Sustainable
Agriculture
Good
Food Direct, our marketing program for local food producers, completed
the year 2000 with regular-season sales of $21,400 (May-November), up
from $13,000 in 1999. A new website offered on-line ordering to our
customers, and orders came from as far away as Columbus. We put out
two catalogs, one emphasizing produce during the growing season and
later a holiday catalog that featured such items as garlic braids, fruit
baskets, and sweets. A total of seventeen producers participated in
the regular season catalog, the holiday catalog, or both. We also finally
received approval to accept food stamps, making this program more accessible
to low-income consumers.
Holiday
sales totaled $4,900 in just four weeks, after a story about the Good
Food Direct Holiday Catalog ran in daily newspapers statewide when Associated
Press picked it up from a front-page feature in the Columbus Dispatch.
This was a wonderful holiday bonus for our growers!
We
began a pilot project to broker produce to restaurants, met with new
dining hall managers at Ohio University to discuss brokering of specialty
products from local growers, and offered a series of four business development
workshops for farmers on topics of pricing, marketing, financial management,
and taxes.
Sustainable
Forestry
The
Sustainable Forestry Program works with landowners, small businesses,
agencies, and low-income entrepreneurs on sustainable options for non-timber
products native to our forests, such as gourmet mushrooms and medicinal
plants. To a lesser extent, we are also exploring options for sustainable
timber enterprises, especially through landowner cooperatives, and we
bring together landowners, agencies, and environmental groups to explore
forest stewardship issues. In 2000, we were fortunate to receive funding
from the Ford Foundation's Community-Based Forestry Demonstration Project.
We also were awarded a USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education
grant to continue research and training on cultivation of non-timber
forest products. We hired a new Forestry Coordinator.
We offered six introductory workshops on mushroom and medicinal herb
cultivation to about 130 people. In June we held the second annual Landowners
Conference, attracting more than 150 participants. At the conference
a group of fourteen growers who are cultivating high-value medicinal
herbs announced the formation of a growers association to share research,
cultivation techniques, and market resources with assistance from Rural
Action. By the end of the year, the group had a name (Roots of Appalachia
Growers Association, or RAGA) and thirty members. We estimate that there
are now over twenty acres of medicinal herbs in cultivation through
our efforts-ten of ginseng, seven of goldenseal, and four of black cohosh.
This is up from less than five acres in 1998.
In early December we sponsored the Southeastern Ohio Forest Congress,
a gathering that brought together stakeholders from the environmental
community, the timber industry, Forest Service and conservation staff,
landowners, and interested community members to discuss issues relating
to the ecological and economic health of our forests. The congress was
far more successful than we had envisioned, producing substantial agreement
among the very diverse attendees about guidelines for sustainable management
of woodlands. We also offered a series of workshops on the use of landowner
cooperatives for forest management and economic return on small parcels
of forested land.
National
Center for the
Preservation of Medicinal herbs
In
June 2000, Rural Action was selected by Frontier Natural Products to
receive stewardship of the National Center for the Preservation of Medicinal
Herbs, a 68-acre research and education facility and botanical preserve
located near Rutland in Meigs County, Ohio. The Center's mission is
to determine successful cultivation methods of critical-to-cultivate
medicinal herbs in order to curb the need to harvest these plants from
the wild and ensure their future survival. To this end Center staff,
interns, and volunteers work to develop successful methods for organic
cultivation of plants currently acquired through wild harvesting. We
then educate growers about these methods.
Founded
by Frontier in 1998, the Center employs three people--a director, a
farm manager, and a farm assistant. Rural Action prepared to begin managing
the Center as of January 1, 2001, with the final donation of land and
buildings scheduled for 2002. During the year 2000, our activities focused
on meeting with the Center's national advisory board to develop a transition
and management plan and a fundraising strategy.
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