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.

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.

I've been thinking over the points about scale of both marketing and farming that arose at the first Council meeting. We may want to set a specific goal for growth in local food sales in Ohio. The Kellogg Foundation Food and Society program set a goal last year of 10% of national food sales by 2017, and consider that to be pretty audacious. I'm not sure that there is a good estimate of current Ohio sales but the estimates I have seen for regions within Ohio are 1% or less of current food sales from local sources.