The College has been buying local produce for 20 years through a local company called Squash Inc., and has recently been working on significantly increasing the amount of locally grown food available in the dining hall, adding items such as honey, jam, beef, maple syrup and apples, all acquired from local producers.
Director of Media Relations Paul Statt opened the conference by briefly describing the College's involvement in the program. "It's almost not newsworthy that Amherst is buying local produce," he said. "In fact, we were founded almost 200 years ago by local farmers."
Statt was followed by Nancy Bagley, a farmer and the coordinator of a farm-to-school program for Czajkowski Farms in Hadley. She described the program, which has been delivering locally grown foods to local schools, including Amherst, Smith and Hampshire Colleges and Amherst's public schools, for over a year. She also addressed the versatility of their program, saying that they routinely pick up new crops and new farmers to meet institutional demands. "What we don't get from our farm, we get from others," she said.
Next to speak was CISA's Executive Director Annie Cheatham, who described the relationship between farmers and institutions such as the College. She said that 16 percent of all farmers in the area sell to institutions, but that another 30 percent were willing to participate, indicating that there was a large untapped market. She also emphasized that there were various difficulties for farmers who wished to deal with institutions. "There's a lot of potential, a lot of opportunities, and a lot of barriers to overcome," she said. As for the College's contribution, she said, Amherst spends 10 percent of its $1 million food budget on locally grown foods.
Congressman John Olver of Massachusetts served as the next speaker. This is the third year that the grant has been given to a group working to sustain local agriculture, and is arranged as part of a partnership with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). He said that the grants were meant to offer a much-needed helping hand to American farmers. "The goal is to improve their standard of living, to increase the income of their farms and to sustain them into the future," he commented, adding that the health of our farms would be important for the country long into the future. Olver then presented Cheatham with the ceremonial check for $50,000.
The final speaker was Daniel Beaudette, the Director of the Community and Business Program for the local USDA. He was not only involved in CISA's work through the USDA, but was also among the stakeholders that created CISA. Beaudette shared that he was happy to see that the organization had progressed so far. He discussed many of the specific goals of CISA's program and what the grant money would be used for, as well as the obstacles that CISA's work would help farmers overcome.
Beaudette also described the difficulty of dealing with large institutions such as colleges and universities, which are often managed by large corporations that are difficult to access. "You don't just drive up to the back door of one of these institutions and sell your crops," he said. Beaudette said that CISA hoped to give farmers a place to go for "sophisticated advice" that they would need to deal with institutional buyers.