Push for Alaska Grown

Your recent editorial on Alaska Grown was printed in this morning’s Juneau Empire. You are right on. Rising fuel prices adversely affects many aspects of our lives, including the costs of industrial farming and the transportation of agricultural products over long distance (think globalization).

Writers, including James Howard Kuntsler and Bill McKibben, have correctly identified the renaissance of local economies, including local food production, as essential as society responds to increasingly expensive fuel. Local food production (think smaller scale and organic) reduces transportation costs and carbon emissions, helps build local businesses and retain money in the local economy and improves food security.

There is a grassroots movement across the country toward small-scale, community-based agriculture that represents the trend of the future. The opportunity for small-scale agriculture exists in the Mat-Su and around the state, and may self-start as response to market conditions.

Local government can help through zoning to retain productive land for growing, encouraging farmers markets and other means. The state can help with technical assistance, information, science and research, experimental stations, funding and so on. Public policy should view a renaissance in Alaska farming as comprised of smaller-scale enterprises, organize programs and assistance accordingly and build up from that base.

Thanks for your viewpoint, and I hope you will keep up the call.

Peter Freer

Juneau