Baselines, Trajectories, and Scenarios: Exploring Agricultural Production in the Northeast U.S.

Abstract

Agricultural production on farms and ranches in the U.S. contributes to the food supply and the food system on local, regional, national, and global scales. Increasing production at the regional scale-the focus of this research-depends on accurately estimating current production and understanding the mechanisms and resource d Jonathan Resop is now at the

A Regional Imperative: The Case for Regional Food Systems

“…Of the total Northeast land in farms between 2001 and 2010, calculated as an annual mean across the 10 years, 26 percent was used to raise forage crops, 20 percent was in pasture, 11 percent in field crops (a total of 57 percent), 8 percent in nonfood crops (nursery, flowers, and ornamental crops, Christmas trees, and fallow and conservation land), and approximately 8 percent in food crops (Griffin et al, 2018). Note that nearly all forage, pasture, and field crops go to feed animals for human consumption.…”

“…For their regional self-reliance (RSR) analysis, the researchers calculated the baseline for current agricultural production in the region, and the relationship between food consumption and agricultural output in a general net balance way-the amount of food produced in a region compared to how much the population consumes. The baseline is not meant to imply that what was produced in the region was actually consumed in the region (Griffin et al, 2015(Griffin et al, , 2018, which is true for all the studies described in this section, since "little regional food production can be currently attributed to local food consumption" (Kremer & Schreuder, 2012, p. 183). When the EFSNE project calculated the percentages of regionally produced foods in the 11 supermarkets in the low-income locations in the study, the numbers ranged from 100% for fluid milk to 77% for apples, to 40% for potatoes and cabbage (Park et al, 2018).…”

“…Analyzing the carrying capacity-the maximum number of individuals that a given environment can sustain over time without destroying or degrading the environment (Rios, 2019)of the Northeast, researchers determined the land requirements of 10 diet scenarios ranging from the current American diet to one in which 100% of the meat source is beef. The carrying capacity estimates, based on per capita dietary requirements and regional population, are that 28% of the population can be fed with product from within the region based on a lacto-ovo vegetarian diet; 23% with a vegan diet; 17% with the current diet; and 14% with a diet in which 100% of the meat in the diet is supplied by beef (Griffin et al, 2018).…”

“…The edges of urban areas were not well defined until researchers from the EFSNE project developed a finer gradation of these areas by creating three categories of peri-urban zones between city and rural boundaries (Griffin et al, 2018). Based on the assumption that periurban is part of a continuous spectrum from urban core to urban periphery, the analyses of Saberi ( 2016) and Conard et al (in Griffin et al, 2018) make it possible for urban and regional planners to work with more specific and realistic boundaries of urban food production and related infrastructure. The findings also reaffirm the importance of protecting peri-urban farmland as well as rural farmland.…”

Multi-objective optimization identifies trade-offs between self-sufficiency and environmental impacts of regional agriculture in Baden-Württemberg, Germany

“…Especially the poor representation of distinctive impacts for different management systems in organic milk production is a major shortcoming and may overestimate the environmental impacts for base and vegetarian demand. Still, using those LCI datasets was the only feasible way to obtain reasonable impact estimates for regional agriculture in BW, and more region-and site-specific agricultural process inventories are needed to provide more accurate scenarios in the future, including potential yield changes as a consequence of climate change (Griffin et al, 2018). Considerations of the economic and political feasibility of the self-sufficiency rates and underlying scenarios, as well as the question of how and where the missing food should be produced and imported from without intense environmental damages, are of paramount importance but were beyond the scope of this study.…”