local food

Case studies and tips on small farm financing

July 20, 2012
Case studies and tips on small farm financing

Financing smaller farms: New resources for lenders who want to learn and activists who want to promote.

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Small Farms, Local Food Getting Some Hot New Technology

May 19, 2012
The field of small farm business services is growing for Jane Bush's Apple Schram Organic Orchard in Charlotte and many other diversified operations focused on local markets.

In a sign of changing times, the field of business products and services available to the local food set is now popping with entrepreneurs and innovations. This new business-to-business lineup is helping farms leapfrog over many food market barriers and establish an entirely new playing field.

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Food Innovation District: New Economic Gardening Tool

April 6, 2012
Cherry Blossom Time, Benzie County Michigan, photo by John Clement Howe. http://tiny.cc/bgmccw

Toolkit in process: How communities can make space for local food and farm entrepreneurs to co-locate, collaborate, and grow.

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Lenders learn how to bank on small farms, local food

February 3, 2012
Lenders learn how to bank on small farms, local food

 Financing team offers training as part of healthy food initiative  By Patty Cantrell  Nic Welty employs himself full time year-round raising lettuce, spinach, and other leafy greens in three low-cost passive solar greenhouses, which together cover less than one acre of land. His Nine Bean Rows farm near Traverse City, MI, is one of many [...]

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Michigan cities tangle with state’s Right to Farm Act

January 15, 2012
Michigan cities tangle with state’s Right to Farm Act

Michigan cities navigate around state’s Michigan Right to Farm Act to zone for urban agriculture.

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Pure Michigan coming to MI agriculture

January 15, 2012
Pure Michigan coming to MI agriculture

Pure Michigan is one of the strongest destination brands in the world. Now Michigan farmers can use it to connect with shoppers.

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Making way for cottage food entrepreneurs

November 4, 2011
Making way for cottage food entrepreneurs

Nayyirah Shariff is on her way to an entrepreneur’s life of making signature products, employing local people, and investing in her home state of Michigan. The young woman from Flint has her marching orders from customers who have lined up every week to buy her sweet and savory fresh-baked, organic artisan breads. Now she’s putting [...]

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Wanted: Grassroots Push for Good Food Programs

October 28, 2011
Renee DeWindt sources dozens of local farm products as school food service champion in Michigan's Benzie and Onekama schools.

Michigan residents will play an important role in the 2012 Food and Farm Bill. The butterflies, young farmers, and school lunches need you, Michigan.

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No foothold for Wal-Mart in Germany. But local food still loses.

October 13, 2010
No foothold for Wal-Mart in Germany. But local food still loses.

Five years ago, the international discount giant Wal-Mart started setting up shop in Germany, one of the last frontiers on Wal-Mart’s road to world domination of consumer product and grocery sales.

Today, Wal-Mart’s blue and white megastores are nowhere to be seen in this land of thousands of brands of local sausages and beer. But it was no local-economy protecting protestors that sent the big retailer packing. Quite the opposite.

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