Newspapers / University of North Carolina … / March 28, 2017, edition 1 / Page 3
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Community supported agriculture offers a direct farm-to-consumer approach to purchasing produce and other options. This approach is often more beneficial to the local community than larger retail grocers. CSA Fair connects farmers and BROOKE RANOLE News Staff Writer brandle@unca.edu The eighth annual Community Sup ported Agriculture Fair kicked off ear lier this month with more than 14 par ticipating farms, indicatiiig a growing interest in direct-to-consumer farming practices in and around Asheville. Robin Lenner, events coordinator at Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, said community-supported ag riculture provides residents with a way to purchase directly from local and regional farmers, while supplying the initial capital to farmers to kickstart the growing season. “It’s a pretty wonderful way to en gage with a farm,” Lenner said. “Un like shopping at a farmer’s market, which is still a fantastic way to directly purchase from a farm, community-sup ported agriculture is a membership where you basically buy a share of the farm at the beginning of a season and receive a box of produce or other prod ucts every week.” Farmers lined up in farmer’s market style booths to discuss CSA options, such as share size and pickup locations, while answering questions from poten tial buyers. In addition to vegetables. ** IT’S JUST SO EX CITING TO SEE HOW MANY FARMS HAVE iOlNEO THE FAIR. BECAUSE THERE’S MORE AND MORE FARMS THAT ARE 0FERRIN6 CSA.” • — Robin Lenner eggs and meats, fresh-cut flowers were among some of the many options pro vided by participating farms. “It’s just so exciting to see how many new farms have joined the fair. Be cause there’s more and more farms that are offering CSA,_ farms are figuring out ways to differentiate themselves,” Lenner said. According to a report released last year by the Department of Agriculture, more than 160,000 farms nationwide utilize CSAs and other direct market ing practices, such as farmer’s markets. in 2015. The USDA said locally produced and marketed food also helps to strengthen the rural economy and provide greater food access. Despite an overall decrease in desig nated farmland throughout the country, Lenner said the local food market spe cifically has experienced some growth. “On a whole, even though we’ve seen a decline in farmland for things like development, we’re also starting to see some growth in some areas, such as increased sales of products that are marketed in direct ways,” Lenner said. “There’s more acres in production than there were in the last AG Census and that shows that despite the decreases in overall farm acreage, there’s an in crease in acres in production.” Lenner said the agricultural heri tage of Western North Carolina centers around tobacco farming. As demand for tobacco waned, many farmers scrambled to find a more sus tainable farming industry. Lenner said her work with ASAP in cludes programs to educate farmers on marketing, distribution and connecting , local growers and buyers. CONTINUED ON PAGE 16 Section E0or: Larisa Karr lakarrmmca.eau Asheville experiences heroin resurgence BRIDGETTE PERROTT Contributor bperrott@unca.edu Asheville police say the once popular and idolized drug, heroin, is making a deadly national resur gence with Asheville in its tyranni cal clutches. “We’ve been dealing with heroin a pretty good bit here. The resur gence started a little bit over a year ago,” said Sgt. Brandon Moore of the Asheville Police Department’s Drug Suppression Unit. “It was something we haven’t dealt with in a very long time. Heroin itself had kind of died out, so to speak. It wasn’t really a drug that anyone was messing with.” The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention reports opiate over dose deaths nationwide have nearly tripled since 1999. “Heroin is a nationwide epidem ic and it stems from opioids, people being prescribed prescription pain medicine and it could be for an in jury they sustained from playing a sport or in an accident,” said Eric Boyce, assistant vice chancellor for public safety at UNC Asheville. The American Society of Ad diction Medicine classifies heroin, oxycodone, hydrocodone, codeine, morphine and fentanyl as opiates. According To the U.S. Depart ment of Justice, 1.4 million people abused a prescription pain medica tion for the first time in 2014. Moore said the problem is not so much the prescription of opi ate-based drugs, but the overpre- ' scription of opiate-based drugs, specifically, in the Asheville area. “The DEA came in and did a pretty big crack-down on some of those, maybe reckless, preserv ers,” Moore said. “Folks who were taking opiates prescribed to them CONTINUED ON PAGE 14
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