11 COMMUNITY-DRIVEN TEAMS

The purpose of this team is to promote and support a growing number of farmers and farms of different sizes in the Gallatin Valley. It will research and develop diverse pathways to farm ownership for those who want it and it will educate both the general public and the real estate community on the issues farmers face regarding land access. This is tied intimately to the financial system and how we best pursue a diverse array of public & private tools for financing farmers. This team will collaborate closely with the Community Investment Team.

This team will identify the components needed to enhance and expand the local food system from farmer to consumer. This could include anything from tools for storage, processing, distribution, and other mechanisms for enabling food procuring, farmer efficiencies, and customer education. One component could be shared equipment for initial harvest handling and another profit-making business opportunities to get food from farm to plate. One principle project for this team is fleshing out a year-round farm stand for Gallatin Valley.

Processing

Distribution

Commercial Kitchens

HRDC/Fork& Spoon/Indigenous Food Lab

Food waste management and composting

Connecting local and regional food security for benefit of farmer & eaters

Healthy Soil = Healthy Food = Healthy People 

A guiding principle of regenerative healthcare is that a nutrient dense, properly prepared diet is the essential foundation for optimal health. The nutrition content found in food is directly tied to the health of the soil and how our food is grown and processed. This team will dig into food access equality, farming practices, cooking and food preparation and the many ways our food systems and healthcare systems are interconnected. Nutritious, high quality  food needs to be prioritized in our schools, hospitals and for our elderly community members.

This team will build on and modify the already active conversations surrounding “Development” in the Gallatin Valley.  It will bring together diverse players with a broad array of experience to integrate the Food Lens into our collective Development vocabulary.  It could include research and education about what other communities have done or are doing, and will seek creative avenues that may cause us to question old assumptions about what is legal, desirable, and possible in our changing society.   It will build ideas around a realization that current trends in mainstream Bozeman do not necessarily reflect future trends for all of Bozeman, Gallatin Valley, and Montana communities.

This team will work to build relationships with neighboring town and county governments as well as the state government with the food filter in mind. It will work to protect and/or change zoning laws in a way that allows for future urban and local agriculture, consider current litigation regarding state vs local control on development in light of food system decision making, and work on expanding the vocabulary of what kinds of development could take place by putting pressure on the City to seek different developers willing to consider local food resilience. This team will also determine the viability and community desire for a Local Food Council in Gallatin Valley to coordinate private and public efforts.

This team will research & promote best methods for both increasing and strengthening community gardens in our neighborhoods. It will ask willing participants to make their own wishlist of what they would like to see in their neighborhood with the food lens in mind and facilitate communication with relevant HOAs and regulatory bodies to implement those visions.

This team will engage the outdoor community to connect the dots between ourselves, our food choices and the health of the land and waters where we recreate. Being in nature and eating nourishing, local food is healing and it's a way that we connect to place and our community. Let’s engage outdoor recreation folks to use our muscles to volunteer on farms, food banks and at community gardens and implement ways to get farmers enjoying outdoor recreation. 

This team will build on the considerable planning and infrastructure work related to water resources that has already taken place in the Gallatin Valley.  It will include interdisciplinary expertise that may both question and affirm much of the  work that is already underway, with an eye toward integrating Food Lens ideas, including a regional conception of the term “Food Security”.  New strategies such as creative gray water management, roof water collection, novel water conservation ideas, and integrated water and home- or community-garden mechanisms  are among the many examples for possible expansion of our community water use ideas.

This team engages the community through visuals & media, thus creating and disseminating the public identity and spirit of the Food Lens concepts. This team integrates and connects information from all of the Food Lens teams and distills it into shareable information for both educational purposes and calls for action. This team is seeking artists of all mediums, story-tellers, writers, and content creators.

This team explores the relationship between the Food Lens mission and all of the educational entities in Gallatin Valley, from food purchasers to food educators. The team will explore ways to integrate food system development with the whole range of community education organizations and find and develop avenues for collaboration.

This team exists as the gathering ground for all Food Lens followers, to host a monthly conversation/gathering around good food & serving as the continual reminder of why we bother with doing this at all. The guiding points of this team stem from what follows:

Given the magnitude of our dependence on food imports (>90% of Montana’s current food supply is imported), some say it is futile to aim toward greater local food independence and resilience; that “only national-scale action is significant.” While that perspective has merit, it’s incomplete, and thus flawed.

Many realities compel inspiration and action in a local food lens in spite of the daunting challenges. These include:

• Food quality and diversity matters for our health, fairness, and joy

• Understanding the origins and efforts behind nutrition can influence every facet of our social/economic/political/environmental  frameworks and build on the nonpartisan common ground that food represents. 

• We are achieving “very cheap food” at a very high cost.  Concentration in the food industry has achieved near-monopoly status and the  costs to the least privileged among us are profound.  Like it or not, humans and other animals ultimately all share the costs of social and environmental degradation.

Embedded in those three bullet points is a vast array of life experience; libraries of food and farming literature; and conflicting predictions. Food Lens embraces that complexity and uncertainty, and identifies a pragmatic rationale for joining forces toward the visions we can see through a local Food Lens.