The geographical range, orientation and power dynamics involved in such non-food functions have yet to be assessed . In short, the many highly-valued social and ecological services that farms provide have not been defined spatially or related to marketing practices, though it is these very orientations that are important to theories of localization and its role in the practices of farmland preservation and management.Last, production, relationships and proximity do not necessarily beget mutually beneficial feedback loops between environmental and social justice objectives. Food insecurity in farm workers is more than triple the national household average in multiple areas of the country . Naturally, markets will gravitate toward more wealthy and powerful communities that are better positioned to help farmers achieve their end goals of profitability and secure farm tenure. Indeed, there is evidence that many direct marketing networks target consumers in the wealthiest neighborhoods. Farms involved in direct marketing are more likely to be located in the Northeast or the West Coast, near densely populated urban markets in areas with high median home values . Schupp finds that farmers markets locate in areas where the neighborhood population has attained higher education levels and a higher percentage identify as white than the national average. Direct market customers are more likely to bemiddle-aged, middle-income or above, well-educated, suburban women . However, different types of local food marketing, blueberry in pot beyond direct marketing through farmers’ markets, may differ significantly in demographics of clientele, economics and geographies.
While the local food movement grows, so does demand for food assistance. As the federal government removed welfare programs, non-profit food banks have rapidly grown in number since the 1980s . Today, one in seven Americans rely on food banks to feed their families . To meet the needs, food banks source from nearby farmers, distributors and retailers, and they are increasingly sourcing fresh, local food . Indeed, the market embeddedness that enabled Belo Horizonte, Brazil to achieve food security for all its citizens may be differently oriented spatially and socially than a food system that localized with the objective of influencing production practices. Empiric research on the embeddedness of food supply is growing to help understand how such theories play out in practice. Penker shows the alternate routes for grain from harvest to mill to bakery with unique social and geographic distinctions between whole meal and standard bread chains. Moragues-Faus and Sonnino review three olive oil producers and their sourcing regions to show the socio-spatial place-making in branding. This research will be the first to explore multiple sales and donation practices in relation to one another. The aim of the research is to identify the geo-socially embedded intersections and deviations in the local food system.The research is not exclusively focused on consumers and their relation to farms, but rather on the interplay of a variety of immediate relationships with farms around sales, visits, and donations, referred to collectively as networks. Geo-social network findings are triangulated using comprehensive planning documents and expert interviews. To start, the methods section will provide a description of the case study region and its relevance the research questions raised in the above literature review to help make sense of the methods employed, how networks were coded, and profiles of interviewees selected.
This study focuses on Chester County, PA due to its long history of direct marketing local food. Located in the northeast, near high to median home values in close proximity to large urban markets of New York, Philadelphia and Washington D.C , Chester County has similar characteristics to what the literature defines as the average landscape involved in direct marketing which both grounds this study and broadens its application to similar cases. The county has historically held widely spaced towns and villages surrounded by new growth forest, livestock operations, row crops, horse farms, and mushroom farming activities . Farms face economic pressure from the housing market. Having added 70,000 people from 2000 to 2010, Chester County has the highest population growth rate of any county in Pennsylvania and ranks second in Pennsylvania, only after adjacent Lancaster County, for farm production. Because of heavy development pressure, agricultural land-uses face continual competition from the residential housing market. The 2007 Census of Agriculture reported a 10 percent decline in the number of farms and 14 percent decline in farm acres from the previous census in 2002.Food insecurity is actively tackled by the local food movement. One in 20 of the 500,000 Chester county residents receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs compared to one in seven for the state . The food bank, which has been in operation for over 80 years, started its gleaning program in 1996 with the help of state Senator Andy Dinniman and the newly hired Larry Welsch, the Chester County Food Bank’s current director.
The concept of gleaning is based on the Biblical description of scavenging for food left in harvested fields. Some farmers’ crops are earmarked for the food bank while others make their leftovers available to be picked by volunteers. Chester County Food Bank has become a national leader in purveying local, fresh food by harnessing the goodwill of a large volunteer base and generous farming community. The food bank supplies fresh, local food through a variety of programs: gleaning, urban gardening, and school-based high-tunnel greenhouses. In addition, the food bank runs several outreach programs whose education and social networking aims dovetail with gleaning program farms. The Chester County Food Bank ranks sixth nationwide in the percentage of fresh food it disperses, with over twenty-two percent of the 2,000,000 pounds of food distributed being fresh, according to a study by the University of Pennsylvania . This amount does not include the many pounds of fresh food grown in raised beds at food cupboard sites and distributed directly to the community without being transferred through the food bank.No comprehensive list of farms and their market connections currently exists in Chester County. I employed a cross-sectional design to create a novel database, which required a range of sources. Farm and market data was gathered from civic documents, market promotion material, media, farm website listings, county farm listings, Local Harvest affiliates, and buyer associations. Farm managers were queried with an IRB-approved electronic questionnaire to identify their geographic coordinates, raw products and direct sale/donation markets. Non-local products sold through the farm and processed products are not included in this study. In turn, markets were queried by an email, which asked them to identify other direct sale farms in a double verified snow-ball sampling technique. Market and farm locations are geocoded by latitude and longitude based on the exact address. The geographic location of farms and markets were virtually site checked using Google Street View imagery from 2007 to 2015 to verify the location. CSA member purchases are coded at the zipcode level to protect client confidentiality. CSA members were not queried to verify zipcode or network connection. This technique allowed the researcher to capture direct farm networks within, moving into or going from Chester County. Email surveys were sent to 700 farms and 2000 markets/users, and responses from 117 farms and 637 unique users/ markets confirmed network connection.This research takes a broader approach in accounting for any immediate relationship with a farm, plastic planters wholesale including sales to distributors and wholesale grocers, donations of unprocessed food, and visits to farms. Relationships, including donations, sales and farm visits, are referred to collectively throughout as “network.” Networks trace the connections formed through the sale or donation of raw product and services produced by the farm to their first point of sale/donation to customers, institutions, and distributors. In this way, the research encompasses a range of the immediate interactions with farms to assess the spatial distribution and typologies of networks in which farms engage in relation to one another. A priori coding is based on theoretical considerations. Informed by the theory of local food’s embeddedness , this study parses direct marketing networks by their social construct. For example, farms can market directly to consumers through Community Supported Agriculture or farmers’ markets. Farmer’s markets are seasonal and represent a direct connection for consumers with the farmer where the farmer usually travels to an urban or suburban location. CSA and Buyer Club networks bring the product and end consumer in contact through drop-off/pick-up locations. Thus, CSAs constitute a different socio-spatial type of farm network when compared to farmers’ markets, but not buyers clubs, and are coded thus. Wholesale networks represent purchases by larger-volume distributors and grocery stores which act as intermediaries between farms and end-users. Institutions are largescale buyers which, like the smaller-scale restaurants, represent a steady relationship between the purveyor and farmer to cater to consumer demand.
Agricultural byproduct, farm-to-farm sales, and educational visits are also noted as important networks between farmers, farms and their communities. School trips to farms bring students to the farm and represent regional knowledge networks captured in the ‘education visits’ variable. Farm-to-farm sales represent the agricultural social networks involved in sales of raw products.The generated network map is an under-estimate of a county’s farm networks for a variety of reasons. Some categories of farm networks are not captured in this data. Many farms allow online purchases through their own website or a crowd-sourcing website. Farms also sell directly from their farm gate. These sales and connections are not documented in this study. Larger direct distribution networks were not captured in this study mainly because large suppliers did not respond to the query nor do they list their outlets online. Conversely, many smaller-scale suppliers readily listed market outlets on their websites and confirmed them in the research query. Additionally, the online query method limited the response to farms whose networks could be verified by email correspondence. Farms that only listed phone numbers were not contacted. For example, numerous Amish farms were not included in this study due to inability to reach the farmers via email. Conversely, many farmers’ markets list Amish farmers asprominent suppliers. This study does not include non-food producing farms, thereby omitting many fiber alpaca farms, greenhouse nurseries, and horse farms that play a vital role in supporting food-producing farms through the sale and purchase of ancillary products such as horse manure for mushroom substrate. The size of the farm and product sold are not noted. Seller, buyer, and market manager characteristics, which may be highly relevant to the social and geographical nature of supply chains were not noted in this study. Further, coding the type of network is imperfect. Some farms sell through supermarkets that they run from their farm gate. Many retail establishments may operate a cafe through which they serve locally-sourced farm products. In these instances, the duplicated forms of retail were noted. For example, if a farmers’ market is operated from the parking lot of a grocery store that uses some of the food in its on-site cafe, food sold through the farmers’ market is coded as a farmers’ market and restaurant though the primary venue use is for wholesale.The 2009 Chester County Comprehensive Plan is divided into urban, suburban, and rural landscape visions which seek to isolate active farming areas from residential developments while connecting these land-uses through local food marketing . In essence, the planning regulations seek to divorce producers from users physically, while promoting their connections socially. Some agricultural activities are included within the suburban landscape vision. Community Supported Agriculture , small specialized farms and nurseries, community gardens, and farmers markets in suburban areas are meant to “provide residents with fresh locally grown food.” The rural landscape vision has three components: small villages that make up rural centers, a rural landscape of scenic vistas without active farming, and an agricultural landscape . The agricultural landscape is largely located in western Chester County, where the character is similar to the large agricultural area in Lancaster and Berks Counties as opposed to the nearby Philadelphia metropolitan urban area. Agricultural production is diverse, including dairy production, horses and other livestock, poultry, mushrooms, nurseries, orchards, and field crops. This landscape is not planned to accommodate future projected growth, and is dominated by a concentration of active farms, Agricultural Security Areas, large clusters of land permanently protected by agricultural easements, and areas with municipal commitment to adopt effective agricultural zoning.