Here are a few links that may interest you:
Food Alliance Midwest
Food Alliance is a 10-year old national nonprofit that provides third-party certification of sustainable agricultural and food handling practices.
Click here to read a few short quotes from their website!
Minnesota Grown
The Minnesota Grown Program is a statewide partnership between the Minnesota Department of Agriculture and Minnesota producers of specialty crops and livestock. It was created over 20 years ago by specialty crop growers to differentiate their produce from competitors produce from thousands of miles away.
Local Foods Partnership
The Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships host localfoods.umn.edu as your one-stop shop to connect University and Community resources to strengthen local food economies. Find a map of local foods producers and processors, or search for a farmer or product. Learn how communities are partnering with U of M faculty with expertise to assist them.
Quotes Worth Repeating
From the Food Alliance Midwest website:
When buyers see Food Alliance Certified, they know the people behind the product are dedicated to continual improvement of social, environmental and economic performance.
What’s wrong with organic?
There′s nothing inherently wrong with organic agriculture. Growing food without synthetic pesticides and fertilizers and with attention to soil health is a great improvement over the industrialized form of agriculture that′s prevailed in the last half-century. Organic is the first and most broadly accepted food eco-label, and the organic community helped start the sustainable agriculture movement.
But the national organic certification standard is not a total solution for all the challenges found in agriculture and the food industry. It doesn′t guarantee, for example, that workers are treated well, that animals are raised humanely, or that wildlife habitat is protected and enhanced. Many organic farmers are also dissatisfied with the national organic standard and use the term "beyond organic" to describe their individual efforts to address these and other issues.
That′s why Food Alliance believes a different and more comprehensive approach is needed. To ensure the sustainability of our food system we need standards that take into account a broader range of social and environmental concerns and evolving management strategies. Rather than focusing largely on inputs, Food Alliance looks more holistically at farming systems and management practices designed to deliver best possible social and environmental outcomes.
Rather than taking a natural vs. synthetic approach, Food Alliance requires farmers to show that they have taken appropriate steps to prevent pest problems, that they have evaluated the extent and likely economic impact of pest problems, and that they have chosen a mechanical or chemical response to the threat which poses the least possible risk to human health and the environment. For worker safety, Food Alliance certification further prohibits the use of certain commonly used pesticide ingredients that are acutely toxic to mammals.
(To read more visit the Food Alliance website at
http://foodalliance.org/about/faqs)
