Thanks for the food issue.

• Author: Preston, Bonnie
• Position: WE HEAR YOU - Letter to the editor

Thank you for the July/August issue on food, water, and land, which offered insight into many important issues. It reinforced my gratitude for Maine, where the local food movement is thriving, the number of farms is increasing, the average age of farmers is going down, and I can get Eliot Coleman's fresh greens at a local winter market!

A huge problem for small farms and food producers is the cost of meeting the regulations created (necessarily) for the industrial farms and national distribution system. When Maine's Department of Agriculture decided to impose them on small farms in 2009 for the first time, a group of small farmers and their patrons got together and wrote the Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance, relieving farmers and home kitchen...