by Amy L. Stock, Contributing Writer


By now many of us have heard or know the reason’s why it’s important to support local farms – 1) it helps the environment by reducing the amount of fossil fuel used to transport the food, 2) helps support and maintain local sources for growing food, thereby increasing food security, 3) provides fresh fruits and vegetables often grown with little or no chemicals, and therefore generally overall better and more healthy for you, 4) contributes to the local economy by providing jobs and keeping our money spent on food local, 5) provides a sense of community and offers an opportunity to have a more personal relationship with the person growing your food, 6) overall just makes common sense.

Perhaps for me, it’s the sense of community and personal relationship with the person(s) growing my food, which is at the center of why I try to buy local.  I regularly shop at the Saratoga Farmer’s Market year-round.  How great it is to greet Paul Arnold at the winter market and have him ask, “So, how’s the house?”, because he’s taken the time to get to know me and his other customers and so he knows I bought my first house a year ago.  Or, to be able to comment on the Arnolds “Tour de National Parks” vacation, which they shared with their customer email list last fall.  Or, to know I can ask him and the Kilpatrick’s where I can find a good source for aged horse manure compost for my own small garden. 

I can’t get this at the grocery store.  Yes, the folks at Hannaford and Price Chopper are very nice and friendly.  I do shop at these places and will supplement my veggies from there, usually in the winter.  But for the most part, I commit to buying the $3 bag of spinach year-round because I know it’s fresh, just picked, and I know it’s helping the Arnolds and others stay in business. Having local farmers is critical to a sustainable community.  It’s also why each week I head to the Farmer’s Market to buy a half dozen apples for the week from Saratoga Apple.  I haven’t bought a grocery-store bag of apples in months!  How can I when the apples from Saratoga Apple are less expensive and better quality.  Plus, I’m supporting their business and orchard - an amazingly rich cultural and natural resource right here in Saratoga County.  And, they are not the only quality orchard in the county contributing to our local economy.

As a kid growing up in upstate New York, my parents always had a thriving garden.  With seven kids to feed, my parents supplemented food bought at the grocery store with food they grew in their garden, and the various wild game my avid outdoorsmen of a father would bring home on a regular basis.  In many ways, we ate seasonally.   In summer months fresh veggies from the garden and fresh trout caught in lakes and streams in the Adirondacks were a regular meal.  In the fall during hunting season, venison and rabbit were often served at least once a week.  My father also hunted squirrel, perhaps one of my least favorite. 

In June we sat around our kitchen table most nights for two weeks straight hulling wild strawberries, which my father picked from farmer’s fallow fields  (For those of you unfamiliar with this term, to hull a berry means to remove the fruit of the berry from the stem.)  The berries eventually were made into my mother’s jam - a prized commodity in my family.

In August we’d pick blackberries.  A few summers we even set up a stand on our front lawn and sold pints of berries, which helped pay for our summer vacation. 
In September, we’d spend two weekends drying and cleaning off the 15 bushels of potatoes we grew in a garden plot shared with another relative in the next town over.  We’d eat potatoes for much of the remainder of the year. 

I was raised with a sense of eating local and seasonally.  My parents grew up in a different generation, a time when many families still owned farms.  One of the family cousins still has a small dairy herd on the old family farm in Herkimer County.  For my parent’s generation and their parents, growing your own food or buying from a local farmer was just what you did.  My grandfather kept a daily journal.  In it, he notes several times where they stopped at some farm to ‘buy chickens’, which would later feed the family for the week. 

Somewhere our sense of local food got lost.  Times changed.  Our lives got busy.  With all their kids out of the house, and families and houses of their own, my parents no longer garden.  For many of us, we are simply too busy or lack the knowledge to grow our food.  Even if we did, growing enough food to feed an individual or a family for a year would be very difficult. 

As a community, in order to be sustainable we must at the very core be able to provide for our basic needs of food, water and shelter.  Local farmers are critical for providing a sustainable source of local food. 

Each day we make choices about what we are going to eat, where we are going to buy it, and whom we are going to give our money to for their labor and effort.  I know local food can be perceived as more expensive – and sometimes it is.  However, that’s because local farmers don’t have the luxury of subsidies to hide the true costs.  However, when I can, I still prefer to give my money to a local farmer or artisan – like Dave and Liza Porter, cheese maker who raise their own goats and sell at the Farmer’s Market (Liza is also past President of the Saratoga Farmer’s Market.)  The quality and value of their product cannot be overstated.  They personally care for each goat from birth. 

The value I receive from knowing these farmers who are living and working in our community is beyond a doubt the greatest of all.  I want to support them because I know they are making personal effort and conscientiously and thoughtfully considering all that goes into growing and selling fresh local food and food products. 

Supporting small-scale local farms makes environmental and economic sense
I know this.  This is a VERY important reason to support local farmers.  However, perhaps for me, it’s also the sense of value and importance of eating locally grown and raised food which was instilled in me from an early age.  Or, my sense of family roots as farmers, which many of us have, and which makes me instinctively want to support other farmers.  Or perhaps it’s because just walking through the outdoor farmer’s market every Saturday morning provides a sense of place and community I never get walking under the bright lights at Wal Mart.