Local Food Shift Magazine: Highlighting the local food movement in Colorado

Michael Brownlee has been at the forefront of efforts to localize Colorado’s food supply via Local Food Shift Group, a non-profit he co-founded a decade ago. He says the growing awareness on local food issues can be nourished by more news and coverage of this issue. To that end, he is now the co-publisher of a new magazine that focuses on the local food movement in Colorado. Brownlee says that this will be a community supported publishing project, modeled on Community Supported Agriculture.

“Just as farmers have learned that they need a lot of capital early in the year to be able to prepare the land, buy the seed, hire the labor and all of that so they can deliver crops during the harvest season, they have offered shares if you will, Community Supported Agriculture Shares to members, who provide that capital early on. So we we think of our writers, our creative independents, as something like farmers – they’re providing the content that nourishes us and to be able to support them, to build this magazine, we’re inviting people to become members of Local Food Shift Magazine and pay up front for content they’ll be receiving all year round.”

The magazine will be quarterly starting in September 2015. The cover story for the first edition is on the Arkansas Valley Organic Growers in Southern Colorado, who have come together to build one of the first functioning food hubs in Colorado. Brownlee says they chose to feature this farmer-owned cooperative because it represents a key model for moving forward by creating a viable food hub. A food hub is a facility that can aggregate, sometimes process, store and distribute food that is brought in from a variety of producers. “So it’s the beginning of local food infrastructure in Colorado.”