The Progressive Agriculture Index: Assessing the Advancement of Agri-food Systems

Abstract

Indicators and metric systems are crucial tools in efforts to reach societal objectives, and these systems are being employed increasingly in initiatives to improve the environmental, economic, and social sustainability of agri-food systems. Indicators can help clarify values and objectives, providing assessment criteria useful for tracking movement toward or away from targets. Unfortunately, the application of indicators and metrics to agricultural Disclosures

Community food systems resilience: Values, benefits, and indicators

“…As SES resilience perspectives have evolved within food systems research and practice, a number of approaches have been advanced to build SES-informed frameworks and indicator models for use by practitioners, researchers, and local governments (Worstell & Green, 2017). These approaches include: community and livelihood (Faulkner et al, 2018;Ifejika Speranza et al, 2014), agroecosystems and agriculture (Cabell & Oelofse, 2012;Ludden et al, 2018), food security (Tendall et al, 2015), and sovereignty (Walsh-Dilley et al, 2016).…”

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“…As SES resilience perspectives have evolved within food systems research and practice, a number of approaches have been advanced to build SES-informed frameworks and indicator models for use by practitioners, researchers, and local governments (Worstell & Green, 2017). These approaches include: community and livelihood (Faulkner et al, 2018;Ifejika Speranza et al, 2014), agroecosystems and agriculture (Cabell & Oelofse, 2012;Ludden et al, 2018), food security , and sovereignty (Walsh-Dilley et al, 2016).…”

“…Examples of specified resilience indicators include systems of leadership or the ability to self-organize, the extent to which community members experience place attachment, bonds between community networks and community cohesion, knowledge of the system or recent memories of overcoming previous disasters, and the capacity to learn new things (Faulkner et al, 2018). Specified resilience indicators together help achieve the general goal of the system, addressing broad social and ecological indicators, including environmental sustainability, community selfreliance, leadership and decision-making, focus on food producers, and place-based economics (Cabell & Oelofse, 2012;Ludden et al, 2018;Worstell & Green, 2017). The absence of any of these indicators in reaching resilience goals may not only weaken resilience, but indicate system failure (Cabell & Oelofse, 2012;Walsh-Dilley et al, 2016).…”

“…Resilient communities are diverse in landscape and seascape, institutions, actor groups and networks, governance support, forms of collective action, and learning platforms (Folke et al, 2010). Racial, ethnic, and gender representation, explicitly inclusive of female and/or non-white principal farm operators, are also critical indicators of diverse approaches to strengthening resilience (Ludden et al, 2018).…”

Feeding relations: applying Luhmann’s operational theory to the food system

“…That is, we should recognize that information about the food system enters our own observing system incompletely, through selective couplings, and is made sense of in our own terms. For example, many food-systems assessments and analyses rely heavily on indicators available in publicly available datasets, often obscuring important qualitative and dynamic factors (Ludden et al 2018 ), demarking particular connections among the food system, public-sector data collection, and academic practices. Similarly, a phenomenon that Porter and Wechsler ( 2018 ) pointedly name “academic supremacy” shapes how resources and power operate in collaborative community work in food systems and, ultimately, which observations and insights enter into scholarly exchange.…”