Local Food for Local People:
A Big-Picture Vision for Taos County Food Security
Updated November 2019 toddwynward@gmail.com From TCF [Taos Community Foundation] and TiLT [Taos Initiative for Life Together]
Our Common Framework: As we head into an uncertain future, we believe that one of the most basic parts of our community’s economy, health, resiliency, connectedness and well-being will be a robust local food web that uplifts all our region. This won’t happen overnight, but we will begin now.
Our Common Vision: Through this robust local food web, we intend to craft the regional, resilient future we want by producing good food, preparing good meals, fostering good jobs, nurturing good land, and building good relational bridges across economic, cultural and racial divides.
Our Common Schedule: teams meet and act; provide progress update at quarterly all-group gathering.
Our Common Aims: 10 Objectives we seek to realize in Taos:
Expand Farm to School capacity, so our region can provide local meals for ALL our kids
Publish an online Taos Food Directory mapping all aspects of the Taos County foodscape. Develop and populate a LocalFoodWeb App partnered w this Food Directory—a nimble, responsive, self-directed, up-to-the-minute network able to transform our foodshed in Taos.
Develop an active Food Policy Council that works w local and state governments to advocate for better regional ag policies and incentives
Form a multi-year regenerative agriculture cohort that offers peer teaching, support, shared equipment and best practices among practitioners; education to the curious; and demonstration plots that exhibit practices and collect data from methods-in-process.
Increase local staple grain production, reviving Taos as “bread basket” for the region
Increase local food available in winter: four-season growing storage, & distribution
Form thriving farmer/rancher cooperatives as powerful economic umbrellas
Make real a modern Taos Food Hub—a large facility providing shared aggregation, processing, packaging and distribution. Aspects might include: a grain mill; on-site bakery; a mobile matanza; a drive-in processing/curing facility for specialty meats; community-scale fruit juicing and distribution; large-scale food dehydrator.
Build a robust Bioregional Food Covenant network—a loosely affiliated support network for people who vow to eat locally. Related to this, we also intend to foster the Watershed Way, a covenanted, intercultural social-spiritual movement that re-orients its members’ tastebuds, habits, and schedules so that together we re-learn to live in season and live in place like people have for time immemorial.
Form an Organizing Team that guides and facilitates the growth of this movement over time.
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Some other objectives that are emerging:
Develop a robust regional seed revolving “library,” a regenerating supply of local seed for local growers
Develop Leadership Farms offering paid education and training internships [i.e. May - October]
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Local, healthy, affordable food for all of us in Taos County. Does this seem out of reach? Hardly. But it will take a change of our habits, a change of our economy, a change of our community, a change of our capacity. I wonder: Can we get 5000 Taosenos sourcing 50% of their food from within 100 miles by summer 2022? Let’s give it a try, and see what happens!