About
“The most notable event in the history of Fort Collins in a material way, since the completion of the Colorado Central Railroad in 1877, was the building of the beet sugar factory in 1903.” - Ansel Watrous, History of Larimer County (1911)
“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.” - Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace
In 2021, the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded a planning grant to a coalition of six Fort Collins food organizations: The Growing Project, The Family Center/La Familia, Northern Colorado Foodshed Project, Poudre Valley Community Farms, ReKaivery, and CSU Extension.
This group, called the Poudre Food Partnership, was instructed to build a more equitable, vibrant, and resilient food system in Northern Colorado by addressing three key areas of growth and opportunity: food sovereignty and access, production growth and land access, and community outreach and education.
For the last two years, we’ve been planning. We’ve built a framework to achieve our long and short-term goals. We’ve assembled four working groups of local experts and advocates who are designing tangible, concrete strategies to improve the economic, environmental, and agricultural health of our community. Each month we host a Community Convo at Stodgy Brewing Co., where farmers and foodies convene, converse, enlighten, and inspire one another to go forth and spread the good word.
That last part is why we’ve created the Sugar Beet, a newsletter and resource guide highlighting all the happenings in our food system. Food. Farming. Policy. Markets. Environment. If it has to do with Front Range food, it has a place here.
Why subscribe?
Perhaps you don’t grow, produce, process, aggregate, distribute, market, cook, bake, or sell food. But we know for a fact that you eat it. That makes you, dear reader, part of our food system. If you’d like to receive monthly newsletters about the issues, ideas, events, people, and places within it, subscribe here:
