Stimulus / Federal Money for Local Food

Has anyone looked into federal funding or stimulus money to support these local food initiatives? Small business and entrepreneurs are going to be the first to jump start the economy. And funding local food initiatives seems like a much better investment than failing companies and banks.

Michael Pollan is a brilliant food writer and in his "Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief", Pollan suggests the many benefits of fresh, local food. Obama sited this letter in an interview, and here is the President's analysis of it:

"There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy. I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That's just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board."