by Bonnie Preston

Since Maine’s town meeting season of 2011, 55 towns have passed the Local Food and Community Self Governance Ordinance (LFCSGO), which gives small farmers who sell directly to their customers an exemption to licensing and inspection requirements.

For some reason, the Maine Municipal Association (MMA), a statewide membership organization which provides an array of services to assist municipalities in their governance, has never supported the LFCSGO. The MMA doesn't set policy, but instead supports needs that are frequently beyond the scope of what small towns in particular can do for themselves. Yet they have recently recommended a seriously modified version of the LFCSGO to towns that ask for their advice on this issue.

On March 16, the Portland campus of the University of Southern Maine hosted the Maine Hunger Summit, and Local Food Rules was there.

Conference organizers invited us to participate to give our perspectives on how food sovereignty, or the ability of communities to control land use, production of food, and how it is sold or otherwise distributed--can help address hunger. Our two presentations drew an audience mostly made up of students. They listened intently, asked good questions, and stayed around after the presentations to talk with us.

One of our presenters, Suzanne Dunham, was the lead organizer for passing a Local Food and Community Self Governance ordinance in her town of Greenwood, Maine. Suzanne manages the local farmers market with her husband. She recounted how several people have used their town's ordinance, which allows unlicensed farmers to sell face-to-face with customers, to test a product to judge if it might be worthwhile to get licensed so it can be sold through more conventional retail channels. At least one farmer has moved from farmer's market to store distribution, adding to her family's financial well-being as well as adding economic development to the town. Other farmers and home-based food producers in town are simply happy to be able to use the farmers market for some legal extra income.

Craig Hickman, a Maine state representative who is a small farmer and B&B owner, told about his efforts to add a right-to-food amendment to the state constitution. This would ensure people's rights to feed themselves on a local level, bringing aspects of the Local Food Community Self Governance Ordinance statewide. 

Jesse Watson, a permaculturist, talked about how the intense focus of permaculture on improving the soil will enable more people to grow their own food, providing greater resilience to our food system.

Sonia Acevedo has a micro-farm in a poor town, and convinced people that farmers markets are not just for the elite. She said that in her town, poor people buy food from poor farmers, and it works; no one goes hungry.

Matthew Hoffman, head of the Food Studies Program at USM, is looking for more ways to connect us with his students. We were delighted to present to these committed young people, and look forward to future collaboration. Urban meets rural will be a win-win!

The Common Ground Fair, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardners Association’s huge celebration of all things agricultural and much, much more, takes place every year on the third weekend in September, drawing some 60,000 attendees to the Unity fairgrounds. This year Local Food Rules was there, presenting to a standing-room-only audience.

Their speakers were four of the dozens of town-level organizers who have brought the campaign's Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinances to Selectmen, Town Meetings, or City Councillors. Suzanne Dunham, Jesse Watson, Brooke Isham and Steve DeGoosh each told their stories and inspired listeners with tales of success in varying circumstances, and persistence when confronted by a hostile town government. 

There were many good questions from the audience, and Local Food Rules campaign coordinator and Alliance co-Vice Chair Bonnie Preston expects more ordinances will be passed as a result. The ordinance has now passed in 43 towns with at least one town in 14 of 16 counties in the state of Maine. 

Three of the Common Ground speakers will also take their stories to a November conference on relocalization for economic democracy--look for more info in our next e-newsletter. The Local Food Rules campaign is also organizing individuals who took charge of ordinance campaigns to talk to people in neighboring towns who are interested in the ordinance.

What has started as very local actions in very small towns has grown into a real drive to ensure food sovereignty for Maine people and communities, to protect and expand the state's small-farm economy, and to protect the health of people, environment, and soil. This is how grassroots organizing works, spreading quietly but inexorably from success to success.

So far this year the Local Food RULES! campaign has helped a dozen Maine towns pass local food and community self-governance ordinances, bringing the total across the state to 41 municipalities.

To celebrate, here's Malvina Reynold's song "God Bless the Grass," which has become a kind of unofficial anthem for the campaign. You can also find some neat cover versions out there.

Monday, April 30 is the deadline to comment on the Environmental Protection Agency's human health and environmental risk assessments for the herbicide glyphosate—most commonly marketed as Roundup™ and Rodeo™. There is growing evidence that glyphosate products are carcinogenic, and cause other health problems, including non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, genetic damage, liver and kidney damage, and endocrine disruption. Glyphosate is in nursing mother’s milk, contaminates drinking water sources, and impacts amphibians. Its use on a wide variety of GMO crops resistant to it has contributed to the spread of resistant weeds, and thus the use of even more herbicide. Some of the additional ingredients in commercial formulations are even more toxic than glyphosate itself.

You can comment directly at Regulations.gov or use the form on the BeyondPesticides.org site. 

Glyphosate, invented and still largely made and sold by Monsanto, is one of the most widely used herbicides in the world.  You can read more about it here, along with reporting on Germany's proposed restrictions on glyphosate, and Monsanto's attempt to sue California to keep glyphosate off a state list of probable carcinogens. 

NOTE:  Monsanto at UC Davis
The University of California, Davis receives millions to fund  agricultural research from Monsanto and Bayer. Just recently, US Right to Know donated a huge collection of agrichemical industry documents to the University of California, San Francisco, a pre-eminent research institution and medical center, to be part of their free on-line Industry Documents Library. 

These documents shine a light on the public relations, scientific, legislative and regulatory tactics the industry has used to defend their products and profits. “They offer an inside view of the agrichemical industry communications about the health and environmental risks of its products,” said Gary Ruskin, co-director of US Right to Know. “We hope they will prove to be a valuable resource for policymakers, investigative journalists and the public at large.” According to Right To Know, many of the documents known as the “Monsanto Papers” will also be made available which are surfacing in litigation over whether Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Town meeting season in Maine got off to a great start for Local Food RULES! Four towns passed the ordinance in just one week--Starks, Jonesport, Westmanland, and Parkman. Montville soon followed, raising the number of towns voting to protect local food to 29, with great potential for many more.

These latest five towns are in five different counties, so this is not a case of near-by towns playing follow the leader. Campaign organizers are hoping to pass ordinances in clusters of towns, however, by adding a section to the model Local Food and Community Self-Governance ordinance language titled “Mutual Recognition and Inter-Municipal Government Collaboration,” allowing food producers in one ordinance town to operate in others as well. Supporters hope to see some creative ideas coming out of this.

These town-level victories are especially sweet after last year's fight to retain most provisions of the Maine Food Sovereignty Act, a state bill that was passed and signed into law but then came under criticism by the USDA. “Getting to this place took a great deal of work with our allies to write an amendment to the Maine Food Sovereignty Act that would satisfy the USDA’s objections and still give us most of what we wanted,” said Bonnie Preston, Local Food RULES! Organizer and Alliance co-Vice Chair. “We succeeded! The Dept. of Agriculture and their lobbyist friends were shocked when the legislature voted for our amendment and not theirs, which had managed to remove all food from the Food Sovereignty Act. Once that was done, we had to work even harder to revise the LFCSGO to incorporate the changes in the law, but we got that done, too.”

News about the ordinance is also spreading thanks to Richard King, who homesteads with his wife Maria and who introduced the ordinance to his town in 2016. He has updated the website with a map of all the towns that have passed the ordinance, color-coded for dates, and more helpful material is on the way.

The campaign also has an ally in Maine's Granges. “The first one we visited was in Madison, a town that passed the ordinance in 2016,” Bonnie noted. “We learned that they had a farmers’ market that does not require venders to be licensed, and they were happy with the fact that they therefore had 'poor people buying from poor farmers,' a local economy that works well in very rural areas. No $6.00 lattes at that market!

“One person who attended the meeting was a selectman from a near-by town who is a lawyer, and he came in very skeptical about the ordinance, and left eager to pass it in his town, and happy to have us refer towns with questions about legal issues to him. He is truly one of our most valuable supporters.”

The Local Food RULES! Campaign is making great progress in Maine, but to change the way we do agriculture in this country, more towns and states must be involved. They are beginning to reach out to inform more people about this work; the more places that pass the ordinance, the more successful we will all be. What is now being called regenerative agriculture must take over from the industrial model. It will have huge benefits for the health of people, animals, and the environment.

The town of Starks, Maine, will hold a public hearing on a proposed Local Food and Self-Governance Ordinance on Monday night, February 19, at 7 p.m. at the Town Office. The ordinance will be voted on at Town Meeting on March 10. 

If you have an hour to listen to an excellent news program, check out this edition of Maine Calling, a current affairs show focusing on Maine issues produced by Maine Public Radio. 

Maine has a new law--LD725--that allows towns to regulate local food production as they wish, without requiring state and federal rules. While the focus on the show was on what the new law means for Maine farmers and food-buyers, the conversation also touched on national and international food freedom and food sovereignty movements. 

Guests include local food ordinance organizer and farmer Heather Retberg, as well as Rep. Craig Hickman, a state representative who also helps run a local bed and breakfast, and Richard King, a goat farmer who helped pass a local food ordinance in his town of Liberty.

Jessie Dowling, of the Maine Cheese Guild, calls in with some criticisms of the new law, and good information about the supports that the Maine Department of Agriculture offers to small farmers and food producers, especially cheesemakers. Even though she's not a fan of LD725, her comments underscore that as far as local food infrastructure goes, Maine has a lot to build on. 

The show is a very comprehensive look at what these ordinances do and don't do, the issues of liability, and the importance that people place on good healthy food.