even offered free land.
We have 140 acres.
We told any grocer that would build a grocery store,
hire people from our community, hire students to work there,
that we'd give them the land to build a store.
No one took us up on it.
So we got angry.
We tore up our football field and created an organic farm.
Okay?
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: In Texas?
Michael Sorrel: In Texas.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: I went to school in Texas.
You did that in Texas?
Michael Sorrel: We did that in Texas!
You know, luckily I'm not a little guy so we made it a
little bit safer, right?
But the reality of it is in less than two years we have grown
over 5,000 pounds of food.
We give away 10% of what we grow in a program called "Tithing to
the Community."
Now, in case you think that you you have to have some wonderful
agricultural program to do this, we had none of that.
Right?
We just had a will.
We had a desire to know that people deserved better.
And now we're still angry because we still don't
have a grocery store.
So we decided to tear up the baseball field and build a
grocery store.
(laughter)
So, and this is a true story.
And thankfully to, you know, the White House and the folks here
at USDA and Joanie Walsh and others,
who have been very supportive in pointing us in the direction,
and Sam, of places to go to get support for what we're doing.
And so what I can promise you is that in the next year we will
break ground on a grocery store.
Our farm is now going, in less than two years,
it's first expansion because the real estate council in Dallas
has donated an irrigation system which we were watering it with
hoses in the Texas heat.
Well, let me be clear, I wasn't watering it;
the students were watering it.
Right?
(laughter)
But we are getting an orchard.
We are getting a greenhouse.
We're getting an irrigation system and solar panel lighting
because people understand it.
If you stand up and try and do better for yourselves other
people will help you.
And we are appreciative of that.
But we are just warming up.
So thank you.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: All right. Cool!
Thank you, Michael, that's pretty exciting stuff.
Chef Kass: Could I add one thing on access?
One of the pillars of the First Lady's "Let's Move!"
campaign is ensuring that all families have access to healthy
and affordable food.
And we know that, you know, as diverse as those communities
are, there's going to be that diversity in solutions.
But this is something that is at the core of what
we're trying to do.
Because while these issues are always going to be fundamentally
about choice and families making choices that are best for them,
for the families or people that are living in communities such
as this, the notion of choice just means nothing to them.
And it's at the heart of what we're doing.
You cannot serve your -- you can't raise healthy kids who are
eating healthy food if there is no healthy food around.
So the first place that we went after, we launched "Let's Move!"
was to Philadelphia where we visited,
the First Lady visited a grocery store as part of their
Fresh Food Initiative.
This community hadn't had a grocery store in ten years.
In a decade.
And when you stop to think about that's from the time a kid is
born until they are ten, or when they are five until they are 15.
And so much of their habits will be shaped by that time.
So we worked very hard.
We're partnering with grocery stores across the country to
build or refurbish 1500 stores over the next five years
impacting about 9.5 million Americans according
to the companies.
It's a big step in the right direction.
But all of these alternative strategies as well with food
trucks, and local community gardens.
Ample Harvest is doing amazing work by collecting from
community gardens from all over the country and making sure it's
getting to those in the greatest need.
There are strategies happening all over the country but it's
going to take all of these collective strategies to make
this happen.
But this is a top priority for the Administration and for the
First Lady.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Excellent.
Well, let me say, one of the things that you'll see on the
Compass is where we have provided EBT,
electronic benefit transfer technology,
to farmers markets for redemption of federal
nutrition benefits.
Right now you can see in 2010 we had 900,000
people in the country able to use the WIC Farmers Market
Nutrition Program Benefit, women,
infant and children benefit.
And you can see those on the map in terms of density,
where it is.
Also the Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program,
2.15 million people are redeeming benefits there.
But what you don't see on the map currently is the
supplemental nutrition assistance program,
our largest nutrition program that USDA runs,
formerly known as food stamps.
And so I know Lisa Pino is in the house.
And Lisa, I want to know, are we going to get that SNAP data up
there at some point?
Where do you see this moving?
Lisa Pino: I'll definitely work on getting that data up
there as soon as possible.
But I did want to share that the good news that is the SNAP EBT
Farmers Market Business is literally booming.
We now have about 2500 SNAP authorized markets
in the country.
That's a third of all the markets in the U.S.
That's triple the amount of SNAP EBT markets we had in 2008.
Last year more than $11 million was redeemed through SNAP EBT at
farmers markets.
And that's a 400% increase from the amount of
redemptions in 2008.
But this is fantastic news not only because it economically
empowers local and regional farmers,
but also it expands their customer base, it expands jobs.
But conversely it benefits by expanding access to fresh and
healthy food in low income, underserved communities.
And that's so important because not only is affordability of
fresh, healthy foods so key, but it's really even a more
important message in the context of public health as the obesity
epidemic continues to increase and all the chronic diseases
that accompany obesity like diabetes and heart disease,
et cetera.
But, you know, we couldn't do this alone.
We also have to acknowledge all the fantastic community partners
we have out there.
I'll mention a couple.
Like the Wholesome Wave Foundation that has done --
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: They're in the house!
Lisa Pino: They're in the house!
You guys have done outstanding work in increasing the financial
incentives for folks when they spend their EBT dollars
at farmers markets.
And also SNAP Gardens is in the house,
and they have done a fantastic job of just promoting EBT use
for seeds and seedlings which a lot of people don't
even know that you can do.
And the last thing I wanted to mention is that I think on page
62 of the Compass report there is a great example of nonprofit
in Forest Grove, Oregon, I think it is,
that expanded EBT use among immigrants and Hispanics.
So if you guys want to learn a little bit more,
there is a great key study right in the record.
Thanks.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Great.
Lisa Pino from FNS.
Thank you, very much.
So I know Sam needs to head out.
And we only have a few minutes left.
I do want to talk about local food knowledge.
But, Sam, I want to give you any parting shots.
Chef Kass: You know, the only thing to say is it is just a
phenomenal day, a phenomenal report and phenomenal work.
And thank you, everybody, for all the work you
have been doing.
You have laid the foundation for these efforts for decades.
And you just know that you have our commitment to continue to
build and bring people together around these set of issues.
So thank you so much.
And thank you, Kathleen.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Thank you. All right.
So actually I have two sections left.
Yay, Sam!
(applause)
Hook me up, hook me up with the bees before your day ends.
All right.
Careers and local food knowledge are the two last sections of the
report I want to talk about.
First, careers.
With Oren we touched upon this, the need to repopulate our
working lands.
When you go to this part of the "Know Your Farmer,
Know Your Food Compass," you'll see us talk about young farmers,
beginning farmers, immigrant farmers, veterans.
A lot of veterans coming back looking for employment.
Job Corps, how we even get kids in high school interested in
agriculture through the Job Corps Program.
There's a lot of exciting things.
We have really tried to work in this Administration very closely
with FFA and 4H.
I was in 4H.
What about you?
Jon Carson: I was the treasure of my local club.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Of 4H?
Jon Carson: 4H, yeah.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: They didn't have FFA where I was then.
Jon Carson: They had it. I wasn't quite that cool.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: You weren't that cool.
(laughter)
Anyhow, the Secretary and I enjoy nothing more than when
these young leaders come in.
And when we talk about the 2012 Farm Bill we say let's not look
about 2012, '13, '14, let's look where we need to go.
Where are we going to be for these young people.
So that's the challenge.
I know that I have Sabrina Madison here from Farm Bureau.
And Sabrina has been great.
She's the Director of Rural Affairs and she's been a really
close colleague on all of this stuff.
And if you'd just give us a little sense of what you think
the challenges are, what we need to be doing.
Sabrina Madison: Across the United States,
there are concerns with the business transition of getting
the farm from one generation to the next.
And with the age of farmers and young farmers coming into the
And many of our farmers, we're finding,
farm, it's really hard for the farmers to be able to bring
are diversifying in order to be able to bring that next
their, the next generation, in to a farm operation as it is.
generation back to the farm.
In fact, this year at our annual meeting,
we awarded our achievement award and four of the top five winners
had some portion of their farm operation that was involved in
retail agriculture.
Farm Bureau has been involved in a lot of support for local and
regional food both at the national level with the Start To
Farm Project which you heard about the Beginning Farmer
Initiative, and also with state initiatives that, for example,
in Indiana, they did a boot camp for meat managers,
farmers market meat managers so that they would understand
the new rules.
There are lots of Farm Bureau programs to support farm
markets, and farmers markets.
And Wholesome Wave, I have to give kudos to Wholesome Wave who
partnered with the San Diego County Farmers Market to give
those double-up food bucks.
We also have resources online about careers and there are --
we have the Ag in the Classroom program that we work with.
And also there are -- have a program called My American Farm
which is online games to introduce children to
agriculture.
And they can go online and see how that's -- what it might be
like to be involved in careers in agriculture.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: That's great.
So we've got a lot of resources.
We've got "Start To Farm," we've got Farm Bureau, FFA, 4H,
Ag in the Classroom.
But this is the biggest challenge in my mind facing
America in agriculture today is getting that next generation
in and successful.
There are a lot of capital barriers, you know,
in trying to get in to American agriculture,
a lot of challenges.
With only 1% of Americans now directly from the farm or ranch,
there is that broken connection for the passing on of knowledge.
So we've got a big challenge ahead of us.
I go out on the road and I actually meet people who are in
their 80s still dairy farming, not because they want to,
because that's a pretty hard 365-day-a-year job.
You are probably milking three times a day.
It's tough.
But they just don't know who to pass the operation off to.
So thank you.
The last section I just want to touch upon is Local Food
Knowledge.
Many of you might know that we're underway right now for the
2012 Ag Census.
We'll be collecting some more information.
Including information about intermediated sales.
When we talk about local food right now all our data is really
about, a lot of it's based on direct sales and we want to get
some more data.
That's good.
In the local food section you'll see about some of the research
we're doing.
You'll get a hyperlink to the Plant Hardiness Zone Map which
USDA just released.
So it's sort of got the color board,
as people wonder are the seasons changing, when do I plant what.
We just reissued that tool.
That should be really great.
But there's a lot of work to be done in terms of data gaps.
It's a big focus area of our work.
And I would like to call on Destin Joy Layne from the Grace
Foundation in New York.
Among other things, you guys have the "Eat Well Guide" to
give us a little sense of some of the research data issues that
you're engaged with.
Destin Joy Layne: Sure.
Well, first of all, I have to say this is a dream come true.
I've actually been following USDA data for about ten years.
When I was a graduate student back at the University of
Wisconsin I was playing around with some of the first GIS
systems when we were looking at mapping food access and the USDA
was just releasing data.
So it's a thrill to be looking at it now and engaging in the
data in a new way.
I am the Program Director of our Food Work at Grace Foundation.
And you may be familiar with Meatrix, Sustainable Table,
our Resource Center, and the Eat Well Guide,
which is our online directory of 25,
000 hand-selected curated listings of the Sustainable Food
Movement.
So we're really intimately connected with this data.
And I was thrilled, let's see, I think it was last year when the
USDA first started releasing the Farmers Market Data and I had
been in touch and we had been working in partnership with Real
Time Farms and with Food and Tech Connect and others to
really look at how we can come together,
all of the partners in this field,
and say how can we support this data and engage with it in new
ways and actually start looking at the government as a leader
where then we can explore the ways that data can be applied.
So now looking at this, I think it's incredible,
because we have a significant evolution for a government
agency and we can really explore how to catalyze conversation and
how to look at new innovation.
This Compass is just thrilling. It's a dream come true.
It's exciting.
The innovation, all of the applications that are possible.
The ways we can map, the ways we can do mobile applications.
The ways we can start looking at infographics and new ways that
we can use data to tell the story is just at the frontier of
where we're going.
We had a Farm Bill Hackathon posted by Food and Tech Connect,
founded by Danielle Gold and Grace Communications.
We sponsored this last December.
We brought together 125 different folks in the
technology field: Developers, designers, graphic artists.
And then we also brought in food advocates to tell the story of
the Farm Bill, of the food system.
And we had this incredible day in New York City looking at new
ways that we could tell the story.
We built an application for Meatless Monday.
We looked at new ways of telling the about meat consolidation.
Food and Water Watch was there talking about some of the issues
in the meat industry.
We had other partners all at the table.
And what I'm here to do today is to say we are committed to
working with you to get this data out.
There are new ways so we can have developers explore the data
and figure how we can take it to new platforms.
So I'm standing here in commitment with Food and Tech
Connect and Grace and we want to host another hackathon to
explore the USDA data and to help really explore new
frontiers for this work.
You can follow us along at Eat Sustainable on Twitter and also
Food and Tech Connect or Food Tech Connect, and, please,
come play with us.
Let's take this somewhere!
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Okay. Well, great.
Well, let me say we've got about five minutes left and since we
were just talking about our data,
let me start with an apology.
Look, this is a lot of data up there, you know?
A lot of data points.
Am I confident it's a hundred percent right?
Should we say good enough for government work?
Oh, no, I'm only kidding.
(laughter)
I mean, we've had a lot of vetting in this.
We've done a lot of hard work.
But there may be things where there are glitches.
At one point this afternoon I was trying to hit a hyperlink in
the Compass to hit a study and it didn't come up properly.
Let us know.
Know Your Farmer e-mail address.
Let us know of any technical problems that you find in the
document or concerns that are raised.
We have a team ready to respond.
We want to know about it.
We want to improve our tool.
This is a hallmark of transparency.
It's a really important thing for us.
And so we made sure that all of our data sets that we put up
there are in EXCEL programs that you can download.
Am I pronouncing, saying that all right, Steve?
Spreadsheets. Okay. Old dog.
So we want people to do with it what they want and figure out
and give us feedback.
That's all good stuff.
I also got a question from Hilde Steffey at Farm Aid wondering
how can farmers share their stories with USDA,
both successes and challenges so we can serve them better.
I think that's a really great question.
I don't know exactly how all the Compass is going to evolve but
we again are going to be repopulating with more stories,
more case studies.
I think the case studies put the flesh on it.
You get the data -- that's important,
I'm not saying data is not important and all that -- but
when you know someone in your community,
I think that really makes a difference.
I also got a question: Will there be a section of the
Compass for children for education fun?
Frankly, I hadn't thought about that.
So all these different tweets that are coming in I just want
to assure everybody that as Deputy I will be
reviewing them all.
The Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food Task Force will be
reviewing the tweets figuring out if there are things that
have come up that we really should be thinking about that we
may not have already.
And then I also got a question: Do you plan on
releasing farm data?
I don't know.
That might be, the Farm Service Agency is where a lot of farmers
get their operating loans, their farm ownership loans.
The way we've tried to represent that is if you go to the state
office where FSA is, you click on that and it will tell you how
much in the loan portfolio for that year FSA went to farmers.
And then right now about half of the states,
and very soon all of the states, will have three or more profiles
of farmers that will say so-and-so got an operating loan.
And these are people who are deliberately working in the
local regional food space.
So we are trying to get out that information.
We're not trying to represent people's personal data.
But so it doesn't say so-and-so got X dollar loan.
And all these farmers and ranchers have been very kind.
They've all signed waivers, they say, yes,
you can put me up there as an example.
So they're out there.
And I hope that helps people get a sense of what the range of
services are from USDA.
Jon, do you have some final comments before we go dark?
Jon Carson: Well, I'm leaving this more excited than
I was coming in.
I first just want to congratulate USDA,
the entire team that's here today.
This is what President Obama envisions for the federal
government.
Government being a partner.
Concrete examples.
Concrete solutions.
And my challenge to all of you, this is clearly -- I knew it
was coming in but not to this extent -- this is
a connected community.
This is a community that's growing.
My challenge to everyone following online here in the
audience is on your way back home today,
while you're tweeting, think of a couple people who you
know who aren't part of this conversation.
There are so many challenges we're facing in this country
today.
As someone recently said we're at half-time in America and we
know that we're heading in a great direction,
but this is a set of issues that everyone can be involved in.
Everyone can feel like they're part of the team making a
difference.
From the consumer end using Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food,
to make smart local choices, to starting your own bee club at
high school, please help us spread the word.
And we'll continue to do that, too.
Deputy Secretary Merrigan: Yeah. Excellent. Well, thank you all for coming.
I know some of you came great distances.
Those of you out in cyberspace, hello, there!
Great to have you.
Let's continue the conversation at #KYF2.
Thanks, everybody!
(applause)