JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The City of Jacksonville is launching a new initiative that aims to study and ultimately strengthen food accessibility and affordability for residents.
One in seven Duval County residents experiences food insecurity.
Local farmers like Sarah Salvatore with Eartha’s Farm and Market do their best to fill in the gaps, but it’s not easy work.
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“The hurdle I’m facing, I have 10 1/2 acres of land. I’m only actively farming about 2 1/2. That’s due to capacity,” said Salvatore. ”I only can fund so many farmers.”
Salvatore was among more than 50 community members who came to hear about the new city initiative that aims to develop a comprehensive food plan for Jacksonville.
Mayor Donna Deegan said community engagement will play a key role as the city looks for solutions to ensure long term sustainability, accessibility, and affordability of Jacksonville’s food system.
“We sit in a region with more than 20,000 acres of agricultural land and over 300 registered local farms. Think about that. So, the truth is we don’t really have a food issue, we have a systems issue,” said Deegan.
Anne Coglianese, Jacksonville’s Chief Resiliency Officer, is deeply involved in the development of the new “State of Food” plan.
Along with community input, she said there’s also a lot of data to analyze, like where does Jacksonville’s food currently come from, how does it get here, where do people buy it from, and what happens to the waste.
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“As our population grows, we want to make sure that access to food is distributed across our city. We also know that we have policies and we have programs that can make it potentially easier for our urban farms and for other growers to get started here,” said Coglianese. ”To have more a productive agricultural economy here in Jacksonville, that’s both good for our economy and also good for residents and their access to healthy foods and the affordability of those foods.”
The goal is to have a plan ready to enact by this summer.
Farmers like Salvatore are excited to see what new funding options, programs, and opportunities could come out of it.
“Infrastructure to support the growing, aggregating, and the distributing of food, then we have these little local food hubs all over our city supporting the bigger picture to make Jacksonville a more sustainable community,” said Salvatore.
There will be some public meetings this spring where residents can provide input and get updates on how the plan is taking shape.
Action News Jax will update you when those dates are announced.
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