Delectable food, conversation were on the menu at Granary

The Dakotafire Café event at the Granary Rural Cultural Center, near Groton, S.D., on local food was held a little later than planned, but worth the wait—at least as far as those attendees who enjoy eating were concerned.

A local-food potluck gave participants an idea of what a strong local-food economy would taste like; Ken Meter’s discussion provided some ideas of what it could look like. “What can be done in the eastern Dakotas to try to put the infrastructure together to make it easier and more efficient to trade food from your farms … to local consumers? How do we make that happen here? I think that’s going to be decades of conversation through Dakotafire,” Meter said.

See a video and more photos here: http://dakotafire.net/?p=7628. Join the conversation at forum.dakotafire.net.

Some of the ideas from the local food conversation.

Ken Meter of the Crossroads Resource Center in Minneapolis presented the findings of the economic analysis he did of the potential for local foods in the Dakotafire region. He also described a number of successful local-food projects that had been done in other parts of the country.

About a dozen people stayed to discuss the local-food potential of the Dakotas after his talk. Photos by Marianne Marttila-Klipfel and Heidi Marttila-Losure