Master of Science / Department of Horticulture, Forestry, and Recreation Resources / Candice Shoemaker / Agriculture is a driving industry for most areas of the United States, and the Great Plains region is no exception. In the state of Kansas, agriculture is the primary industry capturing a spot in the USDA 2012 Census of Agriculture’s Top 10 states for total agricultural sales, total crop sales, and total livestock sales (USDA, 2012). Despite the thriving agricultural industry, little research has been completed on the food systems supporting Kansas communities. What are the characteristics of a local food system within the fabric of an agriculturally rich state? The goal of this study was to evaluate the characteristics and perceptions of the local food system supporting Manhattan, Kansas – a metropolitan area located in North Central Kansas. Specifically, we wanted to understand producer barriers to expanding beyond direct markets into institutional markets such as school dining services, grocery stores, and hospital food services. The objectives were to 1) understand producer concerns for selling to institutions, 2) identify resources producers need to access institutional markets, 3) understand institutional preferences for local purchasing, and 4) understand producer and institution definitions of “local” food. In February 2013, a survey was mailed to 162 Kansas producers identified within a 150 mile distance of Manhattan, Kansas. The response rate was 63% and descriptive statistics were completed. Interviews were completed with eleven local institutions in March/April 2013. Common themes were qualitatively assessed. In general, farms were small-scale, producing a diversity of products, and utilizing direct-to-consumer markets while selling to institutions on a limited basis. Producer concerns for selling to institutions included low prices, small production quantities, and delivery costs. Institution concerns included product quantities, quality, and seasonality, quality of communication, and food safety. There was no consensus on a definition for “local” food systems. Opportunities for developing the local food system of Manhattan, Kansas include increasing seasonal production, increasing producer access to resources, and fostering relationships between local producers and institutions.

Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / Hikaru Hanawa Peterson / Local foods is a growing market segment, and there are multiple businesses attempting to capitalize on the interest in buying from local producers. As consumer interest in local food continues to grow, businesses will be created to meet a growing demand. This research identifies areas in current customer segments in local foods that are not being serviced or are being underserviced. Potential business models are then identified in order to service the identified customer segments. One primary service gap that was identified in the research was that end consumers were not able to purchase local food per their definition of local food. Major retailers sell local produce and food items that were grown within the state boundaries, but few sell produce that is grown within the community. A cost/revenue framework simulation was built to compare three different types of business models that could potentially fill the identified service gap in the target area of Washington State. After the simulation was performed, the models were compared on net present values in lowest feasible, expected, and best case scenarios. Factors such as imitability and scalability were also considered. The three models were a micro-farming app and website, a CSA delivery and management service, and a non-profit community garden. The micro-farming site and app would allow producers and artisans, no matter the scale, to have an online marketplace to sell and trade food products. The CSA management and delivery model delivers CSA shares to customers while charging a delivery and management fee to the farm on which the CSA is based. The non-profit community garden is a five-acre parcel with a water retention system and offers tiered services for garden management in King County. Results suggest that even though each business model could potentially be feasible in the targeted areas, the most visibly promising model was the micro-farming website and app. Beyond the financial overview and analysis reported in the thesis, the business models could be ranked in a variety of ways according to an entrepreneur’s interest. More importantly, there is no better time than now to start building a business model that services customer’s interest in local food.

In recent years, the production and marketing of local food has become the fastest growing segment of the natural food industry and an important part of the sustainable agriculture movement. The heightened attention to local food systems has bolstered farmers markets attendance, Community Supported Agriculture memberships, and Farm to School programs. The movement has gained such popular salience that in 2007, "locavore" (defined as a person who seeks out locally grown foods) was Oxford American Dictionary's word of the year. Many scholars have also recognized that local food systems may provide positive economic effects (Swenson 2009) and have the potential to build community relationships (Kloppenburg 2000; Lyson 2004). This thesis is based on ethnographic research among local food producers in Iowa that was conducted between June of 2008 and August of 2011. Here I examine the daily practice of producing and marketing local food and consider the challenges producers face in their attempts to develop economically viable farms. Emphasis is placed on the relationships between small-scale direct market producers and their larger-scaled conventional neighbors, the implications for rural labor associated with alternative agriculture and small-scale processing, and the strategies producers use to meet the demands of diverse market outlets such as farmers markets or institutions. I argue that, while producers differentiate their farms from the conventional, industrial system, they are embedded within it. Local food producers must contend with the same land shortages and federal policies as conventional producers and in some cases they make use of the equipment and expertise of their conventional neighbors.

Using focus group methodology, this research identifies the behavioural, normative and control beliefs associated with consuming a local diet. Using these findings as a platform, a questionnaire was developed to quantify attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control, the theoretical constructs of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). In addition, moral obligations were measured for the first time in relation to local food consumption in an extended TPB model. The sample consisted of 114 individuals consuming various levels of local food in the Austin, TX area. Results indicate that perceived behavioural control and moral obligations had both a direct effect on intention to consume local food, as well as an indirect effect on intention, which is mediated via current behaviour. Dietary analysis was conducted using an online dietary assessment tool, the National Cancer Institute's Automated Self-Administered 24-hr recall. Between one and four recalls were collected from participants and a mean Healthy Eating Index (HEI) score was applied. Findings suggest that while controlling for age, sex, income and education, as the amount of local food in the diet increases, the total HEI score and the Dark Green and Orange Vegetables and Legumes (DOLs) component score also increases. In addition, the Saturated Fat component score increases, indicating lower intakes of saturated fat are associated with higher local food intake. This suggests that saturated fat in the diet is being displaced by local vegetable intake, particularly DOLs.

Sweden is becoming increasingly dependent on the import of foodstuffs from a globalfood system that is unsustainable due to its responsibility for environmental degradation and itsdependency on finite resources like fertilizers and fossil fuels. The diminishing ability to be selfsufficientin a time when peak oil, climate change, environmental degradation, exponentialpopulation growth, and a troublesome global economy might reshape the structures of the currentsystems, in a not so distant future, could be a cause for great worry. Skåne County has functioned asa case study to investigate the level of self-sufficiency in foodstuffs at the present time and theprospects for self-sufficiency in the future. Forecasts for the years 2030 and 2050 have been madebased on five different variables: population size, production and consumption, climate change,available agricultural land, and the transition toward a sustainable agricultural system. At thepresent time, with today’s consumption patterns, the foodstuffs that are produced in Skåne Countycan sustain around 78% of the population. For the forecasts, different scenarios have been generatedby adjusting the five variables within a reasonable range. Scenarios are also in the forecasts inwhich suggested proactive implementations to enhance the possibilities for self-sufficiency havebeen included. Due to these proactive implementations and the high degree of uncertainty withinsome variables, the result ranges from a 16.7% self-sufficiency level up to 111.6%. In order to reacha 100 % level of self-sufficiency there are strong indications that this will require structural systemchanges as well as behavioral changes

Building from existing literature on anthropology of food, political economy of food and consumption, and social movement theory, I examine the direct agriculture network of Tampa Bay Florida through a mixed-method ethnography. The research consisted of one year of field-work, with 6 months and over 100 hours of active participant observation, open-ended interviews with eight local producers, and short surveys with 100 market patrons. This thesis is an analysis of the results of this rigorous qualitative and quantitative work and, perhaps more importantly, an account of my own personal struggles in joining the direct agriculture network and my ultimate commitment to the movement. This report documents one student's transition from a researcher to an activist, finally settling in a local place that occupies both worlds in an effort to help increase the accessibility of others who wish to join the movement; an equal access based not only on economic capital, but also social and cultural capital in order to sustain an alternative food social movement.

This dissertation examines a movement in Western North Carolina to build a local food system, one grounded in the conditions and relationships of place. In 2000, Mountain Family Farms launched the Local Food Campaign to raise public awareness about the region's farms and farming heritage, to educate consumers about the benefits of buying food grown by local farms, and, ultimately, to build markets for locally grown food to sustain the region's farms. The campaign sparked a social movement and over a decade later local farms and locally grown food are a palpable feature of life in the mountains of Western North Carolina. This dissertation is the result of my tenure at the organization as an employee and four years of ethnographic research. The primary objective of my research has been to understand how the Local Food Movement in Western North Carolina is interacting with and affecting the industrialized food industry at the local level. Drawing on perspectives within anthropology, sociology, political science, geography, feminist theory, and social movements theory and from the concepts of hegemony, cultural politics, place-making, and social capital, this dissertation understands the movement in Western North Carolina within a processual framework, an integral part of the hegemonic process, which struggles to define and legitimize the practices and ideas that govern way of life. To examine this process, my research has focused on the ways movement organizers create a movement culture and mediate a tension between the dual imperatives of engaging the dominant food system and protecting the integrity of movement goals. Equally, my research has focused on understanding the impacts of movement activities on the region's food system - on the perceptions and practices of consumers and farmers and of the businesses that serve and sell food in the region. My dissertation reveals the significance of place-making to the strategies of movement organizers - grounding movement participants and observers in the particularities of place, developing a shared place-based consciousness, cultivating different economic subjectivities that affect different material impacts. My dissertation documents the hegemonic process - the encounter and interaction between movement meanings, ideas, and practices and those of the dominant, conventional food industry. Within this process, movement outcomes are the responses of movement organizers, participants, and observers as they mediate challenges and opportunities at the intersection of disparate ideas and practices. Within a dynamic movement, outcomes are both provisional and incremental, shifting in relation to emergent knowledge and perceptions and the actions they inform.

Being able to afford nutritionally complete food that provides energy and health, and continuing to have access to that food day after day after day, is a luxury that's missing from the lives of the 460,000 Central Texans who are classified as food insecure by the USDA. This project is an attempt to understand what the issues surrounding healthy food access in Austin are, and what the potential solutions might be. The three nonprofits that are profiled in this report - Urban Roots, Karpophoreō and Sprouting Healthy Kids - use education, community building, and advocacy to try to get closer to that goal of not only feeding Central Texans nutritious food, but changing the entire community's relationship with that food. / text

In recent years, growing interest towards foods produced from alternative agricultural practices have been seen among consumers. This thesis is an investigation of consumer understanding and attitudes towards information regarding sustainable, organic and local foods and agricultural practices and how such information could affect consumer food product expectation and sensory acceptability. Using internet questionnaires constructed based on common definitions and popular beliefs, 172 primary grocery shoppers were surveyed regarding their perception concerning information related to these alternative agricultural practices and foods. Results obtained from statistical analyses revealed the existence of various dimensions concerning the understanding and attitudes towards these concepts. Segmentations based on their understanding and attitudes towards these concepts were also found within the sampled population. Furthermore, by utilizing the theory of assimilation and contrast, a three-part sensory study was conducted, with 49 consumers from the Niagara Peninsula, to examine the impact of information regarding production methods (organic vs. conventional) and product origins (local vs. imported) on consumer expectation and acceptability of yellow peaches. Despite of some peach samples being under-ripe, a significant positive labeling effect has been observed in hedonic rating and perceived intensity of sensory characteristics when the joint organic and local label was presented. A similar labeling effect, however, was not observed in monetary valuation of willingness to pay. / New Directions Research Program / Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs

Over the past several decades, food systems around the world have come to be increasingly dominated by a ‘conventional’ model, wherein production is heavily dependent on industrially-produced external inputs, and trade characterized by a globalized free market. However, alternatives to this model – that seek to challenge its hegemonic status and address its environmental, social, and economic shortcomings – are continuously emerging. While some of these alternatives are narrower in scope, others attempt more transformative change. One example of the latter category is the Red Mexicana de Tianguis y Mercados Orgánicos (Mexican Network of Local Organic Markets), which strives to move beyond the boundaries of the mainstream organic and local food sectors, instead adopting the more holistic discourse of the food sovereignty movement. The process of translating this discourse into practice remains a work in progress. Significant achievements have been made on a number of fronts, most notably: new market opportunities have been opened for small-scale, ecological producers; attitudes and behaviours regarding both production and consumption have been shifted, and; new institutions – that help enable and reinforce new values and behaviours – have begun to be constructed. Unsurprisingly, challenges exist as well. These include: significant reliance on donated resources; continued dependence on a relatively small group of leaders; the relative fragility of newly emerging institutions, and; a pervasive pessimism regarding the ability to scale up change within a context of political institutions perceived as corrupt, and beholden to agri-business influence. Although such challenges do constrain, to an extent, the efficacy of the organization, they do not by any means diminish the powerful impact of its work to demonstrate that alternative agri-food visions are possible. / Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, International Development Research Centre