The small city of Tieton in the upper Yakima Valley has established six Farmers Markets for this summer.  The first one was on Saturday, July 17th.  Others are scheduled every two weeks through September.  We here at IWF were instrumental in helping the community and a very dedicated group of volunteers start up the markets so we have a pretty good idea of what was involved.

Noodling around the Internet, I came across a year-old Scientific American article about the coming disappearance of the Ogallala Aquifer, the vast underground water source that lies under America's breadbasket and irrigates crops that supply one fifth of the total annual agricultural harvest in the U.S.   The High Plains, the area above this endangered aquifer supplies a large amount of the corn, sorghum, soybeans, wheat and cotton that America produces for itself and the world.

There is a growing awareness that it is important for us to have easier, cheaper, healthier access to fresh fruit and vegetables.  Yet another example of this is a bill that has been filed in the U.S. House called the Greening Food Deserts Act by Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio that is meant to increase the supply of fresh produce in American's cities.  The bill, H.R. 4971, has the following stated purpose:

I had the pleasure of attending a large community dinner in Bellingham to honor Cesar Chavez last week.  Our partner organization, Community to Community (C2C), hosted the event, as they do almost every year near his birthday.  Community to Community, under the leadership of Rosalinda Guillen, a former organizer with the United Farm Workers, has served and organized farm workers and former farm workers and their families in the Whatcom County area for years.

It's the infrastructure, stupid!  The New York Times discusses the reason it's difficult to produce and sell food grown in a sustainable manner.  The infrastructure that moves product from farm to retail outlets is decreasing just when the demand for sustainably grown, local food is growing.  In Vermont, where there is increased demand for meat and dairy raised in a sustainable manner, farmers are having difficulty.  The state had 25 slaughterhouses in the mid-1080s; now there are seven.  Nationally, the number of slaughterhouses declined from 1,211 in 1992 while the number of small farmers has increased by 108,000 in the last five years.

Governor Gregoire signed a bill into law, the Forest Biomass Supply Agreements Bill (2SHB 2481) that was passed nearly unanimously through the legislature near the end of the regular session.  Peter Goldmark, Lands Commissioner, requested the bill as part of the Department of Natural Resource's new emphasis on making use of forest biomass to encourage green industry in rural areas, thin out forests and prevent forest fires.