Theme: research

Why should people buy from local farms, and who cares if there even are any local farms?  These are questions for the dog days of summer, good questions for Californians and for CSA members.

Knowing where your food comes from, having a farm to visit with your family, knowing how your food is grown, getting your fruits and veggies picked at their peak  — these are a few good reasons that come to mind, for buying local. Many people also think that buying from a farmer that you know is good for the local economy.  To find out more, a group at the University of California, in Davis recently completed a research project and determined that for every dollar of sales, Sacramento region direct marketing farmers are generating twice as much economic activity within the region as compared to producers who are not involved in direct marketing.

The researchers were comparing farms that sell direct to the public, with farms that do not sell direct to the public. Direct marketing includes activities like CSA and farmers markets.  While the direct marketers had fewer overall sales, they purchased 89% of their inputs within the local region compared to 45% for farmers not doing direct sales.  One of the most striking differences was that for every one million dollars of output produced by direct market farmers, 31.8 jobs are generated (hired labor is a very high percentage of expenses on direct marketing farms) compared to 10.5 jobs created for every million dollars of output on farms that don’t do direct marketing in the region. Here’s a link to the just-published study. [Read more…]

We recently had a visit from researchers from Washington State University on a project to understand the effect that farm landscapes have on bird diversity. While we love all the birds that live around Full Belly Farm, we often have to work hard to protect our fruit from them. So we have a bit of a dual relationship with the birds and we are always interested in learning more about them.

We have excerpted below from notes provided by the researchers after a few hours of studying the Full Belly birds:

“The bird surveys were very interesting. We detected 47 unique species after sampling 15 points throughout the farm and stratifying the points by habitat type (orchard, livestock, vegetables, creek, etc.) This is the highest number of unique species on the farms we’ve sampled so far. Your farm had far more landscape heterogeneity than other farms. Landscape heterogeneity is known to be important in attracting some species of birds. You’ve also got great habitat for the birds throughout, with thick vegetation located at different heights (ground level for ground foragers, shrubs for edge associated species, thick groups of tall trees for forest species, the creek for marsh birds).  [Read more…]

While many types of ‘fast food’ are heavily marketed and are made from ingredients that enjoy various government subsidies, fruits and vegetables don’t have their own lobbies, federal subsidies or ad campaigns. Subtle signals, and sometimes not-so-subtle messages in grocery stores generally nudge shoppers towards the processed foods and as a result, a healthy proportion of produce doesn’t always end up in the grocery cart.

Social scientists are experimenting with signals that might point shoppers towards the produce aisle.  For example, in one experiment a strip of yellow duct tape across the center of the grocery carts told the shopper to “put their fruits and vegetables in the front half of the cart!” Produce sales jumped… [Read more…]