There are a number of food related employment needs in our region.

1. Make it easier for local to produce food within city limits: allow urban agricultural uses WITHIN neighborhoods. Allow food grown in community gardens to be sold.
2. Incentivize needed components of a local food system: community kitchen (this could be achieved at any semi-public building with a commercial kitchen and the addition of specific canning equipment), slaughterhouse/processing facility (right now you have to drive WAY OUT of the region to turn your good animals into good food)
3. Protect valuable agricultural land from development
4. A Food Hub: right now there is no large scale way for farmers to get there food into our wholesale markets. There are working models for food hubs. This could be spearheaded with the right leadership, some federal funding (which is available more often than one might think) and a few key partners
5. Loosen regulations on small scale producers: it's the big guys that are poisoning us. small scale farms are self-regulatory
6. Systems policies that prioritize locally produced food: right now, large partners like the school system are only allowed to purchase a small percentage of their food needs locally. that's backwards. the more we try to buy, the more farmers will produce. this requires a food hub