An Actionable Roadmap Toward Positive Change: How the NH Food and Agriculture Strategic Plan Is Changing NH’s Food System

Have you faced any obstacles or resistance to your work?

Thankfully, no, we haven't had any resistance. I think the biggest hurdle that we've faced is that it's a lot of information, and it covers a really broad swath of topics that some people may not know as much about one as the other. To me, that is the biggest barrier.

I don't expect anyone to come to the strategic plan and have memorized it or plan to work on every piece of it, but to just get them to the place where they need to know the information or to find the information they need has been the biggest thing. I hope people can go through our website and see some of the ways we've set up. 

Could regional planning commissions be included in the implementation work groups?

I'll pose a question but also provide a bit of an answer. I would love to know if you feel like the housing and farmland protection group is not something that the regional planning commissions could be a part of? I do think that would be a great space for regional planning commissions. I know it's a little bit specific; I know planning commissions work on a broader suite of issues, but that could be a great start.

If you had an idea of a workgroup topic that you think would be good for them, I would love to hear about it. Those organizations across our state are really impactful and provide a lot of great resources to our communities.

Why aren't lumber and forests mentioned in the plan?

I know 27 sounds like a lot, but picking those brief topics was extremely hard. We went through multiple series of listening sessions and meetings to arrive at those brief topics, and we know we missed some. For example, we grappled with whether maple syrup should have its own brief, but we ended up deciding to lump it together with others. 

I think forestry should be something that, in our next iteration of the plan, we would consider because some of our farmers are involved in that space in addition to growing food. My biggest response is that we wanted to focus first on issues that really affected our ability to grow, consume, and market local food and edible things. That's our number one issue at the Food Alliance. I don't want to discount that forestry is a significant part of our system, but it just didn't make the cut this time.

Can you explain what Farm to School is?

Farm to School is actually quite broad and means a lot of different things to a lot of different organizations and groups, but the primary thing is engaging students and young people with our agricultural and food system through a variety of opportunities. Sometimes it is gardening at school, sometimes it's getting local food into the cafe and educating about that, or understanding what types of jobs are available for students who are interested in the agricultural food system.

Sometimes we call it food literacy, and Farm to School really goes hand in hand, just trying to get students engaged in understanding where our food comes from and what that means for their livelihood and their interests in their lives moving forward.

Any chance of state funding for farmers' markets?

I so hope so, and if you talk to our assistant commissioner, Josh Marshall, at the Department of Agriculture, he will say the same thing. I'm a little biased because I work at my farmers' market in my town, but farmers' markets are a really unique market channel for our farms because they are the right scale. Our farms are small, and a lot of farmers are not able to get their food and products into bigger stores like Hannaford's, Shaw's, or Stop and Shop. Their best way of getting their food sold is through a farmers' market.

I'm not sure exactly what that would look like in terms of policy or a program, but I would love to see it.

How many students are involved in your program, and what farm-related majors does UNH have?

We are piloting some research projects with the Ecograstronomy program at UNH. There are about ten students in that capstone class; each has taken on a research project based on the recommendations or issues outlined in this strategic plan. They're working on them this semester, and they are going to be presenting them at our statewide gathering, which happens in April.

How did you get buy-in from all the partners?

We are very fortunate that over the past ten years, I've joined a team of people who have been working at the Food Alliance and developing our network. We have always been about coordinating, collaborating, and really being thoughtful when we see work happening in the food system, not trying to take it on in a way that's not sustainable. Our goal is always to look at a problem and think about who needs to be involved.

The development of that network over those years has allowed us to now take on this strategic planning process. People trusted us at the Food Alliance to know that we weren't just going to lead them down some crazy rabbit hole of strategic planning, but that we were going to lean into our principles as an organization and as a network to prioritize people's thoughts and opinions about how it should be done and what they felt was important.

Building those trusting working relationships with organizations across the state was key, but beyond that, we were so careful and thoughtful about being clear about what our intention was with the strategic plan. It sounds like all of it happened really quickly, but it was months and years of thinking about how we wanted to get to that end point—not just throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks, but really engaging with our community and knowing what people thought they needed through this strategic planning process to feel like it was going to be useful for them. I think that was our secret sauce a little bit.

Is there a way for high school students to get involved and learn more?

Mike is a great resource. He's the lead on New Hampshire Agriculture in the Classroom, which is very parallel to Farm to School work that's being done in the state. It goes well beyond that, and I highly suggest connecting with Mike if you are interested in getting high school students involved.

I don't have a clear path for high school students to be involved. A lot of what we've done at the university level is thoughtfully sharing about the strategic plan work in ways that people feel like it's part of their lives. Whenever I make a presentation to students at UNH about the strategic plan, I always use the wasted food brief as an example because it is something that we all do; it affects all of our lives.

Being able to break down this strategic plan into opportunities for everyone to engage with it—there are ways to do that, and if folks have any questions, I'm happy to brainstorm. Especially for students and younger folks who are passionate about this work but may look at a strategic plan as something that is a little bit overwhelming or academic at certain points, breaking it down in a way that you can connect it to your own individual life or things taht you see every day is a great place to start.

Did agrivoltaics come up at all, and can you explain what that is?

Agrivoltaics are not in the agritourism brief. That brief was specifically honed in on using agriculture as a way to open up another line of business for farmers, not just about buying and selling food, but coming to the farm as an experience and being able to make money off that as another income source.

Agrivoltaics—there's probably someone on here that is smarter than me and could explain it better—but another opportunity for farmers to bring in income would be installing solar panels on some of their land and having animals or sometimes even growing food in-between those areas where those solar panels are being set up, so they're able to offset some of their utility costs while continuing to use the land to produce food. It's kind of a two-for-one deal.

I don't know if there's a lot of it happening in New Hampshire because we don't have a ton of very flat land, and farmers don't have a great amount of big tracks of land. I know that's the standard for a really successful agrivoltaics program—to have that space and ability to do it. It's not something I'm 100% knowledgeable about, but that's a good question.

Can you talk about the metrics being used to track progress?

Metrics are a tough one for us because a lot of that "data" that we're going to get to inform this progress report is going to be very qualitative. At least that's our expectation; it's going to be a lot of organizations saying we did this program, we did these things, we helped pass this policy. It's not necessarily going to be hard numbers and data.

A lot of the data you see in the strategic plan currently is not data that we went out and solicited; it's data from the USDA and other sources like the New England Food Systems Planner Partnership, which did a huge report about the New England food systems and looked at each state's food system and how much local food it produces. When those data sets get updated, we will update our strategic plan and the progress report accordingly.

With 27 briefs, how do you prioritize? What do the alliance partners see as top priorities?

It's a question we get a lot, and it's something we really struggle with, I won't lie. Because this plan is one part of the whole, it's not intended to be a prescription for anyone's work; it's there as a map and a guide. It felt disingenuous for us to say, now that we have this information, we feel these three things are the most important, because they may not be the same for everybody.

It's really been a challenge to prioritize because if everything is important, then how do you move everything forward? What we're hoping to get out of this progress report is kind of an exercise in prioritization; people are doing this work already. Food system work is strategic plan work and vice versa. If we do this progress report and we see where the interest is and where people are naturally prioritizing their work, it gives us at the Food Alliance a better understanding of the work and the intention behind it.

What are a few things in the strategic plan that are more doable in the short term?

The local food access work that's being done across our state is absolutely phenomenal. People from the food bank, from New Hampshire Hunger Solutions, and from all the different smaller, regional food access organizations are really innovating and being thoughtful about their work, and there's a lot of infrastructure in that space ensuring that everyone has access to food and local food. The Granite State Market Match Program is a great example—basically, what it does is provide access for SNAP users to go to farmers' markets and buy local food with their SNAP dollars. It's something that's existed for quite a long time, and it would be an easy win for the strategic plan and for our state to expand that program or get more farmers' markets signed up or more people participating.

The Food Waste Arena is also really primed for some easy successes. There's already a food waste ban that exists in New Hampshire, so continuing to expand that and educate people about wasted food and how to compost. It may not sound important, but the waste stream has so many opportunities to diversify in a way where you can feed people with this excess food that's being thrown away, or you could feed animals, or you could create soil health on a farm. It touches every aspect, and I'm hoping those two areas we can move forward.