Group's expansion to market food grown locally

When Ruth Chantry sets up her produce and eggs at farmer's markets in eastern Nebraska, customers don't ask the same questions they used to.

They ask about exactly how the food was produced, what its nutrition content is, where they got their products from.

"The questions that people ask now, as opposed to 13, 14 years ago, are much more savvy," said Chantry, whose Common Good Farm near Raymond has been in operation since 1997.

Chantry sees that shift as emblematic of a growing concern in consumers over where their food is coming from. And a movement to help local producers capitalize on that interest may be coming soon to Central Nebraska.

Chantry's farm is part of a group called Buy Fresh Buy Local, a national nonprofit with local chapters that work to connect those who produce fresh food with others in their area who sell and buy it.

Buy Fresh Buy Local Nebraska was launched in 2006 in the nine-county area of the Nebraska Great Plains Resource Conservation and Development Council, which includes Lincoln and Omaha.

The group has always intended to spread across the state, said Scott Willet, the Nebraska Great Plains RC&D's coordinator. Now, it's hoping to start with the Tri-Cities area as a pilot project for that expansion.

The South Central RC&D, which includes Grand Island, Hastings and Kearney, heard a presentation on the concept last week from Buy Fresh Buy Local officials.

Randy Gunn, the RC&D's coordinator, said he's working to set up an advisory committee to get a local chapter started. And the Loup Basin RC&D, which comprises nine counties north and west of Grand Island, is interested, too.

Gunn and Loup Basin RC&D Coordinator LeRoy Jons said they see the program as a way to keep more food dollars in town while satisfying a desire for quality, locally produced food.

"I think it's just a another marketing tool for people in production ag," Jons said. "It's a direct-market route."

Farmers are often unaware of the local demand for their products, Willet said. Even if they are, they rarely know how to meet it.

"A farmer is a wonderful thing. He can grow anything, but he doesn't know how to sell it," Willet said. "He can take it to the elevator, but he's not a marketer."

That's where Buy Fresh Buy Local steps in. The program publishes an annual directory of producers and sellers of local food, and it produces marketing materials and labels for local food displays at grocery stores and farmer's markets.

In a more direct vein, it promotes farmer's markets and sets up community-supported agriculture arrangements, in which people buy shares of a farm in exchange for a regular delivery of its goods throughout the growing season.

Nebraska has six such farms, one of which is Chantry's. Though Common Good has been selling organic food to grocery stores, restaurants and consumers for more than a decade, Buy Fresh Buy Local has brought more interest in some of its lesser-known products, like its beef.

"I know I got calls that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise," Chantry said.

One of the program's greatest assets, its supporters say, is its potential for economic impact.

Small towns have long ago determined that persuading their residents to shop locally is critical to their success, Chantry said, and it only makes sense for that philosophy to spread to food.

A decade ago, she said, a refusal to shop at Wal-Mart might have been an extreme, activist statement in Nebraska.

"Now I think it's much more of a mainstream idea to keep dollars in your community," Chantry said. "People are getting more aware that where they're spending their money actually has an impact."

Billene Nemec, Buy Fresh Buy Local Nebraska's coordinator, said it's taken off, with membership among producers and vendors more than doubling over the past year to at least 70.

Of course, it has benefited from encompassing about half of the state's population in its small region. It remains to be seen how that success will translate to the state's less populous areas.

But Willet said he's confident the program will work well across the state because like Chantry, he believes Nebraskans have the local pride to support it.

"It's not only a food thing," Willet said. "It's a way-of-life thing. It's a local economy thing.”