Food in Boston

In my new-ish capacity as the person responsible for most things electronic at The Food Project, I met the other day with Kelley O’Connor of Massachusetts Local Food to discuss possible overlap of our work. In particular, we at TFP maintain a list of local farmers and the things they produce on their farms, which is also going to be one of the many pieces of Mass Local Food’s job.

From my perspective, the issues with our current list is that it’s a bear to update, being just a bunch of static pages, and that there’s some duplication between it and other people’s lists. Seems like everyone involved (farmers, local food buyers, and food organizations like us) would be better off with a more up-to-date and trustworthy listing, which is only going to happen if keeping it up to date is a simple process, and if there wasn’t so much potential confusion between the various farm listings (more on that below).

We spent a fair amount of time just trying to put together a picture of the different parties already engaged in providing online lists of MA farmers (for my benefit; Kelley has this stuff down cold). It turns out that most regions in MA are covered by one site or another, mostly not overlapping with one another, though there’s certainly duplication.

Massachusetts farm listings:

• Berkshire Grown: their own listings
• CISA in Western Mass: listings are provided through farmfresh.org
• The Food Project’s Boston-area listings, which we maintain ourselves
  
• Essex County & Merrimack Valley has their own listings
  
• SEMAP listings also through farmfresh.org

Side note - after Kelley walked me through this list & I dug around, I noticed that the Mass Department of Agriculture has all of this info and more.

There are also some national listings which include Massachusetts farms:

• the Eat Well Guide has a few
  
• Local Harvest has many
  

It’s pretty silly to be duplicating all this info, but it’s not immediately obvious how to effectively share data while still presenting the relevant parts through existing channels (to wit, the above sites). For the Mass Local Food project’s purposes, the easiest thing would be some facility tied into the local food coop software that they’ll be running their operations through. If that was done in a modular fashion, it might also be a labor saver for all these sites that are either maintaining manual lists of farms, or maintaining their own web databases.

We also tossed around the idea of a standard Farm Markup Language for exchanging updates. FML, anyone?

Next steps include digging further into the food coop software, and continuing to reach out to potential partners on the information-sharing and web DB aspects. This isn’t the most urgent project on my pile, but it’d be great to come up with something over the winter that put us in a position to do smart things for the ‘09 season.

Update: while I hope it’s implied, I realized this post is incomplete without an explicit acknowledgment of all the hard work done by TFP staff and interns to assemble and keep our guide up to date, as well as the maintainers of all the other farm lists mentioned. When looking forward to possible improvements, it’s all too easy to take for granted the labors that got us where we are.