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Wisconsin Ag News Headlines |
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A Big Idea for Small Farms: How to Link Agriculture, Nutrition and Public Health
Wisconsin Ag Connection - 02/07/2024
In a chilly storeroom piled high with fall produce, Jimena Cordero is chopping up vegetables and fanning them out onto trays.
Cordero is the farm manager at Ollin Farms, not far from Boulder, Colo. — she’s put together bright pink and purple radishes, apple, fresh turnips.
“This is a green luobo,” she explains, as she expertly cuts the oblong radish into rounds.
These locally grown vegetables aren’t just pretty. They’re being prepared to make a case to state lawmakers at a meeting later that afternoon.
“You can have a super colorful veggie tray for a meeting, and everybody can get on the same vibration, eating the same good, healthy food,” says Cordero’s dad, Mark Guttridge, who started this farm with his wife, Kena, 17 years ago.
That vibration and the good, healthy food are part of the case Guttridge wants to make that farmers can play an important role in public health nutrition programs. At the meeting with about a dozen local farmers, two state representatives, and the Colorado commissioner of agriculture, Guttridge will explain how Boulder county has made creative investments in his farm that could be scaled up to the state or even national level.
Healthy soil to healthy population
Before the meeting, Guttridge shows me one of those investments. A dozen sheep mill about in a field bordered by a simple white fence. The animals, which Guttridge raises for wool, munch on radishes that have been leftover for them. And as they eat, they poop.
“So these guys are out fertilizing the radish field,” Guttridge laughs. “They’ll be out here a couple more weeks, and then it’ll sit for about four or five months. And then we’ll just till that in and get our next summer veggies planted right there.”
Around the field is a special moveable type of fencing that Ollin Farms bought using grants from the Boulder County Sustainability Office. It allows them to move the sheep from one field to another, fertilizing as they go. He’s also used grants for a farm compost system to fertilize the fields that the sheep don’t graze on.
The goal of these investments is “really building up our soil health,” he explains. “That relates directly to the nutrient quality and nutrient density of the food — healthy soil grows healthy food.”
The county also makes an effort to get that healthy food out to different communities to be able to boost public health.
That’s where the Boulder County Public Health department comes in. It created a coupon program that low-income families — many of mixed immigration status — can use to get free fruits and vegetables from Ollin Farms’ farm stand.
“It’s great because it brought a little more diversity to our farm stand – new people, new families,” Guttridge says. “We’re trying to make it more of a place where people come and get their food, but they also hang out and learn.” He is hoping the new customers will learn about the values of sustainable farming – and how tasty its produce can be.
Click here to read more wpr.org
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