Food. It is perhaps the most important consideration that folks concerned about social and economic instability have.  Especially considering the fragility of the current food system.

When it comes to establishing food security and a resilient food network for yourself you can choose to become the primary provider of your own food, but most of us do not start out with the skills and resources to achieve this.  We have depended on farmers to grow the food we eat.

For thousands of years farmers have tended the soil, nourished the plants and animals, and kept the hungry people of their communities fed.  The community knew their farmers and bought their food directly from their farmers.

But these days we’ve lost our connection to our land, our food, and our farmers. With it we have lost the ability to keep our food system accountable, sustainable, and humane. As our communities grew into packed cities it became harder and harder for us to produce our food ourselves or get our food directly from a local farm. We replaced our direct relationship with the farmer with big box stores and we added the cost of the stores and supply lines to our food prices. These additional marketing and distribution network costs now take over half of every food dollar and the pressure to lower prices to compensate for all these added costs (not to mention monetary inflation) meant many farms went out of business. The survivors began to use irresponsible farming practices that hurt the water supply, deplete the soil, perform worrying chemical and genetic experiments on the food, treat animals inhumanely, and in the end produce nutritionally inferior foods. In consequence it has become harder to trace where our food comes from, whether it is responsibly and humanely raised and whether it is even safe!

During times of instability this unhealthy, unsustainable food production model with its sprawling distribution network is the achilles heel of the urban world. Many see the writing on the wall that depending on this model continuing smoothly forever is horribly mistaken.

Some choose to move out into the country and start growing their own food, but most people without the skills and resources to achieve this don’t know where to begin.  There is this insurmountable gap between the centralized-food-system dependent lifestyle and the resilient sustainable rural lifestyle.  Farmmatch is meant to be a bridge between the two.

FarmMatch is a website that connects people to local direct-selling farms and allows them to order their food from that farm's own online store. It allows the simple convenience of the modern online store to facilitate the wholesome old-world relationship between the farmer and their customers. It secures a direct source of farm fresh food for buyers and it makes farms financially sustainable by cutting out the middle-men.

Everything is about relationships. And food is no different.

The farms on FarmMatch sell direct and make deliveries to their local areas and usually also deliver into the nearby cities. So food buyers in the city can build relationships with a farmer that continues on if they decide to move out to the country for the security and quality of life.

Having a direct relationship with a farmer means a nationwide food crisis is not nearly as concerning since you are not a part of the centralized national food system. There is only one link in your supply chain and that is your farmer. The only way to be more certain of your food is to produce it yourself. And even if you grow much of your own food, it is good to network with local farms for things you might not have as well as having a contingency for crop failures. Those who have an established relationship with a sustainable local farm will be the ones who have priority access to the limited supply of food when demand is high.

These farms can also avoid most of the overregulation of the food system.  The obnoxious busybodies of the government appear to be compelled to tell you what you can or cannot eat, but their primary mechanism of control is access to the grocery stores! If you buy direct from the farm many state’s enforcement mechanisms are avoided. Which is the way it should be since the accountability is direct and you don’t need a nosey third-party approving or disapproving of what you buy.

And even if there doesn’t end up being major shocks to the food system, don’t we want to have a more sustainable, accountable, and personal food system?  By buying directly from your local farmers you can take back the power from Big Ag, Big Chemical, Big Pharma, and Big Government and bring it back to the direct (and to me sacred) relationship between the farmer and the food eater.

Proper farming is a harmonious integration of the soil, the plants, the animals, the farmers, and the community that the farmers feed. It cares for and supports all of these vital contributors to the farm.  Please join us in becoming a part of the FarmMatch community and help us decentralize the food system by securing your food source today.

https://www.farmmatch.com

Aaron Ecklund is a Food System Decentralization Specialist at FarmMatch, Provide Technical Support for farms and customers using the software