At the most recent meeting of the Food Systems Assessment Task Force, we discussed some of the options for one or more goals that might be set for Ohio food systems.  Having such a target would give specific direction on long-term assessment of food systems and is very important in evaluating the impact of recommendations made by the Council.  Following is a distillation of the ideas generated in the discussion, so that you can be thinking about what the Council might recommend as one or more goals or targets (if you're reading this in your email, click the link after “Read more”).

One more paper on food system distribution, this is the most detailed study I've found of energy use in food distribution.  It was done with the specific intent of comparing local and global food distibution.  This may be a question we want to address and regardless the methods could be useful to the food systems assessment task force.  I think it may also be useful to the Ag Viability and Market Connections task forces.  If you're reading this as an email, just click the link next to "Read More:" to download the attached paper, if you're already on the OLFSC site, the attachment

Attached (on the website that is) is the narrative information on funding and data sources for food systems assessment that Steven Vickner put together for MORPC.

I have to admit that I haven't worked my way through the list sent by Heather yesterday, but we do have the list of individuals invited to the Leap into Local Foods Workshop last February.  This was a pretty good listing of 200+ individuals who represent the Ohio food system, and may help with identifying additional delegates to the Congress if needed. 

Here are two more papers, preprints, sent to me by Mike Hamm, the CS Mott Chair at MSU, addressing impacts of local food systems on economic development as well as public health.

Following is the link to the Community Farm Alliance home page, on which you'll find the Lexington food assessment done by Univ. of Kentucky faculty and students:

http://www.communityfarmalliance.org/

Please add information on your datasets to the wiki page posted on this working group (click on the title of the wiki page, then on edit), and please come with ideas for an ideal methodology for assessing food distribution in our meeting on Friday.

See you then,

Casey

The attachments to this posting are a few of the papers that address the role of local food systems in economic development, for reference use by the agricultural viability task force.  I've included the abstracts for a "readers digest" version.  If you've received this by email, please click the "read more" link in the message to see and download the attachments.

Your proposal for Stinner Endowment funds to support the NEO Food Congress was reviewed by the Leap into Local Foods organizing committee and was unanimously recommended for funding.  Congratulations and best of luck with the Congress.

Kind regards,

Casey Hoy

Please contact Megan Shoenfelt to process the award and complete the funds transfer.

We have some good news for a Monday morning.  The USDA CSREES has awarded a 3-year, $1.1 million Regional Partnerships for Innovation grant to intensify and extend our network!  The overall goal of the project is to support the networking needed for rapid commercialization of innovations emerging in production and marketing of specialty crops in local food systems.  (Click the link below to read more)

As requested at the last task force meeting, I've created a wiki page that each of you can use to input information about existing data sets that could contribute to food systems assessment. To add information in the table please click on the title of the wiki page (Food Systems Assessment Metadata Table...) to bring the table up, and then choose "edit". Please let me know if there are additional columns that should be added to the table for a more complete record of the available data. Thanks, and we'll look forward to seeing you friday.

Casey