J.D. Wulfhorst

Over the past 8.5 years, I’ve learned a lot about the connections between growing food, community, and what it means to know where /what we eat/ comes from. In my ongoing learning process, Rural Roots has provided a home for me to get exposure to this sort of knowledge a lot of great people are willing to share. Rural Roots provides a foundation to increase awareness, structure education, facilitate networking, and engage producers, processors, regulators, consumers, and policy makers in the vision for a better agriculture than what our industrial food system has become. I want to be able to directly and substantively contribute to building the local foods movement and rebuilding sustainable agriculture even though my livelihood is not (yet) as a producer.

I serve on the Rural Roots Board of Directors because it is an organization with members bound together in a larger vision of a better agriculture and community. Within this broad goal, I have two objectives on which I want to work the most: 1) identifying the optimal geography for Rural Roots’ evolving future (accounting for landscape differences, politics, social needs, and economic contexts); and 2) development of a focused organizational policy on /organics/ as a means to greater dialogue needed, for example, about what characteristics constitute “local”, “healthy”, “natural”, and “sustainable”. I’m no expert on either task yet I believe the organization faces these challenges and critical decisions. Rural Roots has given a lot to me and made an impact. The organization has much more to share and I am serving to help guide that effort.