Connecting good food to local farmers (Copy)
Written by Valerie Dantoin, NWTC Sustainable Food & Ag System instructor and co-owner and operator at Full Circle Organic Farm
One of the goals of New Leaf Foods is to connect you with the most local, healthy food available. It is sometimes difficult to determine which farms are truly in line with growing healthy food, for all people, for generations. To that end, we are excited to share a new scorecard tool we’ll be using to help you make choices about where to spend your food dollars. The scorecard was developed by a team led by me, Valerie Dantoin. I am a New Leaf Foods board member and a faculty member at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College where I teach in the Sustainable Food & Ag System Program. I also co-own and operate Full Circle Organic Farm, a 200-acre farm about 20 miles west of Green Bay.
The scorecard is based on the membership standards for the SLO Farmers Cooperative, to which our farm belongs. These standards were drawn from other organizations including Wisconsin Food Hub Cooperative, the National Organic Program, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, and from Animal Welfare Approved (AWA).
The scorecard provides a rubric to rate farms, producers, or organizations based on just how local, how sustainable, or how organic they are. This helps give you information about who is growing or distributing your food. This is also an effort at transparency so you can see why New Leaf Foods is choosing to occasionally feature some of these producers and allies who meet high standards in their effort to bring you high-quality, local food. Trained volunteers at New Leaf will fill out the scorecard by interviewing and visiting applicant’s businesses. At New Leaf Foods, we are all about education, and we want to ensure that the growers we feature in our publications have goals and values that align with ours. You can read a farm’s scorecard on our New Leaf website and decide for yourself if that is a place to support when you compare it to other farms. Farms and businesses may also feature their “Leaf score” on their own websites.
Shown below is a scorecard for the SLO Farmers Cooperative member farms. SLO stands for Sustainable, Local, and Organic. This is a seven-year-old Cooperative that sells pork, beef, and chicken in an SLO-meat-share box.
SLO also operates a customizable vegetable CSA. Products from SLO are delivered by their partner– Farmers Best Home Delivery. A full article about the SLO Farmers Cooperative will be available in the next New Leaf Foods newsletter. In the meantime, visit their website at https://slofarmersco-op.com/.
SCORECARD for SLO FARMER COOPERATIVE
The scorecard provides a rubric to rate farms, producers, or organizations based on just how local, how sustainable, or how organic they are.
For a more detailed description of how a farm is scored, or if you know a farm or food business that would like to be scored according to this rubric, please contact Valerie at valerie.dantoin@nwtc.edu.
