PORTLAND, Ore. — The nonprofit conservation organization Ecotrust and Portland-based film company Potter Productions, Inc., today announced a partnership to bring sustainability-focused food and farming stories to life through Potter Production’s online television show, “Cooking Up A Story.” The collaboration will use the internet to bolster the distribution of stories about the inspiring people who propel the sustainable food movement.

“Our association with Cooking Up A Story will allow us to broadcast the vital issues facing the sustainable food and agriculture community to a broader, global audience through the internet,” said Deborah Kane, vice president of Ecotrust’s Food and Farms program. “We want to engage viewers regionally and around the world in these issues by allowing them to see the faces and hear the unscripted voices of everyday people and their connections to food and sustainable living.”

“Through our combined distribution networks and internet-based partners, we can broadcast these important stories and expand our reach to a global scale,” said Fred Gerendasy, co-founder of Cooking Up A Story.

Beginning today, viewers can find and watch food and farm related programs through links found on Edible Portland, Ecotrust and Edible Nation‘s web sites, and at Cooking Up A Story and through their distribution partners, Brightcove, YouTube, Veoh, Apple iTunes, Blip.tv, and others.

The first story to come to life through the partnership is connected to an Edible Portland article from the Winter issue, on newsstands December 5, featuring Gaining Ground Farm, which is run by a young family of first-time farmers in Yamhill, Ore. Edible Portland readers can learn about farm owner Michael Paine’s daily work and the barriers faced in purchasing land for small farmers just getting started, and then visit his sloping 76-acre farm an hour west of Portland by viewing the companion video story online.

About Ecotrust’s Food and Farms Program
Since 2001, Ecotrust’s Food and Farms program has been investing in building direct market connections between farmers, ranchers, and fishermen and restaurant chefs, grocery retail buyers, institutions and distributors. One of five major program areas of the Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit Ecotrust, the Food & Farms Program is building a vision for a sustainable food system.

About Potter Productions, Inc.
Potter Productions is an award-winning independent film company whose work emphasizes non-fiction storytelling shot in natural, unscripted environments. Its online show, Cooking Up A Story, has received well over a million views with its unique brand of content, including: documentary shorts about people, food, and sustainable living; Food News: The Science, Politics, and Culture Relating To Food; and its newest segment, faces, profiling everyday people making a difference in the world as it relates to food.

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