A first-of-its-kind assessment by the City of Flagstaff Sustainability Office shows northern Arizona is losing farmers and farmland, even while many rural residents struggle to access healthy food.
KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny spoke with the city’s food systems coordinator, Natalie Pierson, about the findings, which were drawn from surveys and interviews conducted in five counties.
So the bad news is, we’re losing a lot of farmland. Tell me about that.
That’s really an issue that’s not exclusive to Northern Arizona… Farmland has been in decline as really strong monopoly farmers are taking over smaller farms and growing bigger. It’s kind of a get big or get out kind of world… And so that is part of it. But it’s also just really hard to even get started. The cost of land, the cost of water, just accessing water, all of those are really significant barriers. There’s a lot of knowledge that isn’t passed down anymore. Our generations of farmers are getting older and older and newer generations are struggling to get in, to keep things going.
On the consumer side, you also found there were a lot of barriers that people encountered when they were trying to get access to local fruits and vegetables and other healthy foods. Can you talk about some of those barriers?
Yeah. A big part of that really is just the places where you can find fresh fruits and vegetables are very limited in rural areas. A lot of rural northern Arizonans, they don’t have those bigger grocery stores with a lot of healthy options, they’re relying on convenience stores, gas stations… Finding fresh fruits and vegetables is really difficult in those areas. A lot of people have to either grow it themselves or travel all the way to Flagstaff or Kingman or Page or Prescott to be able to find those grocery stores with more options.
Let’s talk a little bit about food insecurity, this is a term that basically refers to people who aren’t really sure where their next meal is coming from. What did you find about the picture of food insecurity in northern Arizona?
Not only are food insecurity rates in northern Arizona higher than the state average, but almost none of the northern Arizona counties are meeting fruit and vegetable intake recommendations. Approximately 21 percent of survey respondents from the Community Foods Systems Assessment reported that they weren’t able to afford the healthy food that they want. There are a lot of barriers to that, one of which is high costs of other living expenses like housing, transportation, and education.
So we’ve been talking this essential disconnect between where the food is grown and how it’s getting to people and whether it’s affordable when it gets there. What are some of the solutions to the problem? What are some things we could collectively do to improve people’s access to food?
Wonderful, wonderful questions and something that we’re still learning ourselves, which is why we did this assessment, why we’re going through so much community engagement right now…We’re hosting community stakeholder meetings on October 23 and 24 at the Coconino Center for the Arts…. We also have some other opportunities coming up to engage with this research and really talk about the solutions. What do we need to get from where we are now to a place where people can eat healthy and affordably? Some of those solutions is how to get more fresh produce at the food banks and distributed to people through food boxes? Is there ways we can have gardens at food banks or are there places where we can build and establish more places to grow food locally or provide more coupons and discounts for people to get healthy food from the grocery stores or the farmer’s market?... And those are just some, they may not be THE golden solution, there’s no one solution for all, it’s going to be a myriad of different things working together that will help to build a better food system.
Natalie Pierson, thank you so much for speaking with me today.
Thank you.
