| Moveable Feast |
What is the Moveable Feast for Wildlife and People™? The Feast is a meal that features locally produced food along with a description of the farm and family that produces the food, how it is produced, and the wildlife beneficiaries on the farm. The Moveable Feast for Wildlife and People™ is a celebration that can be easily replicated by groups working to build a strong base of public support for the preservation of biodiversity in natural and agricultural landscapes. How was the first Moveable Feast for Wildlife and People™ organized? Recognizing the often inherent tensions between the need to increase food production and the desire to protect wildlife and natural habitats, Glynwood Center and the Metropolitan Conservation Alliance (MCA), a program of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), developed the Moveable Feast program to demonstrate the value and unique interdependencies of systems that promote:
How can I identify wildlife beneficiaries on farms in my region? Conservation biologists from WCS developed appropriate criteria for the Hudson Valley region in New York State. Threatened and declining species like bog turtles, meadowlarks and southern leopard frogs are greatly impacted by land use practices associated with agriculture. To determine which farms are helping to maintain wildlife habitats in our region, the biologists made site visits to each farm to assess the capacity of each to sustain wildlife and the farmer’s environmental stewardship. Farms were assigned to one of three tiers based on the following criteria: (1) existing on-farm habitat, (2) landscape context of the farm, (i.e., connectivity with other habitat matrices at a scale of over 1,000 acres), and (3) disposition of the farmer toward biodiversity-friendly farming practices. Tier 1 farms met all three criteria, Tier 2 farms met criteria (1) and (3) or criteria (2) and (3), and other farms were assigned to Tier 3. You can seek help from local biologists and ecologists to identify significant wildlife species, adapt the criteria for your region and perform the site visits. How can I Host a Moveable Feast for Wildlife and People™? The Moveable Feast can be anything from an elegant catered affair to a simple, less formal brunch or luncheon. If you are working with a caterer it is critical to involve them in the planning process early on and talk with them to gauge their capacity for working with local farmers. Even with our expertise on local food issues and our extensive farm contacts in the Hudson Valley, the caterer’s commitment and flexibility in working with local farmers was essential to the success of our first event. The caterer you select may not have a lot of experience buying food from local farms. If that is the case, please consult our Guide to Serving Local Food at Your Next Event. Menu Using locally grown foods demands the flexibility of working with foods when they come into season. A visit to your local farmers market or a phone call to the cooperative extension office in your area will help you learn which foods are available and the peak harvest periods. Price It could be that the price for certain locally grown foods is slightly higher than the supplier normally used by the caterer. Keep in mind that many farmers will offer competitive wholesale prices for large quantity purchases. Delivery Depending on its size, delivery of the food from the farm to the catering facility may not be a problem. However, you need to be prepared for the possibility that one of the farmers you want to purchase from doesn’t have a truck to move the food, or cannot leave the farm to make long distance deliveries. Fortunately, many family farmers located in a particular region know one another and are willing to work cooperatively. For example, one of the farmers from our Moveable Feast event could not deliver all the way to NYC. Instead, we arranged for the food to be dropped at another nearby farm that had a truck and was also supplying the event, thereby using one truck to make a delivery from two farms. The next task is to ask a conservation biologist or ecologist in your region to identify local species that are threatened or endangered, and the kinds of habitats they require. With a working description of the types of habitats and farming practices, you can begin contacting the farmers. When contacting the farmers about purchasing food, it’s important to emphasize that the Moveable Feast for Wildlife and People™ is a celebration of family farming that produces healthy and tasteful food while protecting wildlife and a diversity of habitats on working farms. When organizing this first event, we found that many of the small and sustainable family farms were already doing many of the “right” things (e.g., maintaining wetlands, vernal pools, wet meadows, hedgerows, rotational grazing of animals, and forest). Using our program guide as a model, we suggest that you include information about the farm, the family, and the methods of production. All of the information we collected came from conversations with the farmer and site visits conducted by the conservation biologists. We encourage other groups to adapt the materials we’ve created to host a Moveable Feast For Wildlife and People™ in their regions. All we ask is that when you use the name you credit it as “conceived by Glynwood Center and the Wildlife Conservation Society.” So go out and host your own event, and let us know how it turned out. If you send us your stories and pictures, we will continue adding to the website and inspiring others across the country. First Dinner Program Click here to read about the food and farmers featured at the first Moveable Feast Dinner First Dinner Menu
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here to see
the menu for the first Moveable Feast Dinner. The first Moveable Feast Dinner took place on Monday, August 2, 2004 at the banquet for the Annual Meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology, in New York City.
Participating Farms Background Glynwood Gleanings – Spring 2004 “Farmers and the Richness of Life”
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