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Hudson Valley Harvest: Transparency is Key to Scaling Local Food
Hudson Valley Harvest, the leading local food company in the tristate area (New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey), has grown to fill this niche. Paul Alward, a farmer of 10 years, co-founded the company in 2011 with three friends who met at farmers markets in New York. According to Alward, now the chief executive officer of Hudson Valley Harvest, the company “grew organically from the market system.” Embracing transparency, traceability, and sustainability, Hudson Valley Harvest serves food stores such as Whole Foods Market and FreshDirect, and universities such as The New School in New York City.
When asked what a good food system looks like, Alward says, “I think it’s one filled with information. The most effective tool is information. Let the consumers decide.” To this end, the company emphasizes transparent labeling that not only identifies both product and producer, but also includes information on proximity and processing.
Hudson Valley Harvest has grown from about 10 partnerships with farmer friends to more than 50 farms harvesting more than 6,000 acres. Seasonality and year-round availability were big challenges at first, but by embracing technology for frozen foods and reinventing infrastructure, the company has scaled their business model and achieved greater operating efficiency. “We found very early on that, as a start-up, we weren’t built for mainstream stores right away,” says Alward. “[We therefore] went to small independent stores where the owners were present.”
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Local Production Means Jobs and Prosperity
Local Production Means Jobs and Prosperity
With over 93 million unemployed working age adults in America and the economy beginning to go negative again, if you are fortunate enough to have a job it may not last much longer. It is easy to keep a positive attitude about the economy when you get a paycheck every week but life after the paychecks stop will change your outlook a great deal. That is the reality that is about to overtake the working class in the coming months.
The primary mechanism that has tipped the economy onto a downhill trajectory is the route that circulating money has taken in the past few decades. In the past much of the money was kept in circulation in the local economy resulting in the creation of many local jobs. With the new corporate model, most of the profit is siphoned out of the local economy and goes to wall street profiteers. This has resulted in the destruction of many local jobs while the few at the top of the wealth pyramid get richer much faster as time goes on.
The only way a nation can maintain a middle class is to keep money circulating in the local arena. The lack of this local circulation has finally caught up to the middle class and it has begun to shrink at an alarming rate. If the corporate model plays out to the end, it will mean the total destruction of the middle class and the beginnings of a two tiered system where there are a few very wealthy persons lording over a very large poverty stricken majority. That is where we are heading.
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Inspiration For the Burned-Out Localizer
Richard Heinberg wants you to “learn to be successfully and happily poorer.” Photo: video screenshot.
Inspiration For the Burned-Out Localizer
While Marx predicted that socialism would follow capitalism, Richard Heinberg predicts the next thing will be localism.
“All roads appear to lead eventually to localism; the questions are: how and when shall we arrive there, and in what condition? (And, how local?),” Heinberg writes in his latest book, Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels.
But that’s not what’s new in this collection of Heinberg’s essays. Anyone following the Transition movement has been hearing for nearly a decade that more active local economies are the inevitable future once the triple threat of climate change, peak oil and economic crisis topples global industrial capitalism as we know it. The message came through loud and clear in 2008 with The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins and the world’s local future has been a core tenet of Transition ever since.
What’s new about Afterburn is that it offers two things that Transitioners or anyone else who forecasts a more local future needs today: inspiration and advice for the future that’s better than most of what you’ll read elsewhere.
Inspiration
These days, with gas prices hovering around $2.50 a gallon and all the talk about cheap gas from fracking, if you still care about peak oil, then you’re going to be pretty lonely. It’s easy to feel like you’re the crazy person for seeing an end to fossil fuels and thinking it’s a big deal when everybody else acts like the party of cheap energy and economic growth is going to last forever.
– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2015/06/inspiration-for-the-burned-out-localizer/#sthash.LLWef4Ru.dpu
After Years Without a Grocery Store, Greensboro Neighbors Are Building One Themselves—And They’ll Own It by Dave Reed — YES! Magazine
This article is presented as part of New Economy Week, five days of conversation around building an economy that works for everyone. Today’s theme is “The New Economy Is Close to Home.”
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A still from a video in which residents of northeast Greensboro speak about their support for the Renaissance Food Co-op.
In the late 1990s, the local Winn Dixie that had served the neighborhoods around Philips Avenue for many years closed down. Winn Dixie and other large grocery chains had divided up market territory, resulting in the closing of some stores despite their profitability. The loss of this Winn Dixie turned Northeast Greensboro into a food desert.
For more than 15 years, there were many efforts to lure a new grocery store into the space. However, while the store would be profitable, it wouldn’t be profitable enough to satisfy the demands of the shareholder-based economy of a large corporation. Fed up with essentially begging for access to affordable, quality food, residents of this predominantly African-American and low-income neighborhood decided to open their own grocery store.
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