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Is the college farm sustainable? A reflective essay from Davidson College
No full textCampus farms and gardens are proliferating across college and university campuses. While they may have unique missions, at their core those missions often include promoting student learning, campus sustainability, and strong campus-community relations. In this reflective essay, we share our perspective on the sustainability of one such farm, the Farm at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, to encourage other analysts to similarly assess the interactions among these missions and sustainability’s environmental, economic, and social pillars. We particularly emphasize the factors influencing the Farm’s social sustainability, including the institution’s pedagogical mission, treatment of farm labor, impact on the local food economy, and equitable provision of food for students. We find that the Farm administrators misconstrue “economic” sustainability as “financial” independence and profitability. This hampers the social mission of equitably supplying students with the farm’s food and offering curricular and extracurricular enrichment. We suggest ways forward that help administrators recognize the diverse values that fulfillment of additional social and environmental missions might provide, beyond direct revenues. We conclude with recommendations for institutions interested in pursuing a similar sustainability assessment of their campus farm or garden
“Let us be small”: A case study on the necessity for intentionally small producers
No full textRan-Lew Dairy quickly adapted during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when many grocers suddenly faced shortages due to disruptions in their supply chains. Ran-Lew expanded into the direct retail market and increased its in-store sales to stay viable. Due to its small scale, vertical integration, and community connections, it was able to pivot models and react rapidly to the changing needs of its community. This case study highlights the importance of small-scale producers in developing food system resilience
A collaborative response to equitable food access during COVID-19: Building from Mass in Motion practices
No full textThe Mass in Motion Municipal Wellness and Leadership initiative at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health provides local capacity to implement proven policies and practices creating environments supportive of healthy living, including food access efforts. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mass in Motion has offered a crucial approach and infrastructure to address local food access needs exacerbated by the pandemic. The core components of Mass in Motion and its resulting impacts demonstrate a best practice approach to responding to immediate food access needs while leveraging long-term sustainable solutions
A food nonprofit's response to COVID-19: The Common Market leans on its mission to serve
No full textFirst paragraph:
The Common Market is a nonprofit regional food distributor with a mission to connect communities with good food from sustainable family farms. Outputs of their work include improved food security, farm viability, and community and ecological health. The nonprofit services communities in its three active regions—the Mid-Atlantic, the Southeast, and Houston, Texas—by delivering healthy farm food to the institutions that serve them: schools, hospitals, eldercare facilities, early childhood education centers, etc. As the COVID-19 pandemic struck the nation, it shut down some of the nonprofit’s conventional wholesale outlets and exposed and intensified the issue of food insecurity throughout the country. The food hub prepared to lean on its mission intensely and creatively under these unprecedented circumstances. Poised to test the limits of a regional food system, The Common Market unveiled the resilient spirits of its team, its partners, and the family farms that make up its network. This essay highlights partnerships that ignited meaningful impact for their farmer partners and helped meet the needs of vulnerable populations amidst the pandemic. . .
Perspectives from the front line: The post-pandemic emergency food system in North Carolina
No full textThe novel coronavirus pandemic has had an immediate effect on food and nutrition security, leading to the most widespread increase in need for food assistance in modern history. At its onset, the pandemic led to emergency food providers experiencing the “perfect storm”: surges in demand, declines and changes in types of food donations, limits in the food supply chain, and fewer available volunteers. This policy and practice brief provides perspectives from emergency food providers in North Carolina on their pandemic response along with recommendations for policy and practice applications to promote food security. As the pandemic continues, it is urgent for policymakers, organizations, community members, and other food system stakeholders to encourage collaboration across food system sectors, provide adequate funding for all aspects of distributing healthy foods, promote a continuation of program and policy flexibilities for nutrition programs, and support community-based models that engage a diverse group of organizations and leaders
Farmer social connectedness and market access: A case study of personal networks among emerging farmers
No full textMarket access in the local food system of the American Midwest is largely predicated on key social and economic relationships. This study examines the personal networks of emerging farmers enrolled in an incubator farm training program. Drawing from social network and qualitative analysis the study findings yield insights into the relationship between social networks, market access, and financial sustainability among emerging farmers. Some farmers have highly dense support networks with many strong familial ties. Others have smaller support networks characterized by weaker and more sparse ties. Highly individualized farmer characteristics and aspirations are shown to greatly influence the building and maintaining of networks. Advice networks are demonstrated to affect market access, decision-making, and indicators for entrepreneurial success. Smaller advice networks of non–English speaking farmers demonstrate limited market access and access to information. This distinction is highlighted in the discussion of policy and agricultural development programs targeted toward emerging farmers
Thinking better about rural wealth creation and retention
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For some decades now, the practices of economic and community development have increasingly intertwined. This has largely involved a rebalancing of the economic and community portions of the mix to give increasing prominence to the community side of the ledger. In their decade-and-a-half-old article, Rethinking Community Economic Development, Shaffer, Deller, and Marcouiller (2006) illustrated this in their classification of successive waves of dominant community economic development (CED) theory and practice: export base, business retention and expansion, collaboration and partnership driven, and cluster development.
Shanna Ratner’s 2020 book Wealth Creation: A New Framework for Rural Economic and Community Development comes from one of the leading developers and practitioners of a fifth-wave approach that is beginning to lay a legitimate claim to the respect of academics, professionals, and community members alike. In 158 pages, Ratner’s slim and accessible volume does an admirable job of summarizing a synthetic approach that is both informed by theory and steeped in decades of participant-observation and learning-by-doing. The author, often addressing the reader as “you,” as if in the training workshops she has frequently provided, explicitly aims at writing for those with few degrees of separation from CED practice: “policy makers, practitioners in economic and community development, teachers, students [including undergraduates, I would specify], financers and funders…” (p. viii). . .
From globalism to localism: How structural economic shifts can support the local food movement
No full textFirst paragraphs:
Local is Our Future was published shortly before the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic, yet it makes a timely contribution critiquing economic globalization given the experiences of 2020. It emphasizes the need for shorter supply chains and champions local food systems by focusing on the structural forces that currently control the food system.
In the first three chapters, Norberg-Hodge explains and details the costs of economic globalization, which provides an adept introduction to understanding the structural impacts of financial deregulation on health, food security, environmental consequences, and growing inequality. The fourth chapter covers a topic that might seem unlikely to be included in a book on local futures, as it describes the rise of extremism, yet this is a crucial analysis for current events. This book was published before the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that occurred around the world in summer 2020; however, it provides a contextual backdrop for how the globalized financial system promotes economic insecurity that can lead to the adoption of a false narrative by the far right, as observed by the backlash to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) communities demonstrating the need for increased equality. . .
A systems approach to navigating food security during COVID-19: Gaps, opportunities, and policy supports
No full textThe COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted a series of concatenating problems in the global production and distribution of food. Trade barriers, seasonal labor shortages, food loss and waste, and food safety concerns combine to engender vulnerabilities in food systems. A variety of actors—from academics to policy-makers, community organizers, farmers, and homesteaders—are considering the undertaking of creating more resilient food systems. Conventional approaches include fine-tuning existing value chains, consolidating national food distribution systems and bolstering inventory and storage. This paper highlights three alternative strategies for securing a more resilient food system, namely: (i.) leveraging underutilized, often urban, spaces for food production; (ii.) rethinking food waste as a resource; and (iii.) constructing production-distribution-waste networks, as opposed to chains. Various food systems actors have pursued these strategies for decades. Yet, we argue that the COVID-19 pandemic forces us to urgently consider such novel assemblages of actors, institutions, and technologies as key levers in achieving longer term food system resilience. These strategies are often centered around principles of redistribution and reciprocity, and focus on smaller scales, from individual households to communities. We highlight examples that have emerged in the spring-summer of 2020 of household and community efforts to reconstruct a more resilient food system. We also undertake a policy analysis to sketch how government supports can facilitate the emergence of these efforts and mobilization beyond the immediate confines of the pandemic
Missouri's specialty crop beginning farmers cultivate resilience during COVID-19
No full textThe pandemic placed extraordinary demands on agricultural producers and created unexpected challenges for southern Missouri farmers, and pushed the University of Missouri Extension (MUE) to implement new and innovative approaches to help farmers persevere through the crisis. In surveys and reports, farmers have indicated several changes caused by the pandemic that impact their businesses, such as increase in local food demand, reduction in on-farm labor, and limitations on hosting on-farm visits with customers. The MUE StrikeForce project team, a U.S. Department of Agriculture strategic initiative, continued to serve farmers by developing alternative educational opportunities that incorporated social distancing and other preventative actions, and were of immediate use to farmers in a crisis. Several of the educational approaches, including video conferencing, online teaching, digital recordings, video repositories, social media communications, pick up and drop off locations, and the use of multiple online viewing platforms such as Zoom recordings have proven to be effective in helping farmers sustain their businesses and have substantially increased access to programming across the state. The convenience of accessing education and learning opportunities online also appealed to more participants. Overall, online educational delivery was positively received by producers, demonstrating the efficacy of digital learning when paired with offline resources and support from the StrikeForce project team. After the pandemic ends, MUE will continue to implement these approaches. Nevertheless, the traditional Extension approach of one-on-one consulting and farm visits cannot be completely replaced by online educational programming. The pandemic has highlighted inequities faced by many rural Missouri farmers that lack dependable internet or cell phone network access, and had no access to StrikeForce programming when face-to-face visits were paused