Local Food Is Still A Niche. Can It Grow Beyond That? • 2015 Jun 22 • Ezra David Romero • The Salt • What’s On Your Plate • NPR

“If you drew a 100-mile circle around each city in the U.S. and then you looked at the capacity of the existing farmland, you’d find that 90 percent of the people could be fed within those circles,” says Elliott Campbell, an associate professor of environmental engineering at U.C. Merced who co-authored the study.

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“Very few farms in the U.S. are currently used for local food and instead are contributing to very long supply chains,” Campbell tells The Salt. “If we wanted to earmark some of our croplands for our local needs it would be absolutely no problem to be 100 percent self-sufficient [in many places].”

For example, in rich farming regions like California’s San Joaquin Valley, they estimate that the city of Fresno could feed all its residents year-round with local food.

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Yet shifting to a more local foodshed system — while challenging — could yield benefits in nutrition and health.

“There’s some evidence that these local food systems, farmers markets, can get people to consume more fruits and vegetables,” Campbell says. “It’s a really tough thing to get people to shift their diets, and if there’s some potential for local food to do that I think it’s well worth further looking into.”

Most Americans Could Eat Locally, Research Shows • 2015 Jun 1 • University News • U.C. Merced

Farmland mapping project indicates more than 90 percent of U.S. could eat food grown or raised within 100 miles of their homes, helping economy and making agriculture more sustainable

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“These results are very timely with respect to increasing interests by the public in community-supported agriculture, as well as improving efficiencies in the food-energy-water nexus,” said Bruce Hamilton, program director for NSF, which supports a spectrum of emerging technologies that might help alleviate growing agricultural demands.

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“One important aspect of food sustainability is recycling nutrients, water and energy. For example, if we used compost from cities to fertilize our farms, we would be less reliant on fossil-fuel-based fertilizers,” Campbell said. “But cities must be close to farms so we can ship compost economically and environmentally. Our maps provide the foundation for discovering how recycling could work.”

The potential for local croplands to meet US food demand • Andrew Zumkehr and J Elliott Campbell • 2015 Jun • Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment

Local food systems may facilitate agroecological practices that conserve nutrient, energy, and water resources. However, little is known about the potential for local food systems to scale beyond niche markets and meet a substantial fraction of total food demand. Here we estimate the upper potential for all existing US croplands to meet total US food demand through local food networks. Our spatially explicit approach simulates the years 1850 through 2000 and accounts for a wide range of diets, food waste, population distributions, cropland areas, and crop yields. Although we find that local food potential has declined over time, particularly in some coastal cities, our results also demonstrate an unexpectedly large current potential for meeting as much as 90% of the national food demand. This decline in potential is associated with demographic and agronomic trends, resulting in extreme pressures on agroecological systems that, if left unchecked, could severely undermine recent national policies focused on food localization. Nevertheless, these results provide a spatially explicit foundation for exploring the many dimensions of agroecosystem sustainability.

I am not anti-science by any means, and I don’t think that GMOs are going to kill us all by some unspecified mechanism causing some vague apocalypse, but the fact that so many pro-GMO advocates proclaim that modern mass industrial agribusiness is the only possible way to feed everyone on the planet and that growing food locally using more sustainable methods is a waste of time and resources makes me extremely wary of anything these advocates have to say when we haven’t even begun to explore alternative ways of farming.

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