Where you spend your money matters, and there are environmental, economic, and health benefits to buying your goods locally. This is never more true than in the case of local food, which benefits the environment by reducing the amount of resources expended from farm to fork and requires less packaging and refrigeration. Local food benefits our economy by increasing our food security, reinvesting in local resources, and improving the transparency in our food system. Local food benefits our health by minimizing nutrient loss between harvest and consumption and may be less likely to be contaminated by chemical and biological pollutants.LFMV's goals can be broken into micro and macro missions:Micro mission: To help connect and conveniently distribute the goods of local farmers, craftspeople, and artisan producers to local customers as a means of cultivating a robust local economy— one that emphasizes the importance of community resilience and transparency in the face of macro events.Macro mission: To participate and to collaborate in the larger movement of re-localizing economies in order to mitigate the effects of climate change and modern socio-cultural alienation, and by doing so, to become less reliant on fossil fuels, to reduce waste created by unsold goods, and to keep money circulating in our community.

The Farmers Market Federation of New York is a not-for-profit organization located in Syracuse, NY,with the mission to support and promote the viability of farmers markets through innovative services,programs, and partnerships that maximize the benefits of markets to sellers, buyers, and communities.A number of programs and services have been developed to support the mission.

D Acres was founded in 1997. The Mission of the organization is to function as an educational center that researches, applies and teaches skills of sustainable living and small-scale organic farming. Striving to improve the human relationship to the environment, the center functions as a demonstration farm to role model exemplars of healthy living. Sharing a communal living situation, individuals come to respect and share values of interdependence and love of nature. In addition, the organization supports educational activities directed toward improving the quality of life of residents and the larger community. Our intentions are to:-develop a farm system sustainable and suitable to this climate to act as a demonstration and experimental model;-increase consciousness about people's impact on the environment by limiting our consumption of fossil fuels and other resources; reducing, reusing, recycling; as well as emphasizing local and onsite production and consumption;-develop skills as a group to problem solve, organize and pursue an agreed agenda;-interact with and contribute to the community at large providing goods, services and educational opportunities while representing the vision of the organization;-provide a training center for the development of skills related to organic farming, forestry, landscaping, eco-friendly construction and cottage crafts, anddevelop personal and group skills to improve economic viability through "cottage style" industry.