What is local food?

What is local food?

From a farm blog, "it is entirely possible to buy live animals (or seeds) from out of State and finish them for a short time on specialty rations (or fertilizer) in a local facility and claim local." Its important to know who your farmer really is! Are they overseeing production or even a part of it? Where are the inputs coming from?

I found this topic to be very interesting when reading the blog. Some Farmers are making great strives to have all their products on site. The fact is most Farmers buy their Poultry from out of state MASS hatcheries and grow them up and call them local...Hatching your own breeding livestock requires thousands of hours preparing in the winter, especially caring the birds eggs for incubation and then hatching the thousands in a very precise environment with extreme attention to detail.

Farmers need to think about all these inputs because they are directly relating to their overall cost of the food. Businesses can not run without analyzing the expenses and farming has its share of expenses. The last four years of feeding poultry has reminded me that the need to integrate into these fields are what needs to be done to have any control over the final cost of the product. Otherwise the farmer is left with the going price is of grain, alfalfa and so on.

Our mission is to have every animal breed, born and slaughtered on site, which they are currently and this next year will be the first year we are setting out to produce a crop of grains for the ducks and chickens, making our animals truly 100% all farm grown, zero inputs, the real local food! There is no middleman just a farmer and the food.

What can be done is getting into the back-end of production, the breeding can be taken up easily by concentrating ones efforts to a specific dual purpose animal or crop. We sell just about everything from a single product or have thought of ways to market certain things in every form. For example Heirloom tomatoes, Heirloom tomato chips anyone? Thinking outside the box is important with the products grown on the farm. Learn what is going to be naturally produced like seeds when grown veggies and learn to start saving some.