When Emily thinks about food, she thinks about it from many different angles. In Cooperative Extension at Kentucky State University, she gets to work closely with communities and their food. On a personal level, she values where her food comes from. “Most of us are eaters,” she says, “and I really like to eat high-quality foods and the closest ones I can get are the highest quality.” That perspective helped shape what she brings to her work and to her membership in CFA. For a short clip of what value Emily gets from and brings to CFA, click here.
Emily’s job at KSU puts her at the intersection of of public health and agriculture, working with people in their community so they can improve their agricultural conditions for themselves, understand health, and access foods that are relevant to them. Alongside that community-facing work, she also wants to keep a close eye on state and federal policy. Becoming a member of CFA has enabled Emily to more effectively keep up-to-date on policy and, on a personal level, to better understand the impacts of policy on our food system and how our food system can shape policy.
Before Emily came across CFA, she was chasing information from many different sources. Staying current on ag policy meant cobbling together information across multiple tabs and email lists, tracking down legislative priorities, understanding how federal policy was reshaping state decisions, and keeping up with what was happening for farmers, schools, and communities across Kentucky’s 120 counties all at once. “I was looking at a million different sites,” she recalls.
Joining CFA, changed how Emily could interact with and understand the food system and related policy. CFA gave her a single place to track what was happening at both the state and the federal levels from school nutrition policy to farmer priorities to food access issues. It also gave her a place to listen to people with deep and specific knowledge of the places she was trying to understand and the situations she didn’t yet know about. “I have lots of experts I can rely on,” she says, “to tell me what the conditions in western Kentucky are, where there are so many poultry farms, or how things are going in eastern Kentucky through recovery from floods.”
A practical tool she found which uses directly in her community work is CFA’s Farmers Market Resources, which helps reconnect people in Jefferson County with local farmers. “Learning about who’s growing what and where has been really helpful. It enhances the quality of life,” she says.
What makes Emily’s CFA membership meaningful isn’t just what she receives, it’s what she contributes. As a public health practitioner and a disaster preparedness specialist, she brings knowledge that farmers and food system partners genuinely need. She can help agriculture producers understand how to protect their crops, livestock, and property from floods, high winds, and other disasters. Increasingly that’s a capacity that has become important in the aftermath of the Eastern Kentucky floods. “It’s been really rewarding for me on that end,” she says.
She also serves as a translator between the policy world and her community. When CFA’s work helped her understand new state rules around home processing, she took that knowledge directly back to the people she works with, including small beekeepers and poultry producers. “I get to learn and teach. It’s just a really great place for me to be,” she says.
Why does this matter?
For Emily, the through line of it all from policy to extension to farmers market to disaster preparedness, comes back to something simple: “Everybody needs access to good quality food to make sure they can start somewhere healthy, from the littlest among us to the oldest among us.” What CFA has given her is a richer, more textured understanding of who’s making that food possible. Meeting agricultural producers in Kentucky and listening to their own stories has made her better at her job. “I have a lot more personal experience now. I hear those stories straight from people and that just makes my job easier and makes me better at it,” she says.