Ag Forum: Growing healthy food for Michigan’s exposed families
Sirrine
Posted: Friday, Sep 26, 2014 5:54 pm
Ag Forum: Growing healthy food for Michigan’s exposed families
By Rob Sirrine
Record-Eagle.com
The overarching idea of a Northwest Michigan Food and Farming Network is: By 2020, a region’s food and tillage systems are some-more volatile and yield during slightest 20% of a region’s food.
Embedded within this idea is a shortcoming to safeguard that 100% of a residents have entrance to an ample, high-quality, healthy, and culturally different diet. Our segment continues to make extensive swell augmenting food entrance by programs such as: plantation to institution, food rescue and Double Up Food Bucks during farmers markets.
The Michigan Farmers Market Association (MIFMA) recently announced a module that has a intensity to raise these efforts: Hoophouses for Health. The Hoophouses for Health module “is designed to deliver exposed families to internal farmers markets to yield them with a resources they need to turn loyal, repeat customers.”
For those who aren’t good capable in tillage lingo, “hoophouses” are unheated greenhouses that offer to extend a flourishing season, mostly by a whole winter. Yes, even here in northwest Michigan, it is probable to grow cold-tolerant vegetables all year round.
The Hoophouses for Health module advantages exposed families by providing them with vouchers, distributed by Head Start agencies and other partners, to squeeze food constructed by farmers participating in a program. The module advantages farmers as well.
Farmers who pointer adult for a module accept a zero-interest loan to squeeze a hoophouse. At participating farmers markets, they accept a Hoophouses for Health vouchers for any product they have for sale constructed on their plantation (not only constructed in a hoophouse). The value of a vouchers is afterwards subtracted from their zero-interest hoophouse loan. Farmers have 5 years to “repay” a loan in this fashion. For information on hoophouses, listen to this MSU webinar recording: https://connect.msu.edu/p5bf30drnru.
The web page http://mifma.org/hoophouses-for-health/ includes a list of frequently asked questions, Hoophouses for Health focus for farmers meddlesome requesting for a program, and information for Farmers Markets and Head Start Agencies or village organizations meddlesome in participating. The site also lists participating Hoophouses for Health farmers and farmers markets.
While a list is sincerely short, a Leelanau Farmers Market Association recently submitted an focus to turn an “approved Hoophouses for Health farmers market.” Most expected commencement in 2015, exposed families will have a event to squeeze healthy, locally grown food during all 6 Leelanau Markets.
Dr. Rob Sirrine is a Community Food Systems Educator with Michigan State University Extension, a boss of a Grand Traverse Foodshed Alliance, and Chair of a NW MI Food and Farming Network.
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Friday, Sep 26, 2014 5:54 pm.