Sustainable Agriculture - What We Need!

In order to not only allow, but to ENCOURAGE sustainable local agriculture in every county in the Roaring Fork Valley, we need the following:

1. Unlimited Greenhouses: Jerome Osentowski of Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute in Basalt, has demonstrated for nearly three decades, how to grow very diverse food crops, using greenhouses and outdoor forest gardens. There is very little we can grow without greenhouses. We MUST be able to put acres under greenhouse, if we are going to grow a vital local food economy.

2. Just like the old west, we need root cellars for winter food storage and bunkhouses for agricultural workers, located on ranches and farms. We are experiencing now the phenomenon of our children going off to college, some of them learning agriculture and coming back to help build a local food economy, but they are having great difficulty finding housing. Our market has priced them far out of the ability to obtain housing, and we must solve this, or we will continue to experience Brain-Drain - losing the knowledgable and enthusiastic people who want to grow our food!   Can we fix this?

3. We need some form of tax advantages for ranch owners to lease irrigated farmland for vegetable farming in addition to animal raising. This may come in many forms, but unless we do it, we are wasting lots of irrigated land for pleasure horses, rather than real food for people.

4. Bear problems: We need a common-sense strategy for dealing with occasional bear problems, rather than blanket laws criminalizing the planting of fruit trees.  If we want to develop a local food economy, we will have to find creative ways of dealing with (or simply allowing) bears having a food-scarce year in the high country, who visit our orchards and restaurant dumpsters.