Commonly Asked Questions Over the next two years, Vital Communities will be continue to coordinate a three-year project designed to create a healthy, profitable, and satisfying relationship between local farmers, Dartmouth College, and the surrounding community. This project, funded by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, aims to both create direct or wholesale accounts between New Hampshire and Vermont farmers and Dartmouth Dining Services as well as to engage the student and local communities by educating them on the importance of local food issues. Click here to view an overview of the project This document is intended to be a resource for those who are interested in participating or simply curious about the project. If none of the following questions provides what you are looking for, please feel free to contact Vital Communities. Enjoy!
For many people, local food is more easily defined by what it is not than what it is. Local food, by this classification, is not mass-produced food shipped from distant regions at the expense of taste and nutrition. Often equated with greater nutritional, social, and ecological benefits, local food is simply that which is produced by farmers living in a region geographically intimate enough to be called a community. For the sake of this project, the definition of local is that approximately 80% of the food is produced in the 69 towns of the Greater Upper Valley using ingredients produced in that same area, and the remaining 20% is produced in the bi-state region of Vermont and New Hampshire. Why are local food issues important? Although we seldom think about it, our food consumption is one of the primary ways we interact with both the natural environment and our surrounding community. As such, local foods offer several potential benefits over non-local foods. For one, a much greater percentage of the money you spend to buy the food goes back into the local economy and the hands of the farmers who grew the food, which is vitally important to supporting agricultural communities such as those of the greater Is agriculture a big part of the Although we (as students) seldom think about it, agriculture is still largely the backbone of the What is the The DLF Project is a three-year project designed to create a healthy, satisfying, and profitable relationship between local farmers, Dartmouth College, and the surrounding community. The project first looked at other successful institutional local food programs such as those at Yale and Middlebury, and is simultaneously exploring the constraints of individual project participants, including students, DDS, local farmers, wholesalers, faculty, and alumni. Current stages of the project include making recommendations and laying the groundwork for creating sustainable accounts between local farmers, wholesalers, and DDS as well as marketing the potential benefits of the project to the Dartmouth student body and administration. How is the project structured? Who is actually working on the DLF Project? While Vital Communities, a 501(c)3 non-profit based in White River Junction, is charged with coordinating the DLF project, the core of the project is a cooperative working group known as the DLF task force. This task force is composed of several local farmers, a number of students, Scott Stokoe-the manager of the Dartmouth Organic Farm, Ross Virginia of the Environmental Studies department, Tucker Rossiter, Beth DiFrancesco, Dave Newlove, and Carmen Allen of Dartmouth Dining Services, 2 local wholesalers, Jim Merkel, Dartmouth's new Sustainability Coordinator, and Vital Communities staff. The initial year of work by the DLF task force during 2004-5 was to learn about the needs and restraints of each of the participating groups. The planned introduction of locally grown/raised foods to Dartmouth dining halls began in the winter/spring of 2005, and marketing activities to further develop consumer interest, additional training and technical assistance for farmers based on needs identified during the initial introduction effort, and modification of task force strategies will continue throughout the year. The final year of the project will consist mainly of support and then an evaluation based on the experience of two full growing seasons. How is this project funded? What is SARE? The project is primarily funded by a Vital Communities grant from the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program. NE-SARE is a USDA competitive grants program that “supports research and education that helps build the future economic viability of agriculture in the What foods might eventually end up on my plate? Although many people don't realize it, the farms of the Upper Valley produce a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, meats, and dairy products. What products are eventually-and initially-included in the project will be largely decided by local availability and cost of production. These products might include such foods as corn, lettuce, tomatoes, milk, strawberries, apples, and hamburger. The bottom line, however, is that we just don't yet know. So far we have tested ground beef, stew beef, free-range chicken, vegetables such as carrots and potatoes, apples, and ice cream. Grass-fed ground beef burger is available at Homeplate's grill, and NH apples seasonally. We already get some of those foods from the There are several reasons why it doesn't make sense to simply ramp up production at the Dartmouth Organic Farm. For one, DDS produces approximately 10,000 meals per day-the D.O.F. could never meet the production levels required by that scale. Additionally, the D.O.F. produces a variety of vegetable crops, many of which you have seen in the Collis salad bar. By expanding to other Upper Valley farms, we have the opportunity to include such products as apples, berries, beef and lamb, poultry, and dairy products. Equally important, however, is that part of the fundamental purpose of this project is to increase Dartmouth's participation in the local community through the forum of food consumption. Institutional accounts such as this one can serve as an important asset to local agriculture, pouring thousands of dollars into the local economy. A turkey farmer at Bates College in Maine, for instance, claims that his account with Bates, although only 3% of his business, provides a "cornerstone of dependability" that allowed him to "expand production and make investments like [a] refrigerated truck" (Lorraine Stuart Merrill, "Farm-to-College Dining: Local Food Catches on for Institutions and Farmers", Farming, March 2002). Finally, the D.O.F. does not see itself as a market farm/garden, but solely as an educational and recreational resource for students. This is one of the core issues that the task force is exploring. The bottom line is that we don't yet know how the pricing of the various products will work out-we only know that the long term viability of the project depends on striking a balance between the financial interests of farmers, students, and DDS. Some products will probably end up being more expensive for students than their non-local counterparts; others will probably cost approximately the same; and, surprisingly, some are less expensive. All the farms around here produce food in the summer. Not only are there fewer This concern is related to a major misconception that many people have about New England agriculture. It is during the summer that we see open fields with row upon row of tassled corn, and we hear about classes visiting the Dartmouth Organic Farm, but the reality is that some types of farms in this area produce year-round. Spring through late summer is the season for most vegetables and many fruits, but autumn is a time of apples, pumpkins, and many root crops. Most beef and lamb producers in the area bring their meat to market in the late autumn, eggs are produced all year long, and dairy producers supply milk-made into cheese, yogurt, ice cream-all year round. Thus, while you are most likely to see local lettuce, tomatoes, or sweet corn during the warmer seasons, you will still potentially be seeing local products in the dining halls throughout the year. The interim gaps don't pose as much of a problem as they would appear to. Commencement and reunion catering during the spring-summer interim (including senior week and graduation) actually places a fairly heavy demand on the DDS kitchens, and the longest interim gap (between fall and winter terms) is not a very high production time for most local agriculture. With careful planning and communication between farmers, wholesalers, and DDS, it would be quite possible to coordinate production so as to alleviate much of the inconvenience that the interim gaps might provide. Has this type of project been successfully done before? What past successful models are you working from? While college/institutional local foods programs are by no means commonplace, there is a sizable body of research that has resulted from several very successful local foods programs that have been developed at various institutions over the past 10 years. Bates College in Lewiston, ME, for instance, was honored in 2000 with the Best of the Best ReNew American National Award for Sustainability, largely due to its extensive local foods purchasing program and recycling programs. In the 2002-2003 fiscal year, Middlebury College spent $773,000 of its $3 million dollar total spending on local foods, much of which was local agriculture. Yale University instituted one of the most successful local food programs by converting, in 2003, one of its twelve dining halls into an entirely local organic facility. Other institutions, such as Oberlin, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Northern Iowa all have successful local food purchasing systems. For more information on these individual programs, see these further sources: http://www.middlebury.edu/offices/enviro/initiatives/green_dining.htm http://www.uni.edu/ceee/foodproject/ http://abacus.bates.edu/dining/about_us/environmental_initiatives.html One common element uniting nearly all of the above programs is that they had, from the first time that the local food program idea was voiced all the way through dining hall dinner lines, heavy student support. Anyone is welcome and encouraged to join the group of students currently working to spread knowledge and enthusiasm about both the Dartmouth Local Food project and local foods issues in general. Meetings and activities will be ongoing through the next two years. We have a whole menu of options for participating-please see our website, www.vitalcommunities.org. This project will succeed when the whole Dartmouth community begins to understand and care about the issues of food consumption, consumer choice, and community involvement. Anything you do-helping plan the project, staffing tables, dropping a quick blitz to your dean, telling your friends, or even just seeking out local food-will help mean big things for Upper Valley farmers and Dartmouth students alike. For more information, contact: Vital Communities staffLisa Johnson at Vital Communities 802.291.9100
What is the current status of the project? Click here to view the 2006 annual report. Click here to view the 2005 annual report. |
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