You and your fellow subscribers to this site represent the Ohio food system quite well, and your numbers have been growing steadily. We've simplified the site a bit in response to your feedback, and hope that you find it easier to network as a result. But we now intend to evolve from excellent discussion, to new ideas, and to working together on planning and building local food system infrastructure.

This whole effort began at the first annual Stinner Summit, supported by the Ben Stinner Endowment for Healthy Agroecosystems and Sustainable Communities. The theme for this annual event is finding a project that all participants can work on together, one of Ben's gifts. Building local food infrastructure is a fitting choice, because it will take all of us. At the Summit last September, I told the story of the Argentine ant, an invader that lost the ability to compete among colonies during the trip from Argentina, all they know how to do is help every other member of their species that they encounter. And as a result they've taken over the entire state of California, the 7th or 8th largest economy on earth!

Now that you've experienced communication in this medium, and we've simplified the look to make it a bit easier, it's time to get down to the real work at hand. Over the next few weeks we'll be introducing some very goal oriented forms of communications on the site. One is a way to propose an idea and seek critiques, assistance, elaboration, information, or more new ideas. The second, aided by the idea generation, is a proposed business plan with some standard features but a non-standard route to implementation. Rather than being developed privately to avoid the competition, the plan will be developed openly, recognizing that collaboration will lead to more profit anyway. And the third is a way to make an offer of resources that can contribute to building local food system infrastructure in Ohio.

We'll provide demonstrations of each. Steve Bosserman has already started on how to go collaboratively from an idea to a business plan. The theme throughout will be collaboration, working together. We know that competition is more the norm for what many of us do. I compete for grant funds, others compete for market share, etc. But as Steve Bosserman points out in his "Business plans…" blog, there's not much point in competing within Ohio to build local food systems. There's enough opportunity there for a lot more than us, and we can take better advantage of it by helping each other than by competing. Ask any ant in California.