Slow Food Vermont is looking to source some items to feature at the Young Farmer Meetup at the NOFA-VT Winter Conference. The Slow Food Ark of Taste features rare and endangered foods of cultural significance, and we'd like to feature some key New England items. We are hoping some of you amazing growers have some of these produce items in storage here in midwinter.
The Center for Agriculture and Food Systems (CAFS) at Vermont Law School, Farmers Market Coalition (FMC), and Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont (NOFA-VT) today launched an onlineFarmers Market Legal Toolkit, a free resource to support building resilient and accessible markets throughout the United States. The toolkit, created with support from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), is available at farmersmarketlegaltoolkit.org.
The National Organic Coalition urges everyone to submit a unique comment to express your strong support for the organic animal welfare regulations before the deadline on January 17, 2018.
The state’s dairy farmers, both organic and conventional are in the poorhouse. Vermont’s iconic dairy industry has been in an economic pinch for some time. The prices farmers are paid for the milk they produce are well below the costs of production. Until recently, organic dairy production has been an economic lifeline for many producers, but for the first time ever, organic prices have dropped as much as six dollars per hundredweight in the last few months. Quotas have been imposed on organic milk production further lessening farmers’ income potential. Stress levels on dairy farms continue to increase as farmers find they cannot pay their bills.