It was great to open the December issue of PC World magazine and read about Local Dirt.  The local food movement is rapidly growing, and Local Dirt provides a much-needed link between farmers and consumers.  Since Local Dirt is rapidly expanding, we’re adding new users every day.  You can help get the word out to farmers yourself – send a link out onto your local listserv, mention it the next time you visit your local farmer’s market, and tell your friends and family.

We’re happy that the PC World writer mentioned one of our favorite parts of Local Dirt – the email alerts.  Once you’ve registered for the website, you can set alerts to know when your favorite produce is in-season and ready for purchase or when a certain cut of meat is available from an area farmer.  Try it out for yourself today!  Perhaps one of the best new year’s resolutions any of us can make it to help support our local economy.

On September 22, 2009, Local Dirt launched nationally at the DEMO conference in San Diego, California. Heather Hilleren, CEO of Local Dirt and founder of Hevva LLC, and Raif Barbaros, CTO of Local Dirt, gave a six minute presentation that was watched by 230,000 people via live-stream.

The Fall DEMO conference offered a unique opportunity to officially launch Local Dirt, which was previously in beta testing. According to the DEMO website, “In 1991, Stewart Alsop changed the technology conference circuit by instituting a new event with new rules: DEMO would be about the products; would require timed, live demonstrations; and would not allow PowerPoint presentations! These rules still stand and, in recognition of the difficulty of communicating the power and value of emerging technologies on stage in a short 360 seconds, DEMO producers honor outstanding presentations by selecting DEMOgods.”

We are happy to announce that Local Dirt was chosen as a DEMOgod winner for our grass-roots approach to local food, our unique solution to linking sellers to buyers, and our passionate and informative DEMO presentation. Check out our full six minute presentation in the above clip! At the DEMO website, you can also watch the judges’ discussion and DEMOgod award ceremony. Going into DEMO, we knew that Local Dirt was something special. But gaining international recognition for what we do is truly an honor.

Local Dirt has been making the news, too. An article on Venture Beat states that, “The refrain that the industrial food system is broken gets louder by the day. With bestsellers like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma decrying large-scale farms, and organic food now an $18.3 billion industry, Local Dirt wants to tap into demand for local and eco-conscious food.”

CNET News discusses Local Dirt’s presence at DEMO and reflects on the local food movement. The articles notes that, “While individuals are important buyers in the local food economy, those who can get the greatest advantage from the platform are larger buyers: grocery stores, schools, hospitals, and the like. That’s why buyers can also search for food that can be delivered to such institutions.” It concludes that, “Ultimately, Local Dirt is meant as a way for every participant in the ecosystem–the farmers, the buyers and the sellers–to find the best way possible of getting what they need from the local food market.”

Not only was our experience at DEMO a huge success, it’s helping to grow Local Dirt from the ground up. What more could we ask for?

Next week, Local Dirt will officially launch at DEMO. Produced by Network World Events and Executive Forums, the semi-annual DEMO conferences focus on emerging technologies and new products, which are hand-selected from across the spectrum of the technology marketplace. The DEMO conferences have earned their reputation for consistently identifying tomorrow’s cutting-edge technologies, and have served as launch pad events for companies such as Palm, E*Trade, Handspring, and U.S. Robotics, helping them to secure venture funding, establish critical business relationships, and influence early adopters. Each DEMO conference features approximately 70 new companies, products and technologies. For more information, visit www.demo.com.

Interestingly, at the same time, television shows about food have prospered. What began with Julia Child has continued with Gordon Ramsey, Rachael Ray, Mario Batali, Emeril Lagasse, and many others. As Pollan, the author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, succinctly notes, “A great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves.” Why? There’s archeological, biological, and anthropological evidence indicates that our ancestors hunted together and cooked together – and some experts suggest that these instincts, to run, to prepare food, to spend time as part of a community, may be hard-wired into us. Our modern-day culture has moved away from that in many ways – even if we get our fix from cooking shows.

So what happens when we take cooking – and enjoying food surrounded by family and friends – out of our culture? Perhaps the American obesity epidemic. But what if the effects aren’t just physical – what if they’re mental and emotional too? Today, 80 percent of the cost of food eaten at home goes to someone other than a farmer, namely, the food processing and packaging industry. By buying locally grown foods, by building relationships with area farmers, and by spending more time cooking, could the average American change their relationship to food? I think so.