Why organic and local?

Why can’t I just get local fruit and veg, why does Food Connect Adelaide only provide local organic food?

We believe that buying local is only one part of the sustainable food picture. Purchasing predominantly local food is important for sustaining and building our local communities and ensuring we will not fall victim to wider, interstate and international food production problems. Purchasing locally produced food ensures we eat seasonally and reduces the financial and environmental costs associated with transporting food across the country when such food could have been grown by and purchased from local growers. Food security issues are predicted by both agriculture and food systems experts to continue to worsen and can only be prevented by ensuring we have well educated, resilient and cohesive local communities and well developed and cohesive local food systems.
We also chose to source predominantly local produce for economic reasons, as it allows us to deal directly with growers to understand their production issues and give them more stability and security in pricing as the market will not be undercut by interstate competitor, /issues which frequently cause the current market to be volatile and unpredictable, making it hard for growers to make financial decidions.

In addition to big picture issues associated with the resilience of our local food supply are the facts that modern, conventional food production methods and systems rely heavily on ‘big agriculture’ which itself relies on modern chemicals to fight against the tendencies of nature. These methods are increasinlgy being challenged on their sustainablity as they require ever increasing artificial inputs which are becoming more and more expensive and support more and more intensive food production systems which heavily challenge and deplete local ecology .  The environmental costs of modern agribusiness is a hidden cost of conventional farming but is increasingly becoming an issue of concern to both the consumer and producer. This is in addition to the possible health benefits to the consumer of organically produced food.

Organic food systems have been proven to provide benefits such as storing more carbon in soils, increasing biodiversity, more humane animal production systems, reducing pollution of groundwater and waterways and reducing our reliance on pesticides and fertilisers based on oil and highly energy intensive systems. These are intangible benefits to you as consumers but essential if we wish to ever create more sustainable food systems. This requires us to think about the benefits to our environment and others more so than direct benefits to ourselves. It is for these long term sustainability reasons that Food Connect Adelaide has decided to offer predominantly local and organic produce. We are thinking of the long term benefits for the consumer, the farmer and the environment and have based our new food system upon these principles.