The urban market for local produce must support more and better agriculture than CSAs

Wendell Berry's daughter, Mary Berry, suggests that urban consumers can help leverage a new agrarian revolution:

Urban people’s interest in where their food comes from, and the quality of it—their worry about poisoned food, soil loss, toxicity, etc.—is a good thing. Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs), farmers markets, urban gardens, community gardens and school gardens are also all good. The worry, to me, is that all of this is entrepreneurial. Too many CSAs in any given area can make it hard for a farmer to sell enough CSA shares to get by. Our work is to try to get farmers out of a faddish economy.

The other day, I was talking to a friend of mine who had the first CSA in Kentucky. He was saying that the CSA is a great model for a young farmer. He paid off his farm with a CSA. (He had borrowed the money in the 1980s, at 13 percent interest.) But he said, “You know what? It’s a young person’s game.” And that’s true, simply because it’s really hard work. He’s 55 now, sustainably logging on his own land and doing fine, but do we want farmers to quit at 55? No. We need a place for farmers, an economy for them to function in.

Those of us who live in the urban core need to do more than visit the Farmers Market and buy CSA produce; we need to hold major distributors and big chains accountable, especially as they spout advertising about buying local. We're a vital link in this growing sustainable food chain of produce raised in Davidson County. We have to be informed and ready to spend sustainably and smart. It is a youthful market we can help age well.

Whither a New Convention Center?

Blogging CM Emily Evans encourages Metro taxpayers to ask some very important questions about holes in the Mayor's plan to fund, to acquire land, to build the Music City Center in SoBro. She stipulates her own concerns about the concept:

While some have suggested that we can vote on land acquisition without committing ourselves to actually funding a new convention center, I tend to disagree. The land can only be used for a convention center and unless we are intentionally going to violate state law, we should probably be sure we can support - with all that entails - such a project. Doing otherwise is not good for our convention business, not good for our economy and not good for our taxpayers.

These are all important questions to which I would add: a) couldn't we have come up with a better design than a ripply big box and b) why couldn't the convention center itself have a broader use that would serve the neighborhood besides out-of-towners?

Council Member Says Church Held Hostage by Historic Overlay Bill

In his oppositional comments against council member Jason Holleman's overlay request to protect a historic church building from being replaced with a Rite-Aid tonight, Jim Gotto said that an overlay would stop church members from selling to a big box, which would make them "hostages." Mike Jameson retorted that as a boy scout he was taught to always leave a campsite better than he found it; and he encouraged the exiting church members, who were said to be in the gallery, to leave their campsite better than they found it by working with the Mr. Holleman to protect the community they are leaving. Gotto stated later that this bill needed to be pulled on first reading because church members are being "disenfranchised."

Holleman's bill was passed on first reading with 22 votes in favor.

This bill has been a subject of vigorous debate at the Nashville Charrette.