LOCAL MARKETING

LOCAL MARKETING:-

Perhaps the best preparation we can make today is to get back to basics. This could mean grinding your own grain, baking your own bread, making your own cheese, and growing your own garden. Sadly, in our modern society, not everyone has a place for a garden. While some may decide to dig up their front lawn and replace it with garden plants, there is another option that would not only give you a diverse amount of fresh produce, but would put you in touch with good people too. That’s the local farmers market. In the Columbia River Gorge, farmers markets have become particularly popular as folks opt for fresh, locally grown, often organic, produce.The benefits are starting to be discovered (or should I say re-discovered), since not as much fuel is used to transport local produce, each farm usually grows diverse foods (it’s not mono-agriculture), the produce has usually been allowed to ripen naturally on the vine or tree so that its nutritional qualities are higher than supermarket types that were picked green. And you can get to know the people who actually produce your food — something that could be a mutually beneficial thing should times get very hard.

You can talk with them and discuss the benefits of organic growing practices. Sometimes farmers even have other products they can sell you if you ask for them (like meat, milk, eggs, flowers).The popularity of CSA boxes has increased, too. A CSA box is like a subscription — you get a box of fresh, locally grown produce full of all kinds of goodies, delivered to you on a regular basis. It’s actually kind of fun because sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to get in your box and have to discover how to cook it and eat it.

Diversity at work! (Although these boxes do demonstrate somewhat of a pulling away from the status-quo of bigger, more ensconced agri-business, CSA doesn’t stand for Confederate States of America… No…. It stands for Community Supported Agriculture. By the community supporting the agriculture of their local area, everyone benefits.)Another major benefit to buying local produce that’s been grown on small farms, is that the likelihood of widespread contamination** drops to zero. If one small farm has a problem, it’s not like the big agri-business farms that can contaminate the food of thousands of people just from a single problematic rinsing tank. So, buy local. Buy from the smaller farmers