Despite the Willamette Valley's capacity to produce a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, grains, and livestock, more than ninety-five percent of what the local populace eats comes from out of state. Considering that Lane County alone spends close to a billion dollars annually on food, this means a tremendous economic opportunity in local food production and sales is not being tapped. For this reason, one major facet of the Lane County Commons will be prompting local food production and addressing the lack of food system infrastructure in the region.
Agricultural Resource Center and Food Hub
Overview: Nowhere are the challenges caused by long-term resource mismanagement and environmental degradation more evident than in the realm of agriculture. Monoculture and industrial farming techniques have proven to be unsustainable. Topsoil loss, water shortages, and petrochemical dependency are now stressing global food production, creating increasingly less nutritious food, and raising the price of food worldwide. In the last five years, food security has progressed from an issue associated with developing nations to a concern for all nations, including the United States. Recent studies report that 2.5 percent of the U.S. population is undernourished. Oregon ranks among the worst ten states with 4 percent of its populace undernourished. Closer to home, one in five families in Lane County relies on the local food bank, Food for Lane County, for emergency food assistance, and almost a third of the County's children ate from an emergency food box at least once during this last year.
Currently Lane County's supply of food is heavily dependent on the global food system. Though we live at the south end of a lush fertile valley that has the agricultural potential to provide almost all of our food needs, more than 95 percent of what we eat is imported and travels on average 1500 miles to get here. With increasing concerns for an extended economic recession, growing unemployment, peaking oil production, the uncertainties of climate change, and toxin tainted foods, rejuvenating Lane County's food system is a way to increase our self-reliance, stimulate the local economy, and facilitate year-round emergency food availability. This kind of relocalization makes tremendous sense on all fronts and can be achieved by refocusing regional agriculture on food production and rebuilding local food system infrastructure.
These are both primary objectives of the Fairgrounds Repair Project and will be facilitated by using the fairgrounds' considerable space to create a regional agricultural resource center and food hub. Additionally, classes and workshops in food production, nutrition, preparation and preservation will be provided at the site in conjunction with the OSU Extension Service.
Implementation: The creation of a regional food hub at the fairgrounds involves deconstructing the current OSU Extension Service office building and replacing it with a regional agricultural center, building a year-round farmers' market, converting the existing Livestock Pavilion and Horse Barns into a minimum processing, food storage and distribution warehouse and aggregation depot, and building two medium-size dry-storage grain silos. The construction of this portion of the repaired fairgrounds will be implemented in three distinct stages over a period of three to five years.
The process will begin with the conversion of the existing Livestock Pavilion into a storage and distribution warehouse and the Horse Barns to the south of the pavilion into an aggregation and mimimum processing depot. The initial purpose of these changes would be to facilitate the buying of locally grown products by institutional cafeterias in Lane County (as proposed by the Governor's Oregon Solutions Lane County Food Distribution Project). Substantive contracts with local school districts, the University of Oregon, Lane Community College, and area hospitals will prompt local farmers to increase food crop production for these large buyers. Along with providing minimum processing capacity, the warehouse will act as an aggregation site and central distribution hub to institutional buyers with the intent of increasing product delivery efficiency and minimizing food freight miles. After weekly or bi-weekly institutional contracts are filled, excess produce at the warehouse will be made available to the public. This would gradually include satellite farmers' markets in the area, local food markets, restaurants, and individual buyers.
Once the distribution warehouse and aggregation depot have become a smooth running and self-sufficient enterprise, created evidence of a growing clientele of private buyers, and substantiated local food production potentials, implementation of the year-round farmers' market strategy would begin. This process would also occur in stages, starting with a temporary, exterior market space to further test demand. Once this temporary market has achieved a viable clientele, one of the exhibit halls along the north bank of the Amazon Creek could be deconstructed into a covered, open-air structure for a second stage of market testing for the winter. Should this stage show further evidence of the need for a year-round farmers' market, construction of a permanent year-round market would begin.
Construction of the Regional AG Center office building could begin at any time sufficient office space leases could be arranged to offset amortized construction costs. The grain silos would be the last pieces to be put in place.
These structures will add five critical pieces of infrastructure to our regional food system. The regional agricultural center would help coordinate agricultural activities in the region and centralize agricultural information sources and facilitators. The market would prompt local buying and provide local farmers with year-round retail sales opportunities. The grain silos would be a buffer from emergency shortages. And the distribution warehouse and minimum processing aggregation depot would provide further sales opportunities for local farmers and become a wholesale source for local institutions that participate in large-scale local food purchasing, as well as a distribution hub for satellite farmers' markets and other food markets in the area.