It’s spring at last, and restaurant owners and home cooks can look forward to a bumper crop of locally grown food this summer.

For the past several years, area farmers have reaped the benefit of consumers’ hunger for locally grown food. As the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources’ marketing campaign notes, not only does local food look and taste better, but buying it directly from farmers helps build community and contributes to the Massachusetts economy.

Community banks would be wise to take a page from the farmers’ almanac and launch a similar campaign.

Consumers, small businesses, municipalities and local governmental agencies are starved for responsible banking. They are angry about the financial shenanigans by big banks that led to the mortgage meltdown. And they are even angrier about the latest consumer assault by banking behemoths – hitting customers with a new round of checking account fee hikes. Officials of large, national banks concede that the checking fee account increases are in response to a cap on interchange fees on debit card transactions.

For many consumers, it’s the final straw.

Southern Essex District Register of Deeds John O’Brien may have spoken for many in Massachusetts when he announced plans to shame Bank of America in a language it understands: Dollars. Irate at BofA’s participation in a mortgage registration system he claims bilks the commonwealth out of millions of dollars in lost recording fees, O’Brien earlier this month moved $25 million in Registry funds from BofA to Medford-based Century Bank.

“Perhaps when these lenders lose millions of dollars in deposits, they may begin to understand the seriousness of their actions,” O’Brien said in a statement. “It seems to me that their business model, which has been referred to as ‘fees for thee, not for me,’ needs to be abolished.”

O’Brien’s move has the blessing of Massachusetts Treasurer Stephen Grossman, who is spearheading an effort to shift state cash deposits under his control to smaller, more local community and regional banks that promise to increase their volume of small-business loans. Grossman has said that he wants small-business lending to increase in the Bay State’s Gateway Cities – former manufacturing centers identified by the commonwealth in 2007 as targets for economic development. The initial phase of the program will allocate $100 million for deposit in participating banks.

Investors nationwide are also talking with their deposits.

Moebs Services, an economic research firm in Lake Bluff, Ill., predicts that large, Wall Street firms will lose about 13 million checking accounts to community banks and credit unions by the end of 2011.

There are many reasons Massachusetts community banks present an attractive alternative to large, national banks. One significant factor is that they weren’t involved in the subprime mortgage lending that led to the foreclosure crisis.

According to the Massachusetts Bankers Association, there were 157 bank failures nationwide in 2010, and 30 in the fourth quarter alone. But no Massachusetts state-chartered bank failed in the fourth quarter, and only one failed in all of 2010 – the only one to fail during the entire years-long economic crisis.

In addition, the more than 200 community banks in Massachusetts are locally owned, with directors who live in the towns and cities served by those banks. Community banks are also historically the major lender to small businesses.

So, maybe when we’re strolling around farmers’ markets this summer, we might want to walk over to our nearest community bank and consider growing our deposits there.