Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Learning community workshop shines national spotlight on Leopold Center, Iowa partners

Back to Leopold Letter Fall 2009

By LAURA MILLER, Newsletter editor

Here’s a diverse group: a South Dakota meat goat producer, an inner-city community organizer, a meat scientist from Missouri, and an extension educator who works with the nation’s largest Amish settlement in Indiana.

What could they possibly have in common, and why would they spend two days together in Des Moines?

These four people, plus nearly 60 others from 17 states, were looking for a way to bring together a variety of players around common interests in networks to accomplish specific goals. One such networking approach is to set up a community of practice, the topic of a two-day workshop planned and presented by the Value Chain Partnerships (VCP) project led by Leopold Center Associate Director Rich Pirog.

The VCP project has been using the community of practice model since its inception in 2002 and has documented its success in building networks that address challenges across the food system.

Currently, the project supports five working groups – also called communities of practice – organized around niche pork, local and regional food systems, fruit and vegetables, small meat processors and grass-based livestock. Each group involves producers and others from throughout the value chain from processing, retail, regulators, local government, and the business and educational communities. Groups meet regularly to exchange knowledge and results of small development projects they fund as a group.

Leaders and members of the five working groups shared their experiences, frustrations and insight on the first day of the workshop. On the second day, workshop participants sat in on one of three working group meetings, and met with farmers involved in case studies of the Midwestern dairy cooperative Organic Valley and Country Natural Beef based in Oregon.

All workshop attendees were interested in building local food systems but their personal backgrounds and skill sets ranged from youth development, programs for beginning farmers and immigrant communities to hunger and poverty programs, urban revitalization and microenterprise loan funds. The workshop was presented as a professional development program and funded by the USDA’s Sustainable Agriculture and Research Education (SARE) North Central Region.

“This model really can help farmers in a very practical way,” said Terry VanDerPol from Minnesota’s Land Stewardship Project. “On the ground I can see how farmers can plug in very quickly to what may already be going on in a region.”

Patty Cantrell works in a six-county area of northern Michigan and was interested in the workshop because existing structures and organizations have not been effective in building local food systems.

“I see these needs coming from a lot of directions – consumers, farmers, others trying to connect around food systems and good food,” Cantrell said. “So networking and connecting people with new systems and structures needs to happen.”

Another unique perspective came from Bobby Turner, vice president of purchasing for 32 Whole Foods stores in the Midwest. “At many different levels we need to set up forms of communities of practice to make sure we’re using innovative ways to share knowledge,” he said. “What brought me here is to learn more about the local movement and how a grocer retailer like ourselves can be more involved in getting regional food systems to work better.”

Linda Kleinschmit administers the North Central SARE professional development program for educators and producers, and was pleased to see participants from all 12 states in the region represented at the workshop.

“I think we’ve been given a good blueprint for what works with the understanding that your efforts need to be local and you have to deal with the culture and work with the resources in each community,” she said. As a grassfed beef producer in northeast Nebraska, she wants to organize a regional group for marketing grassfed livestock products.

Karen Lehman represents the Fresh Taste Initiative, a group of organizations that fund projects to improve access and availability of local foods in Chicago and surrounding regions.

“I probably have been part of a community of practice in the past without knowing it, but I feel that the Leopold Center has done groundbreaking work in the intentionality around these working groups and documenting their work,” she said. “I was interested in bringing people from Illinois here to experience what you’ve learned and perhaps to inspire some to help them in their work.”

Back to Leopold Letter Fall 2009