Upgraded Website

With a generous grant from the County Commissioners we were able to upgrade our website to use it as a dynamic and powerful vehicle for communication with the community.

The purposes for which our Farmers Market was organized (taken from our Articles of Incorporation) are:

1. Educate, promote, and conduct direct farmer-consumer marketing;
2. Collect, analyze and disseminate economic farm practices information amonth its' members and other interested persons;
3. Educate consumers on standard farming practices and alternative practices so they can make educated decisions on their purchase of farm produce;
4. Promote local economic development through direct crafter-producer/consumer marketing.

With a generous grant from the County Commissioners we were able to upgrade our website to use it as a dynamic and powerful vehicle for communication with the community.  The upgrades will allow our staff to keep the website fresh and current.  The upgraded website will help us in our missions to foster connections between farmers/artists and consumers in Lincoln County. 

Gray's Web Design developed our website 8 years ago, and it has remained largely unchanged since then, do to a limited budget for programming costs for changes.  With this upgrade Gray's Web Design has made the site completely owner managed making it much more relevant as a tool for educating and marketing the Farmers Market.  Part of our mission is to educate the public, this upgrade will make it much easier to do this, whether it is for posting an in season "recipe of the week", or talking about food safety issues and independence for our coastal community.

Watch our site as we get used to being in the driver's seat this season!

OCA on New Food Safety Bill-HR 2749

There's been a lot of buzz on the web about the new Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 (HR-2749). Many of our supporters have called or emailed us to find our stance on the issue. Although the Organic Consumers Association is fairly satisfied that the bill is intended to protect organic farmers from being negatively impacted by new food safety regulations, the bill does not address the underlying causes of America's persistent and evermore serious food safety crisis: factory farms and chemical-intensive agriculture.

When addressing the concerns of E.coli or salmonella, the bill focuses on fresh vegetables and fruits rather than CAFOs or intensive confinement factory farms, in effect treating the symptom and not the disease. A close look at the nation's food poisoning epidemics over the past decade reveal that the overwhelming majority of fruit and vegetable contamination incidents are a direct result of water and soil pollution from large factory farms. The OCA believes that HR-2749 should be amended to address factory farming:

1) Animals should never be fed blood, manure or slaughterhouse waste.

2) Cows need to eat grass.

3) Animals need to be spread out on enough land to absorb their waste.

4) CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) pose unacceptable risks to human health such as antibiotic resistance, incubate dangerous viruses and pathogens such as the Swine Flu and Bird Flu, contaminate the environment, institutionalize animal cruelty, and need to be phased out and shut down.

Reprinted with Permission from The Organic Consumers Association

http://www.organicconsumers.org/