Colorado water shortages in the future are expected to occur due to increasing pressure and demands from four primary areas of use: population and municipal growth, recreation and the environment, agriculture, and the energy sector. Estimating future demands in all of these areas is difficult at best. Adding to these uncertainties are drought and climate change, and competition with downstream states.

The first ever National Farm to School Month is taking place this October. 

 In 2010, Congress designated October as National Farm to School Month, which demonstrates the growing importance and role of Farm to School programs as a means to improve child nutrition, support local farming and ranching economies, spur job growth and educate children about agriculture and the origins of their food.

Boulder County commissioners will consider adopting an update to the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan on Thursday, which includes a new section that specifically encourages local food production and sustainable agriculture.

Local herbalist Brigitte Mars regularly enjoys a breakfast that would be unfamiliar to most of us. She puts 2 tablespoons of chia seeds into a bowl, adds a cup of water and lets them hydrate overnight. In the morning, she adds blueberries or apples and cinnamon, whatever seasonal fruits she has on hand, and eats the seed, gel and garnishes like a cold bowl of oatmeal. ”I find that chia is the ultimate travel food,” she says. “I’ve been teaching in Iceland a few years. “I can bring a month’s worth of breakfast.”

Fresh and organic local produce come to the table at Vinny’s Restaurant in Frisco on Thursday for a High Country Conservation Center fundraiser. The event is a four-course meal that celebrates the harvest season for gardeners and farmers as well as the local food movement of bringing items to Frisco from within 200 miles

My caveat here is that I am not speaking as a representative of Transition Colorado, or the Transition movement. For the moment I am taking off those hats and speaking solely as a human being, a member of the human race. I need to say this, because I will say some things that I as a human being must say, things that I feel are not being said enough or heard enough.

It’s hard not to love the change of seasons. But if you’re standing in your garden or at the farmers’ market with glorious summer vegetables all around, it’s hard not to feel a little melancholy, too.

Eating locally grown foods is not a new concept. But it has turned into a national movement as we understand more about the modern age of industrial food production, genetically altered crops and E. coli outbreaks. We are increasingly concerned about the quality and “cleanliness” of the foods we put on our tables.

Local beekeepers, honey sellers and produce farmers are worried about the mysterious malady known as colony collapse disorder, which kills off hives, but most of them aren’t feeling any direct negative impacts — yet…

This week I attended a lecture during Boulder’s “Eat Local! Week.” The Chautauqua barn was filled with foodies, gardeners and social reformers, all looking to stock their larder from nearby farms. Speakers held out hope that Boulder County could feed them all. The idea of local food excited everyone’s senses — tidy fields yielding a bounty that travels just a few miles, and is touched by fewer hands, on the way to the table. There’s 25,000 acres of open space here, the speaker boasted, a seemingly vast resource. But in the half-century since my granddad turned out cattle beneath the Flatirons, land values have driven agriculture away from Boulder County.