Download or read book Three Essays on Community Supported Agriculture written by Anastasia Thayer and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The number of community supported agriculture (CSA) farms has grown considerably since the model was first introduced in the United States nearly 30 years ago. However, current academic literature lacks specific studies that provide an in-depth analysis of a market for CSA shares over time. The purpose of this study was to provide a comprehensive overview of the supply and demand for CSA shares in the Tanana Valley through extensive data gathering of local production and farm statistics. The research provides a narrative of how the market has developed and changed over time. Hedonic models provide real estimates of implicit prices paid for specific attributes of CSA shares in the market. A choice experiment and intercept surveys determined consumer preferences for CSA shares. Overall, the results of this research indicate that CSA farms are becoming more prevalent in the Tanana Valley and offer a growing number of consumers a diverse basket of vegetables over the short Alaskan growing season. Based on statistics gathered from the demand analysis, farmers in the region could increase revenues and capture a larger share of the market for produce in the Tanana Valley through increased marketing and more flexible share options.
Download or read book Three Essays Analyzing the Pricing of a Community Supported Agriculture System written by Dwayne Bauknight and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Three Essays on Sustainability written by Mark V. Paul and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 1 investigates the inverse relationship between farm size and agricultural yield. While there are a large number of studies internationally, there have been few conducted in African countries. Using household-level data from a national survey we explore the relationship between farm size and yield in Ethiopia's post land reform scenario. We find a robust inverse relationship between farm size and yield, and a positive association between yield and land fragmentation. These findings raise important questions for current agricultural development strategies that favor larger farms and less fragmentation in Africa Chapter 2 investigates the uptake of top-down flood mitigation policies in Vermont. Despite consensus on the need to adapt to climate change, who should adapt and how remain open questions. While local-level actions are essential, state and federal governments can play a substantial role in adaptation. In this chapter we investigate local response to state-level flood mitigation policies in Vermont as a means of analyzing what leads top-down adaptations to be effective in mobilizing local action. Drawing on interviews with town officials, we delineate local-level perspectives on Vermont's top-down policies and use those perspectives to develop a conceptual framework that presents the 'fit' between top-down policies and the local-level context as comprised of three components: Receptivity, Ease of Participation, and Design. We explain how these components and their interactions influence local-level action. This analysis points to how careful consideration of the components of 'fit' may lead to greater local-level uptake of top-down adaptation policies. Chapter 3 investigates farmer's livelihoods within Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). In the United States there is a tremendous amount of interest in CSA among farmers, consumers, activists, and policymakers. Despite the attention garnered by CSA farms and the resurgence of local agriculture, relatively few studies have examined the livelihood opportunities for farmers within local agriculture. This chapter takes a step in this direction, evaluating livelihoods for CSA farmers through in-depth interviews conducted in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. Based on the principles early advocates set forth as goals of the CSA movement; the chapter evaluates how CSA farmers are doing from the farmers' perspective. The chapter finds that while CSA farmers are faring better than other farms across the United States and in the study region in terms of earned farm income, they still earn far less than the median national income of all households. Community Supported Agriculture also provides broader social, ecological, and economic benefits to farming communities as a whole, with its focus on providing food for the community rather than producing mass commodities for the market. These non-market benefits are a significant source of well-being from the CSA farmers' perspective.
Download or read book 3 Essays on the Local Food Environment written by Cristina A. Connolly and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A significant amount of attention has been focused on both the prevalence of obesity in the United States and the corresponding interest in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. My research concentrates on one aspect of this trend: food access. One perceived component of healthy food is consumption of certified organic produce. However, consumers that purchase organic products may be doing so because of an assumed relationship with local or sustainable production. My first essay teases out these two effects by concentrating on Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) operations in order to measure a consumer's willingness to pay for certified organic produce that is already local. CSA farms differentiate themselves on a variety of characteristics, including certification status, and a hedonic model of CSA share prices is used to find the marginal valuation of each CSA attribute. I find that consumers are willing to pay for certified organic produce, even when food is already local, and that this premium does not hold for competing certification programs. I also adapt a firm entry framework from the industrial organization literature to the local food market and find that the majority of the study regions exhibit perfect competition in the CSA market.
Download or read book Basic Formula to Create Community Supported Agriculture written by Robyn Van En and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Three Essays on Consumers Preferences for Fresh Organic Produce written by Yuko Onozaka and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Bringing It to the Table written by Wendell Berry and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-05 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only a farmer could delve so deeply into the origins of food, and only a writer of Wendell Berry's caliber could convey it with such conviction and eloquence. Drawn from more than thirty years of work, this collection is essential reading for all who care about what they eat.
Download or read book Sharing the Harvest written by Elizabeth Henderson and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To an increasing number of American families the CSA (community supported agriculture) is the answer to the globalization of our food supply. The premise is simple: create a partnership between local farmers and nearby consumers, who become members or subscribers in support of the farm. In exchange for paying in advance--at the beginning of the growing season, when the farm needs financing--CSA members receive the freshest, healthiest produce throughout the season and keep money, jobs, and farms in their own community. In this thoroughly revised and expanded edition of a Chelsea Green classic, authors Henderson and Van En provide new insight into making CSA not only a viable economic model, but the right choice for food lovers and farmers alike. Thinking and buying local is quickly moving from a novel idea to a mainstream activity. The groundbreaking first edition helped spark a movement and, with this revised edition, Sharing the Harvest is poised to lead the way toward a revitalized agriculture.
Download or read book Local Food Systems Concepts Impacts and Issues written by Steve Martinez and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive overview of local food systems explores alternative definitions of local food, estimates market size and reach, describes the characteristics of local consumers and producers, and examines early indications of the economic and health impacts of local food systems. Defining ¿local¿ based on marketing arrangements, such as farmers selling directly to consumers at regional farmers¿ markets or to schools, is well recognized. Statistics suggest that local food markets account for a small, but growing, share of U.S. agricultural production. For smaller farms, direct marketing to consumers accounts for a higher percentage of their sales than for larger farms. Charts and tables.
Download or read book The Art of the Commonplace written by Wendell Berry and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-07 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Art of the Commonplace gathers twenty-one essays by Wendell Berry that offer an agrarian alternative to our dominant urban culture. These essays promote a clearly defined and compelling vision important to all people dissatisfied with the stress, anxiety, disease, and destructiveness of contemporary American culture. Why is agriculture becoming culturally irrelevant, and at what cost? What are the forces of social disintegration and how might they be reversed? How might men and women live together in ways that benefit both? And, how does the corporate takeover of social institutions and economic practices contribute to the destruction of human and natural environments? Through his staunch support of local economies, his defense of farming communities, and his call for family integrity, Berry emerges as the champion of responsibilities and priorities that serve the health, vitality, and happiness of the whole community of creation.
Download or read book Food for Thought written by Michael Ambach and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Greenhorns written by Zoe Ida Bradbury and published by Storey Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Greenhorns are a community of more than 5,000 young farmers and activists committed to producing and advocating for food grown with vision and respect for the earth. This book, edited by three of the group’s leading members, comprises 50 original essays by new farmers who write about their experiences in the field from a wide range of angles, both practical and inspirational. Funny and sad, serious and light-hearted, these essays touch on everything from financing and machinery to family, community building, and social change.
Download or read book Rooted in the Land written by William Vitek and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is dedicated to the notion that human lives are enriched by participation in a social community that is integrated into the natural landscape of a particular place. The writers explore the loss of community, the philosophical foundations of communities, Amish communities, and the current renewal of community life.
Download or read book The Localization Reader written by Raymond De Young and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-02-10 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Readings that point the way to a peaceful, democratic, and ecologically resilient transition to an era of localization, limits, and societal opportunities. Energy supplies are tightening. Persistent pollutants are accumulating. Food security is declining. There is no going back to the days of reckless consumption, but there is a possibility—already being realized in communities across North America and around the world—of localizing, of living well as we learn to live well within immutable constraints. This book maps the transition to a more localized world. Society is shifting from the centrifugal forces of globalization (cheap and abundant raw materials and energy, intensive commercialization, concentrated economic and political power) to the centripetal forces of localization: distributed authority and leadership, sustainable use of nearby natural resources, community self-reliance and cohesion (with crucial regional, national, and international dimensions). This collection, offering classic texts by such writers as Wendell Berry, M. King Hubbert, and Ernst F. Schumacher, as well as new work by authors including Karen Litfin and David Hess, shows how localization—a process of affirmative social change—can enable psychologically meaningful and fulfilling lives while promoting ecological and social sustainability. Topics range from energy dynamics to philosophies of limits, from the governance of place-based communities to the discovery of positive personal engagement. Together they point the way to a transition that can be peaceful, democratic, just, and environmentally resilient.
Download or read book The Rural written by Richard Munton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rural has long been regarded as an important site of geographical inquiry even if our understanding of it has not always been treated as conceptually different from the urban. That said, rural research has pursued a number of distinct empirical agendas ranging from the operation and impacts of agribusiness, to local resistance to global food supply chains, to differing representations of the rural. In doing so, rural geographers have critically examined the relevance and significance of ideas drawn from numerous traditions including political economy, ecological modernization and cultural theory, amending them as appropriate, in their search to understand the nature and trajectory of rural areas. Up until the 1980s, attention remained largely focused upon agriculture as the primary land-use but increasingly new forms of rural consumption - housing, recreation, nature conservation - have taken centre stage as the primacy of local agricultures has been undermined by reduced state protection and 'new' rural populations which have migrated out from the city. More recently, research has been dominated by the 'cultural turn' with particular emphases upon society-nature relations, interpretations of landscape, marginalised others, and analyses of the relations between representation and practice. In the last decade, a more holistic view of the rural, bringing together different aspects of the two previous themes, has emerged through more politically-oriented studies of rural governance concerned with the functioning of interest groups, participation, protest and the allocation and management of resources. The volume is thus structured into three sections concerned with agriculture and food, the rural, and rural governance. The great majority of the selected papers combine both empirical material - often highly informative case studies - and important conceptual arguments about change in the rural condition that can be linked to ideas being employed elsewhere in Geography and the Social Sciences more generally. These critical reflections have been drawn very largely from research conducted in advanced economies which at least provide some commonality of experience allowing the transfer of ideas between what otherwise might be seen as very differing geographical contexts.
Download or read book Three Essays on the Impact of Agricultural Decisions in Africa written by Thomas Taeksung Kim and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I examine agricultural decisions in a developing country context, which cover the major part of life and industry in low-income countries. I question stylized facts about major agricultural activities, evaluate its economic benefit with more thorough econometric methodologies, and present new aspect of its effectiveness. The first paper discusses a possible ineffective farm output resulted from farm-level crop diversification. Using a farm-by-crop level dataset from four Southeastern African countries and exogenous variation from the temporal standard deviation of normalized differences in a vegetation index (NDVI), I find a possible non-positive contribution of farm-level crop diversification on crop output. Based on this observation, I introduce two motives for crop diversification as adding new crops in the crop portfolio: 1) farmers adopt new crops for which they have better crop-specific farmer ability, and 2) farmers adopt new crops with better response to agricultural shocks. Then, I check the model empirically and find that the newly added crops show insignificant response to the NDVI shocks but significantly worse crop-specific farmer ability, which implies the possible economic disadvantage of crop diversification. I further present supporting evidence of output drop due to crop diversification with a series of supplementary analyses. Lastly, I examine different newly adopted crop groups driving different diversification outcomes. Throughout the paper, I present empirical support for the possible output drop due to farm-level crop diversification. The risk of a large drop in crop-specific farmer ability calls for a careful approach of governments and agencies encouraging crop diversification as a risk coping strategy. In the second paper, I examine if living in a community with diverse food production is important for a diverse diet. This paper responds to the large literature suggesting a strong impact of farm-level food diversification on diet. I introduce a new source for diverse household diet, diverse food production at the community level. Using household fixed effects, a spatial autoregression model, and data from Ethiopia, I find a significantly positive association between community-level agricultural production diversity and household diet diversity, while the impact of farm-level crop production diversity is rather limited and reduces the diversity of purchased food consumption. I further examine the association by each food group and check if household consumption of each food group is affected by community- or farm-level production of the corresponding food group. I find a positive contribution of community and farm production on consuming the purchased and own-produced foods, respectively. I finally found that this impact of community production is strengthened by three channels that accelerate the local food circulation: presence of a community market; crop sales within a village; and gifting food behaviors. All the evidence points to the importance of community-level food production. With a loosely integrated market in Ethiopia, local agricultural production plays a significant role for household diet as much or more than farm-level crop diversification. The final paper examines the relationship between rural maize price and local maize yields in agriculture-centered developing countries. Most studies about staple price construction in the developing world focus on price transmission from outside countries or between major domestic markets. Instead, I focus on rural areas in four African countries and point to the significant role of local maize production in constructing the rural maize price. I first create various local maize yield measures by taking the median of all yields within different radii around each village. Then, I derive a trend of association between price and local yield as widening the radius of local yield. In addition, I examine if this estimated relationship varies with village characteristics: proportion of large size farmers; level of maize production; and distance to city, market, and road. I find a negative relationship between rural maize price and yields at the local level controlling for the village fixed effect and global maize price. This relationship becomes stronger in the villages with more smallholder farmers and poor accessibility to major market features. I detect an active rural maize market and find that the local production plays a significant role in constructing the maize price.
Download or read book Cosmos Earth and Nutrition written by Richard Thornton Smith and published by Rudolf Steiner Press. This book was released on 2013-04-03 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in organic and biodynamic produce. Although once marginal and 'alternative', escalating concerns about the environment, health, food quality and animal welfare have brought organics into mainstream consciousness. Biodynamics, a unique development of the organic approach, does not narrowly focus on agricultural techniques. It was conceived as a new way of thinking about farming, nutrition and the world of nature, allowing for a revitalized relationship with the living soil, the elemental world and the cosmos. Originating from a series of eight lectures given by Dr Rudolf Steiner in 1924, biodynamics broadens the outlook of agriculture and the science behind it, leading to a holistic perspective that incorporates astronomical rhythms and unique preparations for plants and earth. The author describes the foundations on which not only biodynamics but also the wider organic movement is based. He builds bridges between mainstream science and Steiner's insights, making it easier for the wider organic and ecological movement to approach biodynamic concepts and practise. This book has much to offer to the beginner as well as to those already involved with biodynamics. Its broad range of topics - including the ecology of the farm organism, food quality and nutrition, community supported agriculture, planetary influences, seed quality, and the vitality of water - contribute to a deeper understanding of the subject. The author is also concerned to promote innovation so that biodynamics moves with the times. An appendix includes details for contacting various elements of the biodynamic world. DR RICHARD THORNTON SMITH was formerly a geography professor at the University of Leeds, specializing in soil science, environment and conservation. Widely travelled, he has a long-standing interest in indigenous and sustainable farming. He was introduced to the work of Rudolf Steiner at an early age, although his full involvement with biodynamics dates from 1990 when he began to participate in training programmes and workshops at Emerson College, Sussex. In 1996 he began a biodynamic extension programme in Sri Lanka, for which he published a book, most recently updated in 2007. Since 2001 he has been an inspector for the Biodynamic Association's Demeter and Organic Certification in the UK. In 2003 he produced an edited selection of Steiner's work relating to agriculture. He is currently a council member of the Biodynamic Agricultural Association, and lives in Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire.
