By Cameron Huftalen

As summer memories fade and fall shines bright outside our windows, we reflect on last August’s NH Eats Local. The Kearsarge Food Hub, New Hampshire Food Alliance, and many other organizations spent the month championing the wonderful web of local food that New Hampshire has to offer. Over the course of the month we heard story after moving story about local farms and organizations all working to provide quality products to their communities. For example, we heard from Jake Gehrung at the NH Food Alliance about the struggles that small fishing operations in the state face, and the hope for change that can come from building a cooperative young coalition of fishers invested in revitalizing the industry. In the same spirit, we at the Kearsarge Food Hub take time each week in our newsletter (Sweet Beet Weekly - sign up!) to highlight what our market partners are up to, to keep our communities strong and healthy.

In past newsletters, we have featured local farms like Greenhill Farm and Kearsarge Gore Farm. Greenhill Collective Farm is a small, family run farm just down the street from us in Sutton, NH that consistently provides healthy and lovely produce for the community and grows with an ethos of regenerative agriculture. Kearsarge Gore Farm is a staple local provider in Warner. They not only keep the community fed with wonderful produce and sweets like maple syrup but are also responsible for giving many local folks their initiation into farm work, birthing life long appreciations for home grown produce and sustainable farming. In addition to these hyper-local farms, we also appreciate our network of partners that are a little farther than a drive down the road (but still pretty local!). For example, Deep Meadow Farm is just across the border in Vermont (only 27.5 miles away from Bradford) and provides us with a variety of wonderful organically grown vegetables week in and week out.

These are just three of the dozens of the local partners we work with to help provide Sweet Beet Market, and the larger Kearsarge Food Hub network, with quality products. We prioritize partnerships with these local organizations because we know they care about the earth they farm on, the people they work with, and the community they provide for. We highlight them each week in our newsletter because we also want our community to support them in turn!

Not only do we want to promote our local partners’ products, but we also want to promote what they are doing right as organizations with regards to the way they grow food and treat their essential workers. Local food systems allow for transparency where the global/industrial system does not. When we showcase our partners’ products, farming methods, and values, we help bridge the gap between consumer and producer. By building strong, local, community-based food systems we can enjoy wonderful products knowing exactly who made them, where, and how. NH Eats Local provided a platform and occasion for sharing stories about local food systems with our community back in August, but we want to continue that work and take time year-round to build a thriving local food system that is beneficial to those working to produce food, those benefiting from the fruits of their labor, and the land on which this food is grown.

Attentiveness to sustainable, local food is more important than ever. At its core, the industrial agricultural complex relies upon exploitation — both of people and of natural resources. Conventional food chains routinely underpay and exploit their workers, allowing them to offer foods at much cheaper rates than other farms that compensate their workers fairly. In addition to a lack of care or support for their employees, industrial agriculture often neglects the limits and health of natural resources and the land from which it is mining a profit. This model is exacerbating the current crises we face on the national and global stages — racial injustice, climate change, and COVID-19.

As COVID-19 threatens communities everywhere, fractures in the conventional food system are becoming even more apparent. The hidden costs of industrial agriculture are more visibly dire as the pandemic disrupts many folks’ routine of ‘normalcy.’ It’s apparent to more and more of us that the conventional systems are not capable of meeting this moment because they ultimately cause more harm than good to communities and to the environment. But they are systems that can be disrupted, and one way to do that is take control on the local level.

This is where we want to invoke our community. If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you care about good food, sustainable farming, and a strong community. We want you to know that you have power to initiate the change that not only supports your local community, but also helps protect the global environment and people who face exploitation. No one person can single handedly disrupt harmful industrial agriculture alone, and very few people have the financial means or resources to eradicate issues like food insecurity or environmental damage on their own. However, if we become more educated about where our food comes from and the conditions under which it is produced, we can choose to invest in a more ethical and sustainable food system.

Collective change begins with individuals choosing to make a difference in their daily lives, and a few small changes go a long way when matched by others in the community! In addition to sharing stories, NH Eats Local also brought forth the $5 pledge. This pledge calls on New Hampshire residents to invest just five dollars per week into local foods. On the surface, reallocating five dollars per week toward local products instead of larger scale corporate products might not seem like it would make a difference, but that’s where the power of a community comes in!

If every person in New Hampshire chose to spend five dollars per week on local products, it would amount to an injection of over $338,000,000 back into the state economy. That’s $338,000,000 going back into the state we all live in, and back into the systems and organizations working to prioritize the health of the earth, their workers, and their communities. When you support local food, you have the power to normalize fair wages and care for the environment. By investing in these homegrown endeavors, you are receiving not only quality food, but you are also joining in a larger movement to change the food industry. Through this, you are both demonstrating a commitment to your own community and showing the industrial agricultural system that the current exploitive and harmful practices are no longer acceptable.

Here at the Kearsarge Food Hub, we envision a future with thriving local food systems. What does that look like? It looks like fair wages for workers all throughout the agricultural chain. It looks like healing relationships with the land on which we farm, and from which we derive so much nourishment and joy. A future with strong local food systems looks like a healthy state economy and the eradication of food insecurity in our communities. An abundant local food system also has larger global impacts, like the improved health of the environment due to reductions in carbon emissions from cross country shipping of products, as well as the push for fair wages and end to exploitation of farm workers across the nation. It is our hope that coming together to divest from large scale corporate endeavors by reinvigorating local systems can spark large scale changes to improve the quality of life for everyone. Our future vision is that of strong local food systems that provide work to those looking for it that is fairly compensated and completed under safe conditions, ultimately producing safe and nutritious foods for all.