Agriculture Workshops Covers Policy and Marketing Produce

logo-w-sunburstKayla Desroches/KMXT

An agriculture workshop this week will focus on organic farming, food policy, and marketing locally grown food.

Kodiak Healthy Tomorrows organized the event and invited Minnesota-based Kathy Zeman to speak.

Zeman, an operations manager for the Minnesota Farmer’s Market Association and owner of Simple Harvest Farm, says people need to look at the actual cost of producing cheap food.

“The worst slogan that I think the U.S. ever came up with was we have the cheapest food basket in the world. Number one, it never really was true. It might be true if all you count is the price tag in the grocery store, but it certainly doesn’t count if you talk about all the subsidies that artificially support those cheap food prices in the store, because the amount of subsidies that go to the [agriculture] industry are huge.”

Another cost is buyers’ health.

Zeman says organic, sustainable food production should keep chemicals out of the environment and drugs out of the food supply, both of which she says are problems that result from cheap food production.

The free workshop begins this evening and focuses on understanding food policy, procedure & zoning. That’s between 5 and 7 p.m. at the Kodiak Public Library. Tomorrow, the workshop will continue with a talk about how to run a profitable farm. Then, on Wednesday, it’ll cover how to market produce to a co-op or farm share.

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