The Gillings Sustainable Agriculture Project: A Gillings Innovative Laboratory

We’ve had our first hard frost of the season. Holiday advertisements can be seen everywhere. Tables at my farmer’s market are piled high with root vegetables and greens. All signs point to the final departure from the lingering mild temperatures of our North Carolina fall and the inevitable transition into a steadfast winter. I’m the first to admit that I’m a wimp when it comes to cold. I keep telling myself that our winter temperatures surely aren’t as bad as more northern states, but I can’t help but long for those warm spring days that seem so far away as the weather demands heavy coats and the daylight gets shorter and shorter. But today, as I was compiling some information for a new Tarheel guide for the UNC Gillings School of Public Health that will feature local restaurants, farmer’s markets and other agricultural related enterprises (more on this project later), my heart warmed to a very early sign of spring. It’s time for CSA sign ups!

CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) programs offer an opportunity to get affordable produce delivered regularly to your home, or to a convenient drop-off point in your neighborhood. Regardless of the CSA, prices are relatively inexpensive compared to buying retail, and you can choose to have delivery weekly, semi-weekly, monthly, or seasonally. Options depend on the program and some farms offer half shares in addition to full shares. A full share typically represents enough produce for a family of four for a week. Some farms offer add-on services: in addition to receiving produce, CSA participants can add on fresh flowers, honey, cheese or value added products like jams and jellies. CSA’s are most typically available during the main growing season from spring through early fall but some even continue through late fall and winter.  Sign ups start around this time of year. You can choose a CSA for a particular farm (or sometimes a few farms working together), where your delivery contains produce from those farms only. Your delivery “subscription” helps fund the farms’ operations for that period of time. Typically farms provide newsletters and recipes along with boxes of produce to help participants learn about agriculture and how to prepare the food each week. Often times CSA participants claim that they get much more produce than they could imagine and find themselves sharing the abundance with friends and family. It can be a great idea for a group of single people, such as students living near one another, to go in on a CSA subscription together.

I was impressed at the number of farms in our area that offer CSA subscriptions, while also happy to see that many farm websites advised folks to sign up early, as their subscriptions quickly sell out. Debbie Roos, NC Agricultural Extension Agent, has compiled a great list with farms in the Piedmont region that offer CSA’s along with their contact information. Click here to view.

As the days get shorter and the weather turns cold, consider an investment in a CSA subscription. It’s a great way to support a local farmer, increase the amount of fruits and vegetables in your diet and, it may even warm you up a bit as you dream about a big, juicy, sun warmed tomato as we head into the December cold.

Mary James, owner of Dogwood Nursery Farms in Pender County, holding one of her turkeys. Photo courtesy of Kavanah Ramsier

Personally, I wished we celebrated Thanksgiving every month. Maybe even every week. It seems strange that there is only one formal holiday set aside to give thanks for our family, friends, and the food on our plates. Not that you can’t do this every week, it’s just that there is only one day nationally celebrated as such.  So take advantage of it. This Thanksgiving, when you’re sitting down to a table full of traditional Thanksgiving fare or whatever it is that you eat that day, take a moment to appreciate the food you are eating by trying to comprehend the story of your meal, not some romanticized tale, but how it really came to be on your plate. And if you buy some parts of your dinner from a local farmer, I guarantee that the story will be a lot less complicated and will probably have a lot less gaps.  And it won’t require a Google search! Because you can know that if you buy lettuce from say, the Soehner family of Eco Farm (a seller at The Carrboro Farmer’s Market), the money that you hand them will go directly to their family and farm.  If you talk to one of them for only a minute, you can find out that it was grown without pesticides less than twenty miles away from downtown Chapel Hill.  And that’s an easy, nice tale to tell about some of the food you are enjoying. So support a North Carolina farmer this Thanksgiving and have a wonderful, restful, holiday!

Goats at My Sister's Farm, photo courtesy of Kavanah Ramsier

We all piled on the bus, throwing our coats, still chilly from outside, down next to us. Some of us chatted with a new acquaintance, excited about the places we had seen that day. I suddenly felt like I was in elementary school once again, coming back from a field trip to the zoo. But this trip didn’t include squashed brown bag lunches or monkeys in a cage or even a bright yellow school bus. This was a type of field trip, I suppose, but of a different kind.

Presented by The Conservation Fund’s Resourceful Communities Program, this trip was a “Peer Learning Visit” – a trip to see first hand what is happening with sustainable agriculture in Eastern North Carolina and learn how our local food economy is growing in a place that traditionally has produced primarily tobacco and large commodity crops. There were more than twenty of us touring four farms located in Bladen and Pender County, all in the south eastern part of our state, no farm more than sixty miles from Wilmington.

To play a part in building a local food economy for North Carolina, those of us working in sustainable agriculture have to start connecting the dots across the entire state — between producers along the coast to producers in the Piedmont to producers in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. With 560 miles stretching from east to west, North Carolina is a large state making this an enormous task, with many organizations working together to make it happen. For someone like me, I find it very valuable to connect the dots by personally visiting different areas in our state and learning first hand how farmers are growing, producing and distributing food and how different resources are supporting them.

During the Peer Learning Visit our first stop was Happy Land Farm in Bladenboro, owned and run by Anne and Harold Wright. This incredibly hardworking and innovative couple not only have one hundred acres in production, growing vegetables and all natural pork and chickens, but they engage in a number of entrepreneurial efforts such as trucking, catering and their very own daycare. Mr. Wright says his key to success is to “diversify as much as possible.” In particular, he says being creative and making use of existing and varied resources is essential, along with buying major equipment jointly with other farmers and having his own tank to store his feed. In the past, tobacco farmers, like the Wright’s, used curing houses, known as “bulk barns,” to dry the tobacco.  Now Mr. Wright and many other farmers are turning these barns into chicken houses. In place of tobacco, they now grow corn and soybeans, rotating between each so as to contribute to the health of the soil. In ways like this farms like Happy Land Farm have become truly integrated  and diversified systems that contribute to the longevity and sustainability of the farm. When asked if his many grandchildren participate in farm work, Wright laughed, “Let them drive the tractor and they’re hooked!”

After a delicious lunch of pulled pork Carolina style, sweet potatoes and collard greens (all grown by the Wright’s), our group listened as members of The Twin River Coop, comprised of seventeen farmers in the area, told us about life after the tobacco buyout. One member remarked about the process that, “There were a lot of questions and not many answers.” So the farmers started providing answers themselves – working as a group to explore new directions for their farms and applying for grants as a group fromRural Advancement Foundation (RAFI)to purchase shared equipment such as a manure sprayer and cooler to support these new efforts. The Coop acted as a support network as farmers shared their successful ideas with other farmers and talked about ways to work around failed efforts and strategize about on farm solutions.

Anne and Harold Wright of Happy Land Farm, photo courtesy of NC A&T

Then it was on the bus once again, to head to the small town of Burgaw, where sisters Joyce Bowman and Carol Jackson greeted us on their certified organic farm called, My Sister’s Farm. Before we could see their field of organic vegetables however, we had to cross through the goat paddock. That was an experience in itself. “Once you’ve named them,” Joyce told us, “it’s hard to get rid of them.” She listed off some names – Twisted Horn, Baby, Pony, Bangs and Reindeer. As I walked past Bangs, aptly named for his natural hairstyle, Joyce told us that the goats were her sister’s idea. “My sister is the adventurous one – anything that’s different, she’ll buy. I’m the conventional one.” Both school teachers in New York, the two sisters retired and started farming on their family’s unused four acres of land only four years ago. “I gradually eased her into farming.” says Carol and Joyce pipes up, “She conned me!” with a grin. When asked about growing organically, Carol said, “It starts off slow, but it’s great once it gets started.” Though getting certified was a lot of work, Carol said numerous times that “they wouldn’t change it for the world.”  Most customers hear about their farm from word of mouth and come to the farm to buy directly, although they also sell to a joint-farm CSA. As Carol talks about what a change farming is from teaching, both of the sisters’ happiness is palpable, “Now I’m doing what I want to do. I’m digging in the dirt!”

Dinner was held at The Pender County Cooperative Extension and over a delicious, all local, meal of roasted chicken, pasta and salad cooked by Café Liardi of Burgaw, we heard from Southeastern NC Food Systems about how they were trying to boost economic development in Eastern North Carolina by connecting the public back to the area’s agricultural roots. As I listened I looked at a quilt hanging on the wall with individual squares painstakingly stitched with images of corn, strawberries, watermelon, grapes and peanuts. It was clear that Pender County took pride in the food their farms produced. As I saw firsthand earlier in the day, farmers are working hard there and in neighboring Bladen County to produce delicious, fresh food by using sustainable farming methods. It’s important that we support these and other North Carolina farmers by trying to purchase locally produced food in our stores and restaurants when we can.

By the time the visit ended and we all headed our separate ways home, I was tired but excited, my mind still full of all that we had seen. I often find it ironic that though my job focuses on agriculture, I spend most of my time behind a computer. It was such a pleasure to be outside and visit a real, working farm while getting to hear the farmers’ stories. I’m sending a big thank you to The Conservation Fund and Resourceful Communities for organizing and funding this 3^rd annual Peer Learning Visit. Click here to view a slideshow of pictures from the trip.

Turnips grown by the Wright's of Happy Land Farm, photo courtesy of Kavanah Ramsier

Critics of eat local movements typically point to one theme – the often high cost of buying fresh fruits and vegetables and the difficult task of stretching food budgets to find ways to afford local food. At the same time one can buy a McDonalds’ burger for a dollar, a head of lettuce grown in nearby soil may cost over twice as much.  This means that financially struggling families often have little choice about how to keep from going hungry: McDonalds is often the least expensive, and perhaps easiest option for people who feel they can’t afford to spend much money on their diet. This point is emphasized by Triangle local Tom Philpott, food editor of Grist Magazine who says, “If there’s no place in the food movement for low- and middle-income people of all races, we’ve got big problems, because the critics will be proven right — that this is a consumption club for people who’ve traveled to Europe and tasted fine food.”

In order to eat more fruits and vegetables without breaking the bank, some people have learned that they can’t just rely on their grocery stores and farmers markets for food anymore and have begun to grow their own in order to get healthier fresh food in their meals. Gardeners around the country are working in their communities, schools and in their personal gardens and are attempting to break the economic barriers of buying healthy food while getting people to rethink the idea that eating locally is only for the upper class.

This coming month, those of us in North Carolina can have the pleasure of hearing from one of the most creative leaders of the movement to improve access to healthy food — Will Allen, the 2009 recipient of the MacArthur Genius award will be visiting Raleigh later this month and speaking at the McKimmon Center . Allen started a two-acre urban garden called Growing Power Farm in downtown Milwaukee, a city with an abundance of cheap, fast food and little options for fresh produce. Frustrated with these limited choices, Allen took initiative to start a community garden and engage those people living in the area to get involved learning about growing their own produce and enjoying the delicious results of their labor.  Allen will be speaking next Monday evening, Nov. 9^th, as the 2009 Center for Environment Farm Systems (CEFS) Sustainable Agriculture Leader. Click here to link to The New York Times article to learn more about Will Allen and his work and click here to learn location and time details.

We encourage you to attend the event and bring a friend! Allen’s beliefs and work are vital in expanding the local food movement to include all people, regardless or race and income.

October Beans

I’ve recently begun driving to farmers markets across the state to collect data for the economic aim of The Gillings Sustainable Agriculture Project led by Mitch Renkow, an Agriculture and Resource Economics Professor at NC State University. I enjoy the work for various reasons; it’s always good to leave familiar surroundings and explore different areas of our state, it’s interesting to talk with farmers, young and old, black and white, part-time and full time and perhaps the best perk, I get to buy from a wide variety of fresh produce, some of which I can’t find at my local market. A couple of weeks ago, I drove to a market far from my own community on a beautiful day with the deep blue sky hinting at fall. I drove through the small downtown, with a Lucky Strike tower climbing above all the other small storefronts. The community had primarily supported tobacco production and cigarette manufacturing, serving as a key location of the American Tobacco Company, which employed large numbers of city and county residents. It was the mainstay of the town’s economy until the American Tobacco Company’s sale and closer in 1994. My hand scribbled directions indicated that the market was further out, so I kept driving, my car winding around country roads that were lined with big oak trees choked with vines. After going a few miles and not seeing anything that resembled a farmer’s market, I stopped at a gas station and asked for directions. Behind the counter, two people stood smoking cigarettes and looking at me in some confusion as I asked if they knew where the farmers’ market was.

“The what?” they asked, as they clearly decided I was not from around here.

I explained to them again, thinking maybe it was my northern accent that was making things unclear. “What are you tryin’ to buy?” one man asked, now seeming concerned.

This was a bit more complicated, but at this point they already thought I was strange. As I explained that I was from UNC and surveying different farmer’s markets from around the state, the other man piped up, remembering where the market was. Though, he said, he wasn’t sure if they were still doing it.

I followed his directions, continuing further into the country, passing fields of red dirt that looked like it had recently been tilled. I noticed a small sign, announcing the market and pulled into a tiny dirt lot. There was a wooden structure with six or seven farmers under it, beginning to pull their cardboard boxes off of trucks and vans. I made my way over, and with a handshake and a smile introduced myself. Mitch Renkow had talked to the market manager by telephone earlier in the week, so the farmers were expecting me. They generously gave me their attention as they set up their goods; giant purple pearls of muscadines, last of the summer’s corn, freckled red apples, mustard greens, kale, boxes of figs and other fresh produce. Some farmers had already finished setting up, and invited me to sit on a crate while I asked them questions and scribbled down their answers on my clipboard. Like any conversation, where questions lead to topics which lead to stories which lead to actually getting to know someone, I began to listen about how they started farming, their family’s history, the price of land, the shrinking size of their farm as they sold it off acre by acre, the scarce number of customers at their market and how many of them could barely afford to make their gas money home. I couldn’t write fast enough and though I had already gotten down the answer I needed, I wanted to record their stories as well.

At this point, the market had officially begun, though only a few customers were milling about. One farmer, surrounded by his homegrown roasted peanuts, jars of light amber honey and rows of okra, interrupted me halfway through my set of fixed questions. “We need to move to a better location,” he said “look at this place – we’re not on a main road, no signs, not much parking. Whose gonna come?”

Another farmer told me that customers just weren’t willing to pay the prices:

One woman came over and asked about my potatoes. I told her a 1.25 a pound. “Well,” she said, “1.25? Not for that price.” and walked away. I remember that kind of stuff. So next time I went to the grocery store, I checked to see what they were selling them for. They had them at a 1.50!

I thought of Gary Grant, a speaker who visited the Politics of Food class, as one African American farmer told me how hard it had been for him in his early days of farming, through the seventies and eighties, to secure loans simply because of the color of his skin.

Despite all of this, the generosity of the farmers with their time and produce had obviously not been affected. One customer, who didn’t have enough cash to pay for a bag of sunset pink October Beans, was about to put them back when the farmer told him, “Take those beans back. Your credit is good here.” As he handed him his bag he told me, “We sell fresh produce at a good price.”

And there were a handful of customers that you could easily tell were regulars who enjoyed shopping at the market. As an older woman approached a table, the farmer cheerfully called out to her, “Hello Miss. Molly! How you doing today?” She walked away with three bags full of lima beans and with a smile looked at me and said, “I’ve got work to do with all these limas!” I listened as one man told a farmer how much his sick mother-in-law looks forward to coming to the farmers market because, he said, “it makes her feel good.”

I left with some beautiful muscadines and honey, both of which the farmers had almost refused to let me pay for.

As I drove home that day, through the beautiful North Carolina agricultural landscape that led back to the ubiquitous highways, I thought of how good and necessary it is to experience different parts of our state. It becomes easy to envision large crowds donned with canvas bags headed to the farmer’s market on a Saturday morning in our more affluent and left leaning Triangle community. Cities like Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Durham and Raleigh may be the leaders in the North Carolina local food movement, but as such, it’s important to remember other areas in our state and to make sure we don’t leave them behind. In order to truly build a long term, sustainable, local food economy, The Gillings Sustainable Agriculture Project recognizes it is essential to learn from and work with challenges that face different communities across the state of North Carolina. As cold weather approaches and the growing season winds down, I’ll stop traveling to visit markets, but I look forward to start surveying and learning from farmers throughout our state again in the spring.

Cinderella Pumpkins

President Obama has proclaimed this week as National School Lunch Week (and every subsequent 2nd week in October.) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Presidential-Proclamation-National-School-Lunch-Week/ Let’s hope this is the beginning of something very exciting to come for our kids.

Want more fruits and veggies in schools: Check out HPDP’s Farm to School Network project, http://www.hpdp.unc.edu/hpdp/index.cfm?fa=research.ProjInfo&ProjectID=31

If you’ve read any of these blog posts, you’ll know that there is a lot packed into The Gillings Sustainable Agriculture Project. Of course, I’m new to research, but it’s still incredible to me that one project focused on local food is connecting economics, health, the environment, public policy, and community development. And now the project has taken it one step further by bridging the gap between historically rival schools – UNC and Duke University, through a class entitled “The Politics of Food.” This class is offered to both UNC and Duke students, who actually sit in a room together and have meaningful and productive discussions surrounding issues related to food systems.  This class became a key element of this Gillings research project when Dr. Ammerman defined how much there was to be learned from the issues the project is studying and how much students’ work could contribute to the project itself.

The Politics of Food course is being offered this fall and is taught by Dr. Charlie Thompson, Education and Curriculum Director of The Center for Documentary Studies, an interdisciplinary educational organization affiliated with Duke. I am assisting Dr. Thompson with administration of the course and have the opportunity to join in the class each week.  Though the class is located on the Duke campus, Tarheel fans make the trip over to The Center each Thursday. The class focuses on discussion of various readings and talks from different guest speakers, including growers, advocates for farm worker’s rights, researchers from this project, leaders in the North Carolina food movement, urban gardeners, union organizers, educators on the affects of pesticides and others. While in the class, students contribute to The Gillings Sustainable Agriculture Project by researching various organizations in North Carolina that are working for justice and change within the food system and beyond. Students have been asked to document their work, through essay, film or photography. Dr. Thompson makes clear to students that their work is not only for a letter grade. “Do your research and writing especially well,” the syllabus says, “because it will have a life beyond this course.”

A recent speaker to the class was Mr. Gary Grant, executive director of his community organization – The Concerned Citizens of Tillery. His parents began farming in the Tillery Resettlement Community in 1947. According to the National Organization to Save the Grant Family Farm over the next five decades, “officials in local USDA offices discrimaned against black farmers by delaying delivery of loans, requiring excessive collateral, and intimidating black borrowers.” Now the Grant family farm is threated with foreclosure. Mr. Grant spoke with an anger that was deepened by sadness, “My family would put in a loan and wait three, four, five months before we heard anything back. Meanwhile, white farmers just walked in and out of the office with their loans secured.”  Indeed in 1999, Judge Paul Friedman signed a consent decree that effectively settled a long and bitter class action lawsuit against the USDA by black farmers alleging discriminatory lending practices. The lawsuit awarded damages to thousands of African-American farmers. Unfortunately, Mr. Grant told the class, obtaining actual recompense for the economic penalties they suffered has been difficult.

Dr. Thompson, who is also a writer and filmmaker, showed the class a film he produced entitled “We Shall Not be Moved,” which portrays the history of the Tillery citizens from their days of slavery, to sharecroppers, to landowners, and through the challenges they face today. ”  Mr. Grant also talked about the school he used to teach at before it was closed down by the state due to budget cuts. Now children in his community have to travel by bus for over an hour to get to school each day. Families with young children don’t want to stay in Tillery, and he fears his community, once a vibrant place, will collapse.

Mr. Grant was a wonderful speaker, an impassioned man who an audience will not soon forget. His story is also a clear example of the political issues embedded in our food system. As I drove back to Chapel Hill that day, I thought about how progressive The Gillings Sustainable Agriculture Project is and how lucky I feel to be a part of it. This project doesn’t just stop at finding answers, but includes educating people about the complexities of what we eat and how it affects so much more than just our bodies. With knowledge, people can begin to decide how they would like to make a difference in our current food system. It can start as simply as buying an apple from a local farmer instead of one that was shipped from thousands of miles a way. Quoting from Dr. Thompson, “We are what we eat, but we are also what we do with the energy from what we eat.”

Gary Grant

I recently read a study that estimates that one in three Americans will have Diabetes by 2050. Diabetes Type II will account for 90 to 95% of these cases; Type II is directly related to obesity and lack of physical activity. A healthy diet could prevent the onset of this disease while helping to decrease the enormous amount of health care costs that arise from it. And a healthier diet could consist partially of eating locally produced food. One aim of The Gillings Sustainable Agriculture Project is focusing on the connection of eating locally and an increase in consumption of fruits and vegetables – which of course are key to a healthy diet. But what does health care reform mean for what we eat? Take a look at this  interesting op-ed piece in The New York Times by Michael Pollan that looks at the connection between health care reform and the potential consequences within the food industry. He asserts that if health insurance companies are forced to cover everyone, regardless of their health, they will inevitably be inclined to take a more proactive approach to improve people’s health.

In North Carolina, there are over two hundred towns with less than five thousand people. Many of these towns lack viable job opportunities and residents are forced to leave to find work in other nearby larger cities. As this exodus occurs the workforce diminishes, fewer people utilize services or patronize retail businesses, the tax base shrinks, economic activity slows, and small towns, that were once self-sufficient and self-contained, end up suffering and at times, completely vanishing. The migration of residents from small towns to the big city is not a new story, but as we look to North Carolina’s strong agricultural heritage, The Gillings Sustainable Agriculture Project views our state’s ties to farming as a potential new way to revitalize and preserve many of our state’s small towns.

Will Lambe, Associate Director of The Community and Economic Development Program at the UNC School of Government, and Helen Dombalis, a graduate student at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, are working to connect the state’s movement towards a more local and sustainable food system with ways to maintain the viability of small communities. Will, who recently published a book entitled “Small Towns, Big Ideas, Case Studies in Small Town Economic Development” is not new to helping communities think outside of the box to foster economic development. He has researched and presented findings related to rural economic development strategies to communities in various states throughout the country as well as to an international audience. Now, Will is using the case study approach to assess agriculturally-related initiatives.

As part of this aspect of The Gillings Sustainable Agriculture Project, Will and Helen will be conducting eight case studies of local, sustainable food systems in counties throughout North Carolina that will showcase community economic development resulting from these systems.  These cases will begin to identify characteristics, assets and other commonalities among those counties and will likely encompass communities in various states of progression in their development of local food systems – from those that have just a few prospects to those with a strong agricultural infrastructure and networked resource base.  As part of this process, specific organizations within each county will be identified for their work within some aspect of food change. Leaders from each organization will be interviewed to learn what the organization has helped to achieve within their community and to explore the organization’s goals and challenges. According to Will and Helen, the intent is to document each system’s development including lessons learned regarding the challenges surmounted, opportunities realized and to identify the ingredients for success. Ultimately these findings, including both barriers to and facilitators of local food system development, will be presented to various county commissioners, economic development professionals, and others who are looking for ways to help save small towns.

Right here in the Triangle area, Pittsboro clearly seems like a small town success story. Just a half hour south of Chapel Hill in Chatham County, Pittsboro’s dynamic and progressive initiatives are impressive. As Sustainable Grub blogger and Pittsboro resident writes, “Clearly something is happening here that may be instructive for other communities. Within a bicycle ride of my backyard are: the first certified organic farm in our state, the first organic dairy in our region, the first two-year degree program in sustainable agriculture anywhere in the U.S., several incubators where newbie farmers have sprouted on small plots of borrowed land, an international research organization committed to preserving small farms, another devoted to saving rare animal breeds, several seed banks, a biodiesel operation that grows food and fuel, and a food co-op where I can buy local organic food seven days a week and eat the best slow-food-from-a-fast-bar for miles around.”

It’s encouraging to look at Pittsboro as an example of what many other small towns in North Carolina could transform into. Of course, we don’t want exact replicas of Pittsboro across the state and lose a sense of small town diversity, but this is an example worth replicating in some manner. Once completed, these Gillings case studies will help people that are rebuilding communities by learning from the experience of others at the same time they restore and maintain their town’s unique and individual flavor. I’ll keep you updated as Helen and Will trek to counties throughout the state to see how various local organizations are connecting back to their town’s agricultural roots and rebuilding on this sometimes forgotten foundation.

Update! The UNC garden, see previous post for more details, has a Facebook page! Click here to become a fan and follow the progress of this new garden that will be available to students, faculty and staff. While we’re on the topic, The Gillings Sustainable Agriculture Project and The Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention have Facebook pages too. Both pages expect to have regular postings about this project and others and will announce related news and events supported by The Center and our community. Click here to become a fan of The Gillings Sustainable Agriculture Project and here to become a fan of The Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. For all pages, just click “Become a Fan” on the left side menu under the profile picture. Be in the know – join today!