Buy Local campaign takes root
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Jamie Rohda’s advice? Buy fresh. Buy local. Add the word “Nebraska,” and you have the recipe for a new marketing and outreach campaign being launched in the Lincoln and Omaha area this spring.
BY ART HOVEY | JournalStar.com
WAVERLY — If you want your tomatoes tough, the ones offered at Harvest Home Farm by Jamie and Norman Rohda might not be tough enough.
The Rohdas grow heirloom, non-hybrid varieties because they’re tender and tasty, not because they’re beyond bruising in a truck bouncing over hundreds of miles of highways.
“The number one priority with an heirloom is they taste good,” Jamie Rohda said.
Rohda’s advice to those who like her take on tomatoes could be summed up as easily as this: Buy fresh. Buy local.
Add the word “Nebraska,” and you have the recipe for a new marketing and outreach campaign being launched in the Lincoln and Omaha area this spring.
The idea is to better connect producers of fruits, vegetables and other locally grown foods in a nine-county area with grocery stores, restaurants, farmers markets, bed and breakfasts and other food outlets.
Producers pay a $25 fee for an approach that will use listings in an online food directory, along with brochures and other public relations tools. Those at the other end of the food-supply line also pay a fee, based on the size of their business.
Corinne Kolm, a former Cedar Rapids, Neb., farm girl, Wellesley College graduate and now a Lincoln-based candidate for a graduate degree in agro-ecology, is the paid coordinator for the food campaign.
If everything goes right, “I want to go full-time with this program,” Kolm said Monday.
So far the focus is on Nebraska’s largest cities and counties including Lancaster, Douglas, Butler, Cass, Polk, Sarpy, Seward, Saunders and York.
A range of cities that includes Kansas City and a grouping of about 15 states that includes Iowa are already part of the national framework for the Buy Fresh Buy Local approach.
In Nebraska, “Our goal is to take it statewide,” Kolm said.
One signal about things going right in this phase will be delivered by the March 30 deadline for producers and other participants to enroll.
“We have about 25 farmers right now,” Kolm said, “and we’re just starting taking memberships for business.”
At her dining room table and later in her early-season horticultural headquarters — a 100-foot long, plastic-lined, solar-heated enclosure called a high tunnel — Rohda displays the energy and enthusiasm it takes to endure a long growing season.
“I like to cook. I like to eat. I like to eat healthy,” she said.
Not to say that her endurance is never tested in a seasonal routine that also includes cut flowers and a regular Saturday presence at Lincoln’s Farmers Market. “Usually, it’s when it’s 100 degrees and I’m picking beans, and the sweat is literally running off the end of my nose.”
In mid-March, the weather is much cooler and the beginnings of dianthus flowers and the next crop of spinach in Rohda’s high tunnel might make a good metaphor for the new foods campaign. The season of success lies ahead.
Kolm points to a 2001 survey by the Food Processing Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as one way to measure potential. It showed that 95 percent of Nebraskans think it’s important to buy foods that support a local farm, and 98 percent want to buy local foods in grocery stores.
“There are very clear indications that Nebraskans want more local food,” Kolm said.
Reach Art Hovey at (402) 523-4949 or ahovey@alltel.net.
For informationFor more information about the Buy Fresh Buy Local campaign, call Corinne Kolm at 472-5273 or visit www.buylocalnebraska.org.
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