Black Hills Supporting More Local Farms Per Capita Than Sioux Falls/Brookings Region

The South Dakota Healthy Nutrition Collaborative has put its food-landscape data into fun interactive charts on FRANK   —no, not a subtle endorsement of Kloucek for Public Utilities Commission by clever and subversive liberal nutritionists, but an acronymic database: Food Resources, Access, & Nutrition Knowledge, hosted by the South Dakota Department of Health. Among the visualizations available is this map showing 260 “local farms”—i.e., farms selling food they grow directly to their neighbors:

80 local farms—over 30% of the neighbor-feeding operations identified statewide by SDHNC—serve the Black Hills in Pennington, Meade, Lawrence, Butte, Custer, Fall River, and Oglala Lakota counties. By FRANK’s population figures, that’s one local farm per 2,600 residents across that seven-county area. Surprisingly, in loamier, moister, and more populous East River, 51 local farms serve Minnehaha and its five adjacent counties. Brookings County adds another 14 local farms to the I-29 corridor. With 65 local farms total, that eastern seven-county region has one local farm for every 5,200 eaters. Statewide, South Dakota has one local farm for every 3,500 residents.

Either Black Hills folks are hungrier for local foods and are thus supporting twice as much local ag per capita as Sioux Falls/Brookings-area residents, or there’s room for a lot more local farms in the southeast South Dakota market.

Whatever demand these local farms are able to meet, that’s in competition with all the commodity crops and processed food that our corporate-warped farm policy favors. Imagine how many more local farms could spring up and support Rapid City, Sioux Falls, Brookings, Milbank, Sisseton, Eagle Butte, and Martin if we passed a Farm Bill that simply leveled the playing field and treated farmers growing fresh food for their neighbors as equal in importance to the big corporate monoculturalists and their factory fields.