Fresno Food System Alliance
The Fresno Food System Alliance, launched in December, 2010, is leading the way in creating new relationships in the community and new thinking about food and farming in America’s most important agricultural county. Convened by the Fresno County Farm Bureau, the Fresno County Health Department and the Fresno Agricultural Commissioner’s Office with assistance from Ag Innovations Network, the Alliance has already mapped an ambitious agenda around taking farm-to-school programs to scale in the County, tackling tough issues like water and agricultural labor, and is increasingly engaged in improving access to healthy foods in the Fresno area.
Fresno County is the largest food producing county in the United States. Its fields are rich, diverse, and like so many of California’s agricultural regions, rife with challenges. From water availability to invasive pests, from food safety to worker safety, producers find themselves faced with choices that often lead to the closing of farms and the loss of rural heritage. Similarly, Fresno County’s cities are home to some of California’s most diverse populations and some of our most intractable urban problems ranging from hunger to childhood obesity, from lack of good food in many neighborhoods to a growing disconnect between urban and rural communities. The common thread in all these issues is food and the system that gets food from farms to forks.
The central idea underlying the Food System Alliance (FSA) concept is that the long-term viability of agriculture is central to the region’s quality of life, and that advocates for agriculture, farm labor, health, and the environment have much more in common than they often see or act upon. The Fresno FSA will expand on this idea by exploring these issues from the perspective of the broader food economy and work to build a county food and farming system that works for a diverse alliance of interest groups in the county. By finding the places where the interests of producers, laborers, restaurateurs, consumers, health advocates, environmentalists and others intersect, there is great hope for proactively building a successful food economy in Fresno County.