Message hits mark, attracts crowd for 1000 Friends
American Farm
9.29.09
By KEVIN GEORGE
Editor
REISTERTOWN, Md. — For once, the simple message of an event seemed to be able to gather more attention than any staff member could have drummed up.
Nearly 120 people from within Maryland’s ag community gathered at 1000 Friends of Maryland’s “For the Love of the Farm” event on Sept. 23 at the picturesque setting of the rolling hills of Green Spring Valley Hounds farm.
The rally cry was a popular one: “Keep Farmers Farming.”
Executive Director Dru Schmidt-Perkins said just a few weeks ago, she wasn’t too optimistic about the event, but word started circulating in recent weeks and suddenly the evening gathering was to become the place to be. “We said we wanted to keep farmers farming,” Schmidt-Perkins said. “All these people want to be part of helping us do that.”
“Keep Farmers Farming” has evolved through conversations with stakeholders, and the policy details continue to develop, according to the organization’s recent press releases.
“Over the past six months, we met with groups with diverse perspectives. These conversations have resulted in a plan to help keep farmers farming,” said Kelly Carneal, the organization’s director of rural lands. “The next round of conversations will help us hone that list and develop the campaign to enact reforms.”
The group, based in Baltimore City, had focused its efforts, until now, on urban areas, while trying to encourage city groups to use local agricultural products and encourage wise development growth and transportation options.
“We’ve always believed that we deserved a more efficient pattern of development — that there’s a whole lot wrong with the way” it is occurring, Schmidt-Perkins said. “They (Chesapeake) Bay is dying, we’re losing farms — and at the same time, we are leaving communities behind. ... It didn’t make any sense.”
She cited common cases of farmers who have had to sell their farms or mass quantities of livestock because of today’s hard times.
“Why? What’s going on?” Schmidt-Perkins asked rhetorically. “It was very obvious: If you can’t make a living, you might as well go to Plan B.
“But there are those who want to keep farming and for the next generation who wants to come on and start farming — there are people who want to do it,”
For more than 10 years, 1000 Friends of Maryland has worked to protect Maryland’s natural areas and open spaces, improve the quality of life in communities, restore once-vibrant cities and towns and improve public transportation through meaningful public participation, education, research and advocacy.
In an attempt to succeed in these efforts, 1000 Friends decided to launch the program focused on farming.
“We typically have a fundraising gala every fall,” Carneal said. “We were going to scrap it this year because of the economy. At the same time, we were going to announce this program, and this ‘little event’ just sort of just morphed and morphed into a bigger one because of the interest we added.
“Word of mouth got a lot of people excited about it, and I think next year it’ll be even bigger.”
There are already various colloquial organizations in the state that work for farmland preservation or try to promote “smart growth,” but if 1000 Friends is successful in its mission, it would be able to serve as an ally to those organization’s actions — and serve as an communication line between those smaller ones.
“The intent of this program is to really bring people together,” Carneal said. “1000 Friends has the ability to bring a lot of diverse voices together and sort of hash things out and put up some common goals we can take to Annapolis and get some reform done with a lot of policies.
“We’re not claiming to be experts on agriculture by any means, and we’re not looking to reinvent the wheel,” she continued. “We’re going to try to connect the dots for a lot of people and help them understand why Maryland agriculture is so important.”
The theory is networking between those organizations will enable word to be spread better among them, which would increase the ability for them to have a less muddled voice when it comes to trying to get encourage policy reforms and new legislation through at the State House.
The event became an ideal forum for 1000 Friends to deliver its message in person. The menu highlighted home-grown foods from three Baltimore County farmers.
A special feature of the event was a chance to meet the farmers who grew the food for the evening.
These farms included Gunpowder Bison, One Straw Farm, Springfield Farms. Kilby Cream’s owners came in from Cecil County.
The panel of speakers included Schmidt-Perkins, Chairman of the Board Jim Lyons, Carneal and Luke Howard — an organic farmer from Millington, Md.
