Notes from the Editor
By Julia Van Soelen Kim, with David Lewis and Paulette Swallow
This spring 2015 issue of Grown in Marin News focuses on the often unseen parts of our local food system—processing, distribution, and wholesale exchanges. These are essential nodes in the complex system that moves food from our farms to our plates.
Processing not only includes turning fresh fruits and vegetables into cooked, canned, and frozen products, it also includes slaughtering livestock animals, as well as butchering, cutting, and wrapping meat into smaller, more manageably-sized items for transport and sale. Slaughterhouses are hard to come by, and facilities that process small batches of locally raised, Organic, and grass-fed animals are rare. We are lucky to have one such facility right here in the North Bay, Marin Sun Farms, based in Petaluma. Read about Marin Sun Farms in an interview with David Evans, owner of the facility and Marin County rancher, by UCCE County Director David Lewis.
Learn about the wholesale industry in an article by UCCE Food Systems Advisor, Julia Van Soelen Kim, and then read more about one recent event co-hosted by UCCE to educate farmers on the topic in the article, "Tour connects farmers with wholesale buyers", reported on by Ching Lee and originally appearing in AgAlert by the California Farm Bureau Federation.
It takes a complex system to get food from Marin County fields all the way to our dinner plates, and we hope that this issue of Grown in Marin News shines a little spring light on these relationships that make our local food system possible.