Joel Salatin is passionate about promoting local food systems, the concept of connecting regional farmers with area consumers and businesspeople who buy their products.

The owner of Polyface Farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley is a high-profile figure in the “farm-to-table” movement, and he urged attendees at a Buffalo conference Monday to figure how to help a local food system take root.

Salatin, 53, said creating such a system depends on more than just a farmer’s output to succeed. He cites six essential pieces: producer, processor, marketer, accountant, distributor and patron.

“If those six pieces fill their proper spots to the right size, what we have is a whole pie,” he said. “And when you have a whole pie, you have a thriving, wonderful local food system.”

Salatin spoke at Field & Fork Network’s third annual Farmer-Chef Conference in the Hyatt Regency Buffalo. Field & Fork Network is a nonprofit group that promotes creating a local food system.

Salatin said farmers—the producers — play a key role by following sound growing and business practices. Processors are needed to get food ready to eat, and while he said that infrastructure should be locally based, those services often face opposition from building inspectors.

Two areas that farmers typically don’t focus on—accounting and marketing— are vital, for keeping track of the money and persuading people to buy their products, Salatin said.

“I would love to think if you produce it good enough, they will come,” he said. “You know what? They won’t. Somebody has to be a gregarious storyteller- schmoozer.”

Distribution is “one of the weakest links right now in the local food movement,” Salatin said, and local farmers should collaborate to overcome that. He suggested having a common cashier at a farmers’ market, “so farmers can actually hobnob, give recipes and all this stuff to people, the sold-out Farmer-Chef Conference, including farmers, chefs, distributors, food buyers and consumers.

The “buy local” theme shows up in a number of ways across the region. Retailers such as Tops, Wegmans and Walmart promote locally grown produce they sell. More farmers’ markets are popping up. And an increasing number of area restaurants are buying locally, as well, said Lisa Tucker, co-founder and president of the board of directors of Field & Fork Network.

“It’s an education process on both sides; the farmers understanding how to sell to the restaurants, and the restaurants understanding how to buy from the farmers,” she said.

How successful has the region been in creating such a system?

“I think Western New York is primed for a local food system,” Tucker said. “We’ve got a long way to go, but agriculture is huge in Western New York. We have over 7,500 farms in the eight-county region, and one of

and build a relationship instead of having to collect all the money.”

And any successful local food system needs patrons to buy the food — people who “get jazzed and excited about cultivating domestic culinary acts,” he said.

“The dearth of culinary information in this country is unbelieveable,” Salatin said. “And all of us share a responsibility of leading by example in encouraging people about the joy and discovery of culinary arts.”

About 250 people registered for

the reasons I started Field & Forks is it can be a key economic driver. It’s largely been ignored, and I think the tide is turning.”

Field & Fork is raising money to conduct a feasibility study to determine which local farmers want to be in the wholesale market, and how much they would be willing to invest in their operations to “scale up” production to meet increased demand, Tucker said. The study would also survey the “demand” side of the equation, including distributors, grocery stores and big buyers like universities, to see how much they would be willing to invest.

The goal is to create an “action plan” to identify the business infrastructure needed — such as processing facilities — to bring the two sides together, Tucker said.

Salatin has gained recognition through documentaries such as “Food Inc.” and for books he has written. As a speaker, he livens up his remarks with healthy doses of humor. He pokes fun at stereotypes about farmers—that they prefer their John Deere tractors to people, for instance.

Salatin recounted meeting a woman who expressed shock at farmers who were “articulate.”

“I’m here to promote the Jeffersonian intellectual agrarian,” he said. “What’s wrong with that?”

mglynn@buffnews.comnull