The national Agriculture of the Middle initiative has produced three sets of curricular resources on value-based food supply chains for university-level business and economics courses. [...more]

The Driftless Region Food and Farm Project is a coalition of farmers, consumers, institutions, agencies and organizations. Together, they aspire to meet the growing demand for local food by scaling up the production, aggregation, processing, distribution and marketing of food in the Driftless Region of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. [...more]

Michael Rozyne, one of the creators of the international fair trade company Equal Exchange, founded an organization called Red Tomato in 1996. The goals for Red Tomato were to develop a dual purpose non-profit to market sustainably grown fruits and vegetables in the Northeast, and to provide consulting services for regional food system development nationwide. This research brief focuses on the first goal. [...more]

In the mid 1980s, a pair of wheat producers, Karl Kupers and Fred Fleming, became convinced that the conventional dryland wheat farming they were practicing was not sustainable in the Palouse region of eastern Washington. They set out to tackle both the agro-ecological challenge of sustainability by reversing soil erosion and soil degradation, and the economic challenge of remaining financially viable without federal commodity subsidies. [...more]

In 1988, a small group of organic vegetable growers in Wisconsin formed a cooperative to provide stable and fair prices to its members. With the addition of dairy farmer members and an explosion of consumer interest in organic dairy products, the dairy segment of the co-op grew rapidly. It evolved into Organic Valley, the largest organic, farmer-owned cooperative in North America. [...more]

In 1986, 14 Oregon ranchers formed a cooperative—Country Natural Beef—to escape the roller-coaster cycles of the commodity cattle market and achieve predictable, relatively stable, premium prices. For its rancher members, simply changing their mindset from producing for a commodity market to producing for a final consumer was a major challenge that paid off. [...more]

Case studies of four innovative enterprises—Country Natural Beef, CROPP/Organic Valley, Shepherd’s Grain and Red Tomato—offer models of how mid-sized farms and ranches can prosper through producing and selling high-quality, differentiated food products into a variety of markets. [...more]

CIAS staff member Steve Stevenson is co-author of a new book on the crisis faced by mid-scale farms and ranches, and strategies for reviving these operations. Food and the Mid-Level Farm makes it clear that the demise of midsize farms and ranches is not a foregone conclusion and that the renewal of an agriculture of [...] [...more]