Fracking threatens local food economy

These are comments I made outside the Ohio Statehouse on Jan. 10:

My partner and I own three food businesses in Athens — Village Bakery, Della Zona — which means "from the region" in Italian — and Catalyst Café. We've grown in our 10 years in business from sales of $300 a day to eight times that. We currently have 25 employees. We make food from locally grown ingredients to sell to our neighbors, to Athens visitors, and to feed our staff. 

Some of the checks I write over the course of the week are to:

• High Bottom Farm, for eggs;

• Laurel Valley Creamery for cheese;

• King Family Farm for pork and poultry;

• Sassafras Farm for sweet potatoes and butternut squash;

• Shagbark Seed and Mill for corn, beans and flour;

• Cherry Orchards for apples, peaches and pears;

• Shade River Farm for onions and tomatoes for our marinara;

• Silver Bridge Coffee Roasters;

• Rich Gardens for garlic and potatoes;

• Green Edge Gardens for kale and lettuce;

• Starline Organics for cabbage, spelt flour and firewood for our bread and pizza oven; and

• Snowville Creamery for milk and cream for selling, and for making cappuccinos, yogurt and mozzarella for our pizzas.

• And several others.

These 20 or so checks I write, with my neighbors' money, represent 20 real businesses and their families, most with additional employees — the larger ones have 12-15 full time employees. So at least 70 people are directly affected by my business. There are dozens more local food producers at the Athens Farmers Market, which has a two-year waiting list for vendors.

These farmers and producers raise food in a way that ensures that future generations will also be able to produce clean, healthy food. And they teach younger generations how to farm, and how to produce food for their families and communities.

Some of our local producers have grown so they have quantities to sell outside Athens, to Clintonville and Bexley markets, Giant Eagle and Whole foods, in larger cities including Columbus and Washington D.C.

No one has done a study to find out the economic impact of taking away the livelihood of these 70 to 100 people my business relies on, and the hundreds more people in this food web, this local food economy.

Shale drilling and the disposal of its waste products — which we have now in southeast Ohio — are an imminent threat to my livelihood and others who make a living from using our environment responsibly to feed ourselves. Many farmers in my community are trying to figure out where they will go if the fracking industry comes any further into our community. Many law-abiding, tax-paying, forward-thinking, innovative business owners will leave Ohio.

This is a massive transfer of wealth — the wealth of our air, our land, our water, our infrastructure of interdependent small businesses. All these are being sacrificed, not for the good of our country, not for the wellbeing of the people, but to ensure the profit of a few multinational corporations.

Imagine if you will, a government truly interested in securing our energy supplies for the future of our country. I imagine we might all have to sacrifice our rooftops as solar panels and solar water heaters are installed across the land. We will have to stand by while insulation is forced into the walls of our homes.

No, this is not about reducing our dependence on foreign oil, making us safe. The climate change denialists, including the president of Ohio Oil and Gas Association, are hand in hand with the denialists who tell us wars in the Middle East are not about oil, and then in the next breath that extracting that last drop of oil from under our land will keep us from war, make us independent, and keep our energy costs low for decades.

So, getting back to reality:

Where fracking has threatened to move in, in other sustainable food-producing regions including New York, the largest buyers of local food have written statements that they will not purchase food from land surrounded by industrial production of oil and gas. What will happen to our farmers?

Fracking in Pennsylvania took the life of one cheese-maker through cancer, and in the months before she died, she and her husband put together a powerful presentation of what fracking is and how it destroyed their ability to farm.

These people I describe, with businesses they give their lives to, are realists and visionaries who have built a sustainable food system over the last 40 years, with the knowledge that fossil fuels would not last forever. If we do not protect our farmland from fracking, we will eliminate the very infrastructure that can survive and the very teachers that will help us all learn to thrive AFTER this brief era of fossil fuel burning is finally OVER.