Civic Agriculture for Civic Health.
2020 (Online) Future of Farming and Food Town Halls
The Town Halls offered opportunities to share information and community dialogue on the unique challenges or opportunities communities face in each topic area, within the context of an election year and the new realities of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.
These came at a time when Kansans are thinking about resiliency and what the future will look like. The ways in which we farm and get food to our plates and our capacity to work together as communities will be critical – perhaps now more than ever.
Based on dialogue and feedback from Town Hall participants in 2019, KRC identified components of a shared vision for the future and developed a report and recommendations for a more resilient food, farm and energy future. The recommendations focus on four areas: Local/Regional Food and Agriculture; Rural Revitalization; Water, Conservation and the Environment; and Energy. A free copy of the report can be found here.
The town halls are part of KRC’s Integrated Voter Engagement project, funded by the Kansas Health Foundation and Farm to School project, funded by USDA. The projects aim to improve economic, community, environmental, and human health in Kansas by strengthening civic engagement and public policy support that better incorporates Kansas farms and communities into the state’s healthy food supply chain.
Feeding Southwest Kansas
“Voices from Southwest Kansas: Immigrant Perspectives”, an 18-minute video, was produced as part of a broader study of Southwest Kansas’ Food and Farm System by the Kansas Rural Center (KRC). Southwest Kansas is a sparsely populated, largely agricultural economy set in a semi- arid climate, fueled by water from the Ogallala Aquifer. It is also home to some of the country’s largest grain farms, livestock feedlots, dairies, swine confinement facilities, and beef processing plants. The region has a long history of immigrants from Mexico and other Central and South American countries, plus a number of other countries around the globe. (The Garden City School District in Finney County has reported up to 29 languages spoken in the school system.)
Over the past two years, KRC undertook exploration of the food system there in the belly of industrial farming, which exports so much of its production, to see what the overall local and regional food system looked like for consumers. The story of the food system could not be told without interviewing the immigrant community. To do so, KRC hired Hugo Perez-Trejo, a native Spanish speaking doctoral student from the University of Mexico.
Hugo is currently completing his Ph.D in Archeology from the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) in Mexico City. He is an archeologist and sociologist who has worked in human rights, immigration and gang intervention, and social work with formerly incarcerated youth in southern and central Mexico. He is skilled in interpretation and translation in Spanish, and is now living in Salina, Ks. with his family. Hugo conducted a survey and interviews in three SW Kansas Communities in the fall of 2018. The video is the product of selected interviews in an attempt to tell some of their stories.
Hugo is also available for a limited number of facilitated showings of the video to community groups in Kansas. Contact KRC at 866-579-5469 or e-mail KRC staff at info@kansasruralcenter.org to make arrangements.
Kansas Rural Center Receives Funding to Advance Local Food Capacity, Health in Kansas
August 3, 2016 – The Kansas Rural Center will continue its current Community Food Solutions Initiative for another three years thanks to additional funding awarded from the Kansas Health Foundation, an organization dedicated to improving the health of all Kansans.
The funded project, “Community Food Solutions: Civic Agriculture for Civic Health” will focus on cultivating civic agriculture in Kansas and mobilizing grassroots Kansans and partners to successfully incorporate Kansas farms into the supply chain that provides healthful foods to Kansans. Civic agriculture is defined as the trend towards locally based agriculture and food production that is tightly linked to a community’s social and economic development. Civic health is defined as the measure of a community’s well-being.
Launched in 2013, KRC’s three year, “Community Food Solutions for a Healthier Kansas” Initiative produced the report, Feeding Kansas: Statewide Farm and Food System Assessment with a Plan for Public Action (Feeding Kansas). The report makes policy recommendations to help strengthen the ability of Kansas farmers and communities to grow and market fresh food, especially fruit and vegetables. The recommendations were developed during the project’s first year based on input from hundreds of Kansans working in farm and food sectors.
KRC and their partners then engaged and educated citizens and statewide public policy makers on the needs identified in the plan and how to take action. Building on the momentum of this project, “Community Food Solutions: Civic Agriculture for Civic Health” is designed to empower grassroots Kansans to take the lead in advancing public policy and implementing actions that better incorporate the state’s farms and ranches into the supply chain thereby improving Kansas’s economy, community, environment, and health status.
KRC’s initiative will continue to engage in a coordinated regional and statewide public policy and community dialogue to grow awareness of the status, barriers, opportunities and policy supports still needed to advance Kansas food and farming systems that create greater ability for Kansas farms and communities to grow diverse, healthful food.
Specific activities of the new project will include revisiting the “Feeding Kansas assessment” process in Southwest Kansas to produce a Feeding Southwest Kansas report; engaging the State Local Food and Farm Task Force and/or its recommendations and local level food policy councils in policies and supports identified by constituents across the state; and advocating for increased support for state specialty crop funding and permanent positions within K-State Research and Extension and other higher educational institutions.
The current Feeding Kansas report has a specific focus on increasing fruit and vegetable production and access in the state. Increasing production of fruits and vegetables for local markets would help diversify and thereby strengthen Kansas agriculture, the Kansas economy, and access to healthful foods. Both Kansans’ diets and Kansas’s agricultural landscape are deficient in fruits and vegetables, compared to other food and farm products.
In 2012, 90 percent of Kansas’s harvested crop acres were devoted to growing the following four foods: wheat (9 million acres), corn (4 million), soybeans (3.8 million), and sorghum (2.1 million). Forage for livestock covered nearly 2.5 million acres. Meanwhile, only 14,359 acres, 0.03 percent of Kansas farmland, were used to produce vegetables, berries, fruits and nuts.
While increasing fruit and vegetable production and access has been a primary focus, the ultimate goals of the projects are engaged, healthy communities across the state and a Kansas food and farming system that will increase residents’ access to and consumption of a healthy plate including fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and a variety of protein sources – both at home and in food outlets, improving personal and community health across the state. The newly funded project aims to incorporate more dialogue and understanding of challenges and opportunities across grain and animal protein food sectors.
Individuals and organizations who are interested in learning more and participating in this Initiative may visit www.kansasruralcenter.org/CFS and sign up for KRC information and emails, or contact Program Manager Natalie Fullerton directly at nfullerton@kansasruralcenter.org or 402-310-0177.
The Kansas Health Foundation is a private philanthropy dedicated to improving the health of all Kansans. For more information about the Kansas Health Foundation, visit http://kansashealth.org/.
The mission of KRC, founded in 1979, is to promote the long-term health of the land and its people through community-based research, education, and advocacy that advances an economically viable, ecologically sound, and socially just food and farming system in Kansas. For more information, visit kansasruralcenter.org.