A group of local residents working within various nonprofits are hoping to plant some seeds this summer — literally and figuratively — that could change the way the Roaring Fork Valley eats.

They’re starting with some farmland and a group of interested students, and hope that, as energy prices rise and the world food supply declines, the message will spread.

“We basically want to start food production wherever possible,” said Michael Thompson, a Basalt architect who sits on the board of Fat City Farms, a local nonprofit that is advancing the concept. “We don’t care where it gets started. The idea is energy prices are not going to be coming down anytime soon, if ever, so we need to establish local food production capacity.”

The group — which includes representatives from Fat City Farms, Ute City Farm, Slow Food Roaring Fork, the Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute and the Carbondale Economic Localization group, among others — is taking a multi-pronged approach to increasing local food production. And while the long-term goal is to acquire and cultivate more growing land, the first step, they believe, is education.

To that end, they will launch what they are calling the CSA Farm School this month. CSA, which stands for community supported agriculture, is a concept that usually involves selling locally grown food through subscriptions or shares. Farm school students would work and learn part time at Peach Valley CSA, a firmly established CSA between New Castle and Silt that supplies about 100 members, and part time at Ute City Farm in Woody Creek. Ken Kuhns and Jennifer Craig, who run the farms, respectively, are two of the instructors, with Jerome Osentowski of the Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute in Basalt rounding out the faculty.

“In permaculture we try to do things from the grassroots up, from the ground up, and this is a good example of that,” said Osentowski, who has succeeded in growing just about everything in his Basalt Mountain greenhouses for more than 20 years.

Osentowski believes that the combined knowledge of three people who have been working the local soil for decades can teach students to grow anything local conditions will support. The group plans to pursue Colorado Mountain College credit for the courses, and as a bonus the students supply free labor.

The Farm School will offer courses in summer-long segments, but also in shorter pods and eventually weekend workshops, to help local homeowners jump-start their own backyard food production.

The hope is that these students will eventually work at one of the local farms, or found their own enterprises.

“The idea is to build models for people to look at and say, ‘I want to do that,’” said Thompson.

Looking for land

In the meantime, the group is looking for a plot of land to buy or lease to start its own CSA, and it’s zeroing in on Carbondale.

A midvalley location would be ideal from a growing perspective, but also because of the anticipated tide of support. Carbondale now has a food co-op, and a CSA is just the sort of project the Carbondale Economic Localization group can latch onto. Carbondale’s Sustainable Settings runs its own CSA program, but the future of that ranch nonprofit is unclear.

Group members say the town seems to be supportive of the idea of devoting a piece of town-owned land to greenhouses and a permanent farm school and CSA.

“We’re just pooling our resources and trying to get something firm on the ground in the midvalley,” said Osentowski. “And you can start with 10 acres. We’re piecing different partners together like a puzzle, so nobody’s giving up too much.”

With greenhouses and other innovations, Osentowski believes a midvalley CSA could grow a wide variety of fruits and vegetables — agreements with other growers would fill some holes too.

Another long-term strategy the group will work on is easing the regularity burden of growing food. A greenhouse, for example, might use up valuable allowable square footage on a plot of land — so they want to give prospective growers better incentives to have one.

Something else that needs to happen, said Osentowski, is that we need to look at open space differently. Perhaps some land now categorized as open space could be converted to growing land.

“We have all this open space land and there’s this stigma about it — ‘let’s just look at it,’” he said. “I think a little bit about that needs to change.”

Given their grand vision, the group has about $15,000 in seed money to launch the program, according to Thompson, who estimates they’ll need almost double that to implement it successfully.

A cynic would say a sustainable farming future in one of the priciest valleys in the country is a pipe dream, but there’s a fair amount of optimism on the fundraising side.

“I don’t think finding the money is an issue; I think education is an issue,” said Susan Brady, a fundraiser and board member of Fat City Farms and Slow Food Roaring Fork. “As people learn how we can live sustainably in this valley, I think people will put money into it.”

Brady points to the recent brush fire that closed Highway 82 for part of a day, and the snowstorms that periodically close passes on Interstate 70.

“The only way food gets in here is trucking,” she said, “and it’s happened where our shelves were getting mighty slim.”

Globalization and corporatization also mean that most food is grown in mass quantities, with large amounts of pesticides on fruits and vegetables and hormones in farm animals to control growth and delivery. Local food proponents point out that one batch of spinach infected with salmonella sickened consumers nationwide.

So both food safety and food security are at the heart of the drive for local food production.

Add to that the concept of peak oil (when the amount of available oil has hit its peak): The general consensus among industry experts is that peak oil hit (or will hit) between 2005 and 2012, so “we need to become as independent as we can and use the resources that we have,” said Gary Goodson of the Community Office for Resource Efficiency, which is helping Thompson’s group find and fund a location for its farm school and CSA.

As energy prices continue to rise, the world is already seeing some food shortages. For example, Costco is now limiting the amount of rice its customers can buy.

“The energy that goes into producing our food is enormous,” said Goodson. “So the idea is local food is healthier, supports the local economy and tastes better. Meanwhile, we don’t need to truck all our food from the Central Valley in California.”

He adds: “We all have to eat.”

lutz@aspendailynews.com