Elanor Starmer

The Agriculture Department’s “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” Initiative started by former Agriculture Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan continues even though Merrigan departed last year, a key official said Friday.

Elanor Starmer, the national coordinator and adviser for local and regional food systems in the office of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, said Friday that she reports monthly to Vilsack on all the activities of KYF2, as the initiative is known within USDA.

Starmer was on a rural development panel devoted to KYF2 at the USDA’s Agricultural Outlook Forum on Friday.

KYF2, which Merrigan set up to use the resources of the entire department to help smaller farmers and ranchers who market their production locally, is called an initiative because it does not have a budget of its own and therefore cannot be called a program.

Some supporters of the initiative had worried that Merrigan’s departure would diminish the effort, although she has said she believes it has been “institutionalized” within the department and that Vilsack supports it.

Guy Land, the chief of staff at the Appalachian Regional Commission, noted that “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” has reached out to agencies beyond USDA.

Land said that since the program was launched in 2009 it’s become clear that emphasizing local food production is part of an economic development strategy but not a complete development strategy for impoverished local communities. It is much easier, he noted, for a rural area to be successful in marketing locally or regionally produced food if there is a nearby large city to create a larger consumer base.

• Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food