JEFFERSON, Ohio -- Enhance your dairy operation with a farmstead cheese business with the aid of an Ohio State University Extension cheese-making workshop.

OSU Extension in Ashtabula County will offer the workshop Nov. 19-21. Hands-On Basic Cheese Making -- Enhancing Dairy Profitability with Cheese, is packed with information on a milk quality, ingredients used in cheese making, cheese-making processes and techniques and tips for establishing a cheese-making business.

Hi Everyone,

I'm posting this to the main group as well as some other group that might have interest in increasing edible perennial production in the region. 

The meeting minutes from June and July have been approved by the task force and are available for review.  See attachments at the bottom of this message.

Thank you, Amalie Lipstreu, Ohio Department of Agriculture 

As requested at the last task force meeting, I've created a wiki page that each of you can use to input information about existing data sets that could contribute to food systems assessment. To add information in the table please click on the title of the wiki page (Food Systems Assessment Metadata Table...) to bring the table up, and then choose "edit". Please let me know if there are additional columns that should be added to the table for a more complete record of the available data. Thanks, and we'll look forward to seeing you friday.

Casey

Attached are the meeting minutes of the Ohio Food Policy Council for June of 2008.  Please feel free to review the minutes and share you ideas and suggestiions.

Sincerely,

Amalie Lipstreu 

The meeting minutes for the Ohio Food Policy Advisory Council's Market Connections task force are attached. Please feel free to review this information and to share your ideas and suggestions with the group. The minutes include three recommendations that the were presented to the full Council. These recommendations have been approved and will be presented to the Governor's office.

Sincerely,

Amalie Lipstreu

Attached you will find the meeting minutes from June and July for the Ohio Food Policy Advisory Council's Healthy Food Access task force.  Please feel free to review these minutes and share ideas. The July minutes include four recommendations that have been approved by the full Council and will be presented to the Governor.

Amalie Lipstreu 

The minutes from the July meeting of the Ohio Food Policy Council's Agricultural Viability task force are attached for review. Please feel free to share your ideas with the group.  Included are three recommendations that were presented to the full Council.  Two of the three recommendations will be presented to the Governor's office.

Each  month we will post the meetings of the previous month - after they have been approved by the task force.

Thank you, 

Amalie  

As promised, here is the text of the USDA SCRI proposal submitted last week.  Just writing the proposal was a great start on collaboration between Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and John Deere.  I'm sure the ideas in the proposal will continue to grow in other directions as well.  Please don't hesitate to engage the group, or any of the other working groups of course, if you have ideas for how to expand on these efforts beyond the proposed project.

Regards,

Casey 

Last week a number of us submitted a grant proposal to the USDA Specialty Crops Research Initiative, under the Regional Partnerships for Innovation program. The executive summary is attached to this blog. The rest of the proposal, for those interested, will be posted to the Regional and National Partners group. We hope this will be successful and that we'll be able to intensify and build on the collaborations we've started since the workshop last February, through this site and through the relationships developed among subscribers.