The Board of Tilth Producers decided to search for an Executive Director to help meet the increasing need for education about organic and sustainable farming.  Besunder was selected for her strong leadership skills, her commitment to food security and healthy communities, her extensive background in nonprofit management and fund development and her clear vision of the organization’s potential for moving forward with new programs and initiatives.  In her most recent role as Executive Director of North Helpline Food Bank and Emergency Service Center, she designed, implemented, and completed a $5.6 million capital campaign, that enabled the organization to transition from a 600 square foot city-owned office to an 8000 square foot, state-of-the-art facility.  Additionally, she led the effort to triple programmatic capacity and kept pace with a 35% increase in service demands over a three year period.

Besunder will be working with Nancy Allen, who will move from Managing Director to Program Director.

Join us for our first farm walk of the year at Gibbs Organic Produce farm!

Farmers Grant Gibbs and Albert Roberts of Pine Stump Farm in Omak will demonstrate a full service tune-up on two Massey Ferguson tractors during this hands-on workshop. An optional one-hour torch, stick and wire feed welding class will immediately follow the farm walk. For more information on this and our other farm walks please Click Here!

We Have A New Website

You may have noticed our chic new look! We’ve added features such as intern and directory listings, an online library and classifieds. We hope you’ll take a look around. Only Tilth Producers members can create listings and access library posts. If you are a current member and have not received your username/password please contact us at: organic@tilthproducers.org or call 206-632-7506. Join Tilth Producers now for full access.

Farmers Grant Gibbs and Albert Roberts of Pine Stump Farm in Omak will demonstrate a full service tune-up on two Massey Ferguson tractors during this hands-on workshop. An optional one-hour torch, stick and wire feed welding class will immediately follow the farm walk. For more information on this and our other farm walks please Click Here!




You may have noticed our chic new look! We’ve added features such as intern and directory listings, an online library and classifieds. We hope you’ll take a look around. Only Tilth Producers members can create listings and access library posts. If you are a current member and have not received your username/password please contact us at: organic@tilthproducers.org or call 206-632-7506. Join Tilth Producers now for full access.

The 2012 Food & Farm Bill:  what’s going on this week?

The House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture is at work on its version of the 2012 Food & Farm Bill right now. (The Senate passed its version just a few weeks back)  Now is a crucial time for Congress to hear from you on what needs to be in the farm bill! The Committee on Agriculture has set up a comment box for constituents to submit their feedback – and it’s open to everyone!

Filling it out will take just a few moments – submit your comments today!

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• · America needs a farm bill that creates jobs and spurs economic growth - support programs like the Value Added Producer Grants Program by guaranteeing $30 million of mandatory funding per year.  VAPG provides seed money to help farmers innovate in agriculture and create jobs while securing a sustainable path to market-based farm profitability.

• · America needs a farm bill that makes healthy food widely available to all Americans - including schoolchildren!  We must provide flexibility for states to use existing food procurement programs to purchase fresh, healthy  food from local farmers and ranchers.

• · America needs a farm bill that protects our natural resources - protect the Conservation Stewardship Program from unfair funding cuts, and improve it by ranking applications solely on their conservation benefits. Farmers count on CSP and other conservation programs to conserve soil for future generations, keep water and air clean, and create habitat for wildlife – all while farming profitably.

• · America needs a farm bill that invests in the next generation of farmers and ranchers -guarantee $25 million per year in mandatory funding for the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program. We need a national strategy and commitment to support beginning farmer and ranchers entering agriculture.  With an aging farm population, now is the time to invest in the future of American agriculture by nurturing new agriculture start-ups.

• · America needs a farm bill that drives innovation for tomorrow’s farmers and food entrepreneurs - fund the Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative at $30 million per year in mandatory funding.  Investment in agricultural research is vital to continued productivity and innovation in growing and diverse sectors of American agriculture, such as organic agriculture.

Tell Congress:  it’s time for a better farm bill!

Click here to submit your comments!

Only Tilth Producers members can create listings and access library posts. If you are a current member and have not received your username/password please contact us at: organic@tilthproducers.org or call 206-632-7506. Join Tilth Producers now for full access.

Here are the guests, chowing down:

A close-up of the favorite entree, Laughing Crow Farm polenta with Blue Valley Meats sweet onion sausage, Seattle-grown garden greens, and caramelized onions:

And our featured speaker, Anne Schwartz, sharing Tilth’s policy legacy and inspiring all:

Please support our fabulous donors:

Nash’s Organic Produce
Applecart Fruits
Blue Valley Meats
Laughing Crow Farm
La Biondo Farm and Kitchen
Bainbridge Island Vineyards and Winery
Field Roast Grain Meat Company
The Essential Baking Company
Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream
Central Coop

You can view it online here. WARNING – it’s a big PDF.

You may have read last month about my trip to D.C. to attend the meeting at which the priorities in this platform were identified. Now that the platform has been released, I will fill in some more detail about what those priorities mean, especially to those of us in Washington State.

In a press release, NSAC staff write:

Farming for the Future spans nearly every title in the farm bill and reflects a comprehensive approach to farm policy reform that will –

- Create jobs and spur economic growth through food and farms.
- Invest in the future of American agriculture.
- Enhance our natural resources and improve agricultural productivity.
- Drive innovation for tomorrow’s farmers and food entrepreneurs.
- Make healthy food widely available today and for generations to come.

At the winter meeting, we set a course for achieving these priorities, that centers around a policy-making tool called a “marker bill”. American Farmland Trust provides this definition of marker bills:

A marker bill is a legislative bill that is used to introduce specific measures or issues into a larger legislative debate. While not intended to ever come to a vote on the floor, a marker bill is proposed as a “placeholder” for specific aspects of a larger bill. This allows legislators to include key provisions into the larger farm bill debate while it is still at the committee and subcommittee level. The more sponsors and cosponsors that sign on to a marker bill, the greater the legislative support for the specific measures that the marker bill represents, and the greater the chance that the specific measures will make their way into the larger farm bill.

Three key marker bills provide the focus for NSAC’s, and thus Tilth Producers’, policy advocacy strategy towards the priorities in this platform. They are the Local Farms, Food, and Jobs Act, the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Opportunity Act, and another soon-to-be released marker bill supporting sustainable agriculture research programs.

All of these marker bills support issues that matter to Tilth Producers members. We focused on the first two in a postcard campaign that you may have participated in at our 2011 Annual Tilth Producers Conference in Yakima. However, when I met with several legislators’ offices after the meeting in January, it was the third, the research marker bill, that caught the most attention.

Sustainable agriculture research matters to our legislators mostly because Washington State University excels at it and has succeeded in winning much competitive grant funding for this type of research. (Of course, Tilth Producers has been a driving force behind WSU’s organic and sustainable agriculture programs. The newest development in this area is an Endowment for Organic Research which will feature a Tilth Producers Fund.) We will continue working with our senators and representatives in D.C. to show support for sustainable agriculture research when the marker bill is developed. Stay tuned for updates on this topic!

I’m writing this from a plane somewhere over the midwest as I fly home from the most meetings I’ve ever had in three days. I came east to represent Tilth Producers at the winter meeting of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), a group working on federal farm policy which we joined in November to strengthen our own federal advocacy work. And after two days of that, I went to D.C. and lobbied, in one form or another, the entire Washington State congressional delegation. In one day – today! So, phew.

National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition Winter Meeting

The NSAC winter meeting (which was kind of like sixteen back-to-back regular-length meetings) seemed to have three main purposes: 1. Educating the members present about the policy issues facing sustainable agriculture right now, 2, Deciding policy priorities for the year, and 3. Developing strategy to achieve the priorities. It’s a Farm Bill year (the Farm Bill is the single largest piece of federal food and agriculture policy and is renewed about every 5 years), so the policies we discussed focused heavily on that.

The cool thing about that dry-sounding list of purposes is that because we did all that, and because NSAC and its member organizations are well-organized, smart, and experienced, some of the things we decided to work on this week will become federal policy, and in turn some of the machinery keeping the industrial food system in place will weaken. Somewhere in America, this year or next or maybe a decade from now, someone who might otherwise have taken another path in life will decide instead that it really will work for them to begin a farming operation growing healthy food without chemical inputs. And someone else, living in a city on a tight budget, will discover they have means to buy that food that they didn’t before. Because 68 of us sat on our butts and talked for two days.

I’m feeling inspired – can you tell? So, now want to hear about the priorities we chose? I’ll be posting updates about all of them for the next few months, so we might as well lay it all out on the table now:

Policy Priorities
- Supporting the local and regional food system-building Farm Bill policies in the Local Farms, Food, and Jobs Act
- Supporting the beginning farmer-enabling Farm Bill policies in the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Opportunity Act
- Another yet-to-be released marker bill supporting sustainable agriculture research programs
- Preserving working lands conservation programs, like CSP, EQIP, and CCPI
- Making sure food safety laws don’t inadvertently make sustainable agriculture illegal

Appropriations Priorities
- Making sure “mandatory” conservation funding isn’t cut during the appropriations process (an increasingly common practice known as CHIMPS – CHange In Mandatory Program Spending)
- Funding the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SARE)
- Funding the Value Added Producer Grants Program (VAPG)
- Funding the Grain Inspection, Packers, and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA) which enforces fair competition rules for the livestock industry

I know when I look at this highly technical and acronym-ridden list, it’s hard to envision it all adding up to the truly sustainable food future those in that room held as a common vision. After we decided on these priorities, it came time to discuss how we will decide, after the Farm Bill gets written, whether to endorse it as a coalition or not. The Farm Bill is an incredibly complicated and disjointed piece of policy, full of all sorts of issues. How many wins are enough? How many losses too many?

As a seasoned advocate in the room cynically pointed out, “every Farm Bill is a failure when looked at in terms of the world we want to achieve”. In the same sense, no matter how we tally the score at this point, industrial agriculture is ahead. That didn’t happen overnight, and neither will the resurgence of sustainable ag. But hey – we’re on our way! And now I know how it’s done.

Lobby Day

I left the beautiful retreat center in Maryland where we came through all these deliberations early this morning for five in-person meetings with and six letter deliveries to the senators and congresspeople who represent Washington State. This was my third time lobbying in D.C. and my first time doing it without anyone else along with me. My first meeting, with Norm Dicks’ agriculture legislative assistant, went okay – I was a little shy and didn’t connect real well with the staffer, he was unfamiliar with the marker bills (the first two above) I brought in asking for co-sponsorship, and the meeting ended quickly.

Then I met with Senator Maria Cantwell. And I don’t mean her ag aide, although he was there, too. She had a constituent coffee scheduled that happened to coincide with my one day in D.C. so I went, expecting to have 30 seconds to make a quick pitch while she shook my hand for a picture. As it turned out, only four other constituents came to the coffee: a couple concerned about a biomass mill polluting their town, an advocate for better domestic violence intervention services for men, and a man showing his Australian nephew the American political process. So I got about five minutes to speak directly with the Senator about the importance of sustainable local food systems!

She gets it. Not only did she tell me she shops at PCC, she even articulated the connection between eating healthy, organic food and decreased health care costs. She told a story about losing a friend to brain cancer, the cause of which her doctors attributed to “pesticides”. And since her update to the group had focused heavily on jobs, we talked about the importance of ag in the Washington State economy and how improving our local food infrastructure and supporting beginning farmers would create more jobs. What’s more, Paul Wolfe, her ag aide who I met with earlier this month in Olympia (long story), chimed in to help explain and promote the marker bills. I think she may co-sponsor one or both – fingers crossed!

Speaking with Maria Cantwell, I grew up a little. I got over my general star-struckness at being in D.C. and talking with people in government, and found myself able to really just chat about issues that matter to me. All my following meetings were relaxed, friendly, and comfortable. Staffers (the rest of the meetings were with staffers) were frank with me about their own knowledge of the issues (which ranged widely) and the political feasibility of what I asked of them and I was able to respond in kind.

I am returning ready to harness this power that really, every American citizen has that we give away to corporate lobbyists way more than we should, to directly address our congressional representatives. If constituents ask, lawmakers respond. We’ve got a lot of asking to do. Let’s get started!

We have a chance to win our right to know about GMOs in our food in Washington State, but we must act fast!

Bills to label GMOs have been introduced in the House (HB 2637) and Senate (SB 6298).

SB 6298 is scheduled for public hearing in the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Water & Rural Economic Development at 10:00 AM on Thursday, January 26, 2012.

HB 2637 is scheduled for public hearing in the House Committee on Agriculture & Natural Resources at 8:00 AM on Friday, January 27, 2012.

We need you to get these bills passed! Here’s what you can do:

1. Write your state reps to ask them to cosponsor the bills.
2. Write your state senators to ask them to cosponsor SB 6298.
3. Call your state reps to ask them to cosponsor HB 2637.
4. Call your state senators to ask them to cosponsor SB 6298.
5. Come to the hearings in Olympia! RSVP for a bus ride from Seattle to Olympia Thursday. RSVP for a bus ride from Seattle to Olympia Friday.
6. Donate to the Organic Consumers Fund so we can reimburse the travel costs of supporters who couldn’t otherwise attend the hearings.
7. Donate to Tilth Producers so we can keep letting you know about key advocacy opportunities! (Write “policy” in the “purpose” field.)

Learn more and get involved at GMOFreeWashington.com.

It’s not too late to save these great programs that channel money into our farm economy and feed hungry people!

Come to lobby day!
- Tuesday, January 10th, we will be heading down to Olympia to let our congresspeople know we need them to put these programs back in our state budget
- Contact policy intern Ariana Taylor-Stanley if you can come: ariana [at] tilthproducers [dot] org or 206.660.8958
- Producers from Central Washington (districts 12, 13, and 15) especially needed!

Can’t come to lobby day? Call!
See this action alert from the Washington Sustainable Food and Farming Network.

Want more information about the Farmers’ Market Nutrition Programs?
See this great flyer from WSFFN

We can do it!

This Tuesday, November 22nd, Tilth Producers is partnering with the Northwest Farm Bill Action Group to hold a rally and meeting with Senator Patty Murray’s King County Director to ask for a Farm Bill that works for small farms, healthy communities, and a clean environment.

Here are the details for the event:

When:
Tuesday, November 22nd, 2:00 PM

Where:
Pike Place Market, Seattle
Rally at Victor Steinbrueck Park
2001 Western Avenue
(grassy knoll at the north end of Pike Place Market near Virginia St.)

How:
A small group will discuss our policy priorities with Murray’s King County Director while strolling together through Pike Place Market. At the same time, a rally will be taking place at the north end of the market withe the same goals in mind. The small group will join the rally, where all will present the County Director with hundreds of signed postcards from farmer and urban constituents as well as the “WE FARM” poster created at the Tilth conference with messages from Washington farmers.

We would love to have farmers there to share their stories! If you are interested in participating, please contact Policy Intern Ariana Taylor-Stanley at ariana@tilthproducers.org or 206.660.8958, or just show up Tuesday.

Can’t be at the rally? See this blog post to take action by phone!