Nicholas Day wrote recently in the Chicago Reader about the new certified-organic pizzeria opening soon four blocks south of me. One interesting bit:

bq. These days, any local organic product is precious. According to Slama, Illinois residents bought $500 million worth of organic food last year, 95 percent of it grown out of state. And still, he says, “there were tens of millions of dollars in demand that weren’t met.” In hopes of increasing production, Sustain helped write the Illinois Food, Farms and Jobs Act, which was introduced in the state legislature last month. It calls for the governor to appoint a task force that would develop policy recommendations for a local organic food system, and to earmark $5 million to support those recommendations.

With proper coordination, a project to increase local organic-food growing capacity to capture even a small share of the state’s organic-food market could yield millions of dollars in revenue for farmers and “farmland preservation projects”:http://www.thelandconnection.org/files/saving.html.