A meal at downtown Sacramento's fashionable Grange Restaurant & Bar shows how one segment of local agriculture has room to grow.
The Grange, home to politicos, tourists and hometown crowds at the Citizen Hotel, thrives on an old idea become new again: locally grown food. A typical meal, conceived by executive chef Michael Tuohy, includes Yolo pastured chicken, salad greens, organic potatoes and a "good local olive oil."
"Local food is why I came to Sacramento," said the San Francisco-born chef, who in 2008 left Atlanta for the capital. "Within 50 miles you have everything from honey to olive oil to cheese to goats to lamb to pork to vegetables."
Regional leaders say Tuohy's four-piece meal represents a small, but key, contributor to the economy. Whether discovering a fledgling chicken supplier in Yolo County or ordering wine from Amador County, newcomer chefs and consumers alike are building a niche for locally grown and consumed food in the region's otherwise globalized farm economy.
Witness new generations of farm families running wineries, selling olive oil and growing all manner of seasonal delicacies, many of them organic.
Farming no longer constitutes a huge sector of the Sacramento economy, but it has been a stable one during the recession.
Area farms actually produced more income during the downturn, not less: $1.66 billion in 2008 compared with $1.3 billion in 2006. Employment, while still a small part of the local jobs picture, grew from an annual average of 7,400 people in 2004 to 8,300 people in 2008, according to the state Employment Development Department. Rice led the way as buyers turned from meats to cheaper grains.
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