Public Service and Leadership Development Fellow USDA Office of the General Counsel
While I can talk law and policy about food and agriculture, it means nothing without the producers. My brother’s beekeeping and honey company, The Hive Supply, was featured on WGN Chicago to talk about their partnership with the Blackstone Hotel yesterday. Naaman Gambill is the head beekeeper at The Hive Supply here in Chicago. Which means that at this time of year, he’s traveling around the city to see just how much destruction the winter brought to his hives. How many died? Which hives can be split? Will he need to purchase more bees from their supplier? How will this affect their production for contract clients as well as retail? Our conversations are so important to me, because they remind me whom agricultural law and policy affects. Agricultural producers have to wrestle with nature, along with bookkeeping and bottom lines. Though nature doesn't discriminate between large and small producers, it is especially difficult for small operations to recover from its blows. It is hard to be a small operation in ag, despite being an important component to a working food system. So when I think about a new policy or program, I am able to ask, how would this affect producers like Naaman?
My business partner Leonard and our client Pierre from Blackstone Hotel were able to spread the word on our sustainabile model of urban beekeeping with WGN today. https://lnkd.in/gtiU-rh4