Good Food is Everybody's Business
This research will help city planners, entrepreneurs, community leaders, and citizens understand how urban agriculture can contribute to creating a sustainable food system in a major North American city.
Good local food depends on farming and farming requires clean, fertile soils in functional working landscapes. “And once productive farmland is converted to residential or commercial use, it’s converted forever. It’s practically impossible to bring it back,” Steve Ventura, University of Wisconsin, Land Information and Computer Graphics Facility.
With the pressure on to create employment in a faltering economy, local food systems are drawing interest as a possible source of green jobs. But just how many is still a guess. A recent study for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture by a University of Iowa economist takes a stab at estimating the economic value and employment impact of increasing fruit and vegetable production to satisfy local demand in the six Midwest states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
