By ANN HINCH

Associate Editor

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Attempting to improve just one part of a food production chain isn’t easy, but tackling the entire integrated system of soil-to-table is a mighty challenge. Now imagine doing so on a statewide level.

That’s the aim of Ohio Smart Agriculture: Solutions from the Land (OSA), which lately published A Call to Action that covers the state’s food system and agricultural economy. The report raises more questions than it answers about how to improve local food production in the face of economic factors and natural phenomena like climate change, while also battling food insecurity and hunger.

But this report was just the first phase of a long-term pilot project. The second phase will dig more into action points.

OSA Steering Committee Co-Chair Fred Yoder said he was at a convention in Chicago with Solutions for the Land – on whose board he sits – when approached by W.K. Kellogg Foundation representatives with a proposal that Ohio develop a 21st century statewide ag strategy and action plan that could potentially be used as a template in other Midwest states.

The Foundation awarded OSA a $500,000 grant to get the project started.

“We wanted to be as widespread as we possibly could” in informing the report, said Yoder, a four-decades farmer growing corn, soybeans, and wheat on 1,500 acres in Madison and Union counties and chair of Yoder Ag Services, a family business with his children that sells seed and other products.

And so, he and Co-Chair Lisa Hamler-Fugitt oversaw all types of stakeholders to serve on the steering committee – from grain, livestock, specialty crops, forestry, academia, conservation, organics, economics, agribusiness, even aquaculture, to name just some sectors.

And food consumers, including the impoverished and working poor helped by food banks – as evidenced by the inclusion of Hamler-Fugitt, whose day job is executive director of the Ohio Assoc. of Foodbanks (OAF).

“One of the things that just shocked me was we ranked 38th out of 50 (states) for food security,” Yoder said. He added he knows Ohio farmers so productive that they’re “sitting on piles of food.”

“It was a systems approach to do this,” he said, adding that improving food production can’t be achieved by simply “growing more” without thought to what is needed and how it’s produced.

Both co-chairs more than once used the phrase “working in a silo” to describe how individual groups or agencies try to solve their own ag and food problems rather than viewing them as part of a system of moving parts affected by individual changes.

In fact, the report’s introduction says  the initiative is partly to find ways to put farming “at the forefront of resolving the extensive challenges facing Ohio today” of hunger and poor health, in addition to degraded environments, broken economies, trade, tariffs, and limited inclusion in global economies.

“This effort,” it further states, “is about creating new options and opportunities for farmers, agriculture, and consumers that together, benefit all.”

The ambitious effort seeks to accomplish four major goals: make Ohio agriculture and the food system a public policy priority; diversify and “sustainably intensify” production of food, feed, fiber, and fuel; develop infrastructure and use institutional purchasing power to quantify and increase markets for “Ohio Smart Food;” and implement climate-smart ag strategies to ensure sustainability and reduce or remove ag runoff. These are not in order and are considered concurrent steps.

Each goal has smaller action steps within it the OSA believes can be done or begun in the short term (there’s actually a longer list of “50 X ‘50” goals the project wants to accomplish by mid-century). Under policy, for instance, one step is to create a task force to coordinate state agencies to jointly address how food, health, and ag programs can interlock.

Food as medicine?

Last year, Hamler-Fugitt said OAF – which represents 12 state food banks – and the Ohio Agricultural Clearance Program bought 45 million pounds of surplus and unmarketable (read: “ugly food”) but healthy fruit, vegetables, and protein (including eggs) from farmers at an average cost of 19 cents per pound, to distribute to 2 million unduplicated recipients.

“I have to tell you, it’s the most wholesome food we serve,” she said. “We like ‘cosmetically challenged’ fruits and vegetables.”

She explained hunger, poverty, and poor health – often interconnected – are some of the most pressing issues not only for those individuals but on state and national budgets. People who have diet-related diseases can’t always afford the food that would best mitigate their detrimental health effects; diabetes is one that readily comes to mind.

She said there is potential for a significant cost savings to the health care system by using good locally produced and purchased food as a disease preventive. Right now, she said Ohio spends $7,000 on average annually in health costs on each diabetic resident who is also insulin-dependent.

According to the OSA report, Ohio ranks 42nd nationally for preventable hospitalizations, 41st for cancer deaths and infant mortality, and 40th for obesity. Ohio Department of Agriculture (ODA) Director Dorothy Pelanda noted that 96 percent of what is spent on health costs in Ohio is for care, while only 4 percent is on preventive measures such as nutrition aid.

Ohio is seeing elevated rates of food insecurity. According to Feeding America, in 2017 the state’s overall food insecurity rate was 14.5 percent, or nearly 1 in 7 people who cannot afford “enough food to have an active, healthy life.” But among children, Ohio’s rate rises to about 1 in every 5 children as food-insecure – ranking the state 15th in the nation.

Both this and the “overall” figure for Ohio are higher than the national rates. Hamler-Fugitt explained Ohio has lost a lot of its manufacturing jobs and not adequately replaced that income for the displaced workers – and as the cost of living increases, food can more easily be sacrificed than other monthly expenses.

Partly for this reason, Pelanda said the ODA has created a new program – Children’s Initiatives – and hired a deputy director to oversee it, which will educate kids about healthy food choices. She also said there is roughly $66 million in federal funds available for state farm-to-school projects that Ohio has not been using so far.