In a globalized economy, why bother to buy local food? In a sense, it comes down to germs.

“You know it was grown in your local soil and all of the bacteria are your local bacteria, and the allergens and the pollens,” said Clint Dudley of Dudley Farm in Kingston. “You’re not being exposed to germs from Mexico, Ecuador or even California.”

Your germs, he said, are better for you than someone else’s germs from somewhere else. “Everyone learns this when they travel,” Dudley said.

Local agriculture in Kitsap County, however, has not been an essential part of the economic landscape for a long time, he said. In the Puget Sound Regional Council’s Vision 2020, which discusses land use among a variety of other elements affected by the Growth Management Act, Kitsap County’s 328 square miles of land do not include a single square mile of agricultural land — on paper.

Dudley believes that perception is changing. He points to the PSRC’s willingness now to include local farm advocates such as Jim Freeman of Bainbridge Island and Mary McClure, president of Kingston Farmers Market.

For small local farms, however, many hurdles still exist for both farmer and consumer. Many of these difficulties have been outlined in books such as “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan and “Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal” by Joel Salatin. For small farmers, Dudley said, “The food safety laws are going to kill us.”

For example, a 13-year-old neighbor called Dudley and asked if he could come down to the Kingston market and sell his eggs.

“Basically, no he can’t,” Dudley said. He could sell them off the farm, as Dudley has from his own farm for years, but “that does not include delivering them into town. As soon you deliver to the customer, it is an away-from-the-farm sale and it is regulated.”

The good news, he said, is that so far farm fresh foods have no rules.

“A lot of the rules for the other food products — butchering your own chickens or animals, making your own jams and jellies and all that — are much more loosely regulated if you sell them directly from your farm,” he said.

Direct farm sales, though, can be limiting for both farmer and customer. Tara Prendergast and Marty Simpson, who own Broken Ground Farm, have been using farmers markets off and on since beginning in 1998 to develop customer relationships. Last year was the first year they attempted to operate as a community supported agriculture farm, and most of their first customers came from contacts developed through the farmers markets.

Although they enjoy the way markets help develop community, doing both the markets and the CSA has been more challenging.

“Our priority is the CSA,” Prendergast said. “When people give you money up front, you have to make sure you are taking care of them. So you just have to plant more.”

Broken Ground will also sell eggs from the farm, but not at markets.

“You have to have an egg handler’s license. It’s not a big deal to get, but all those little things add up to prevent people from coming down to the market (to sell),” said Simpson.

Rob Story of All One Family Farm in Kingston has developed a different strategy. He will sell vegetables he grows direct from the farm at his land in Chimacum, but he has developed a working relationship with farms in eastern Washington. In the last four years he has set up a network of families that he delivers in-season fruit to.

“My customers are basically larger families that want quantity at an affordable price because they plan to can the fruit,” he said. Because much of the fruit they want either doesn’t grow well locally or is not available at various seasons, he has two primary farms he uses and two others as back-ups if the demand exceeds capacity. The long relationship he has had with these farms is his assurance of their quality and dependability.

“Value-added” is a phrase that frequently pops up in conversations with small farmers. For most of them, it means taking their harvest one step further, such as making jams and jellies out of fruit.

But to sell these kinds of products away from the farm, the rules have become even more restrictive.

“We used to see people come in (the market) with their canned products. It was so wonderful to have these little Mom and Pop sellers,” Prendergast said.

Simpson points out that a vendor must now prepare food in a certified kitchen.

“That was just a major roadblock for a lot of people,” Prendergast said. “We saw a drop in vendors just from that (regulation)…. It’s stupid that no longer can a mom with a couple of kids stay home and make something without going out of her kitchen. But there aren’t too many cases of people getting sick from homemade jam.”

Dudley agrees, but in his other role as market manager, he has to require vendors to sign a contract agreeing to abide by the multitude of health safety rules.

“The big guys, yes, they need all the rules. Top-down rules are geared for large producers and shouldn’t apply to small farms. The fact that food is shipped (long distances) changes everything. There’s a huge carbon footprint on the food. It decreases your safety with every person that come in contact with your food.”

Big cities, he said, have no options, “They pretty much have to bring their food in from quite a ways away. But here in north Kitsap, we do have an oppotunity.”