The Food Less Traveled: How Good Local Food Contributes to Healthy People and Healthy Communities is the theme for the 2007 New York State Farmers’ Direct Marketing Conference, January 18-20, at the Owego Treadway Inn in New York’s southern tier region. This year’s conference planning committee is working on workshops and sessions that will provide knowledge, resources and tools to help farmers to increase their farm’s ability to impact their farm’s health, their consumers’ health and their community’s health. Tracks include: Personal health, economic health for farmers and communities, environmental health, healthy farm families, healthy neighbor relations, health and hospitality on the farm, healthy farm collaboratives and healthy children/healthy communities. The conference will feature pre-conference workshops, as well. These workshops will spend the day covering a topic of importance to farm direct marketers. These workshops include: Employee training, food service for farm markets, start-up bakery, CSAs, livestock marketing. In addition to the full three days of workshops and sessions, the Farmers’ Market Federation of New York will be holding a special market manager training program sponsored by the United States Department of Agriculture’s SARE program. This program is the first year of a three year program dedicated to develop professional standards for managing farmers’ markets. Market managers and Cornell Cooperative Extension educators are encouraged to participate to learn how to work together to increase the capacity of markets to manage themselves more effectively to benefit farmers, consumers and the communities in which they reside. The New York Small Scale Food Processors (NYSSFP) will be hosting their annual meeting at the 2007 conference. The workshops for the NYSSFP will include: Healthy practices for healthy foods, all you need to know to become a 20C licensed kitchen and nutrient analysis and why it’s important. New to the conference in 2007 will be the NYSFDMA Display Contest. During the evening meals, teams of marketers will be given identical display materials and products and will race against the clock and each other to create the most attractive, most marketable display possible. The audience will then participate in a group discussion on the merits and failures of each display and judging will be done by applause. The teams that make it through the preliminary round on the first night of conference will move on to compete in the finals on Friday night’s annual meeting night. Prizes will be awarded to contestants based on their level of advancement. The trade show will run Jan. 18-19 and will offer a wide variety of products for the farm direct marketing industry. Non-profits and other organizations whose mission or current work are in alignment with this year’s theme are encouraged to participate in the New York Showcase, an exhibition of the sponsors and leaders in this holistic strategic approach to good health. The conference is cohosted by the New York State Farmers’ Direct Marketing Association; the Farmers’ Market Federation of New York; Cornell’s Community, Food and Agriculture Program; NY Farms!; NY Small Scale Food Processors Association; Cornell Cooperative Extension; CADE; and USDA’s CNY RC&D. For more information, call the NYSFDMA office at 315-475-1101 or email diane99@dreamscape.com or call the NY Farms! office at 607-659-3710 or email nyfarms@clarityconnect.com.
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