Local Agriculture and Economic Development

Michigan Good Food Charter

Michigan has the second most diverse agricultural production in the country, and yet 59 percent of our residents (distributed across each of our 83 counties) live in a place that has inadequate access to the food they need for a healthy daily diet.

We can address the barriers for this and other issues through specific, strategic state and local actions, and we can forge new partnerships centered on the values of good food. We can raise public and private policymakers’ awareness of these issues and make Michigan good food policies and practices a priority at all levels of decision making.

The 25 policy priorities outlined in the Michigan Good Food Charter Executive Summary offer specific strategies for reaching our goals in the next ten years.

You can sign onto the Resolution of Support as an individual, organization, business, college/university or hospital to show your support for Michigan Good Food.

Resources

The Food System as an Economic Driver: Strategies and Applications for Michigan Transition to a more local, sustainable food system (PDF) has the potential to help address many chronic problems facing communities across the country. This is a presentation of results of an input-output analysis for Michigan and was published in the Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition on December 11, 2008.

Michigan Farm to School, through the C.S. Mott Group for Sustainable Food Systems at Michigan State University is another partner organization. They offer a portal for information and a venue for sharing ideas, tools, and resources to support these and other efforts to link schools with local agriculture in Michigan. This work is coordinated by Colleen Matts, Farm to Institution Specialist, and Jekeia Murphy, Academic Specialist.

Food System Economic Partnership (FSEP) is a partner organization. It was established in 2005 to identify economic development opportunities and implement creative solutions to chronic issues relevant to the food system in southeast Michigan. Serving a five county area in Southeast Michigan, FSEP's Farm to School program provides technical assistance to get fresh, healthy, local food into participating K-12 schools.

Limits of Industrial Agriculture

Corporate factory farms, known as CAFOs or confined animal feedings operations, cause high levels of pollution that is harming public health and rural communities. This also includes thousands of acres of a single crop, otherwise called monoculture, which require a significant amount of fossil fuels to grow and harvest. Organizations in Michigan and the surrounding region, team up to tell corporate farms there are alternatives and that our environment shouldn't suffer for them to make a profit.

Organizations Identifying CAFO Pollution:

• Sierra Club – Michigan Chapter
• Documentary: "Living a Nightmare: Animal Factories in Michigan"
• Environmentally Concerned Citizens of South Central Michigan