Farming

What can I do?

1. Write letters and attend regional meetings to encourage local and state leadership to keep farmers on the land. Encourage our leaders to include financial incentives in legislation to make farming a sustainable way of life for the next generation of farmers.  North Carolina requires a new generation of younger farmers to take the place of this current generation, who are nearing retirement.
   
   
2. Support local farmers’ markets and eat as much locally-produced fresh food as you can. Locally grown food is much less likely to contain chemicals and other residues than imported food from less well-controlled areas.
   
   
3. Ask produce managers of your local supermarket where they buy their produce. Ask them about any chemical treatment used on food before it arrives in the store. Find out whether the meat you are buying (pork, poultry or beef) has come from animals where there is extensive use of antibiotics and other growth hormones. Ask if organic meat is available. More and more producers are now selling meat that has been raised in a chemical/drug-free environment.
   
   
4. The next time you go to the grocery store make a list of those things that you like to eat and examine the information on the package to find out where the food is grown.  Can you determine if this food is healthy for you based on this information?  If you aren’t sure that the information is on the packaging, ask the grocery department managers what they might know about the origin of the product. 
   
   
5. Use a search engine, such as Google, on the Internet and type in the name of the product or name of the producer listed on the package.  If you find a website, is the information helpful in learning more about how safe your food is to eat?  If there is no website, how else might you find this information?