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]

Eating locally is going mainstream. For years, committed eaters have gone out of their way to source local food from farmers’ markets, farms, roadside stands and Community Supported Agriculture drop-off sites. With more and more people wanting to incorporate local food into their meals, however, how do we make local food affordable and convenient for [...] [...more]

The UW-Madison Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems has been awarded a grant from the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment that will help feed Wisconsin’s growing appetite for locally grown food. The project will look at tackling distribution challenges that make it difficult to get more regionally grown food into mainstream grocery chains. [...] [...more]

Support local food, farms and communities. Take the Wisconsin Eat Local Challenge from September 14-23. During these ten days, spend at least 10% of your food budget on locally grown and locally made foods. If local food is new to you, then 10% of your food budget is an easy starting point. If you spend [...] [...more]

If the price of our food reflected the environmental, social and health costs of food production…we’d pay a lot more for it. The Price Tags/Cost Tags describe many of the hidden costs of commonly eaten foods and encourage eaters to seek out more sustainable alternatives. Perfect for direct marketing enterprises, food co-ops and CSA bags, the [...] [...more]

From 1997-2000, CIAS published a newsletter for people working to create sustainable food systems. The Wisconsin Foodshed was conceived as a forum where activists, researchers, farmers, organizations and eaters could network and learn from each other. The newsletter addressed topics such as farmers’ markets, community and prison gardens, value-added marketing cooperatives, community food security, and [...] [...more]

You can find shelves filled with organic produce at natural foods stores and increasingly at supermarkets as well. Who supplies this organic produce? Does it all come from California or is some of it from regional and local farmers? What are the possibilities for farmers who wish to sell to retail markets? With support from Cooperative [...] [...more]

Bioregionalists have championed the utility of the concept of the watershed as an organizing framework for thought and action directed to understanding and implementing appropriate and respectful human interaction with particular pieces of land. In a creative analogue to the watershed, permaculturist Arthur Getz has recently introduced the term “foodshed” to facilitate critical thought about [...] [...more]

Why question the modern food system? While the modern food system is efficient and bountiful as measured by many traditional criteria, a growing number of people question whether this system is sustainable and equitable. Concerns about persistent hunger, food safety, concentration of power within the food industry, and the environmental effects of an industrialized, globalized food [...] [...more]

Energy derived from fossil fuel plays a central role in the production, processing and distribution of food. This paper summarizes existing research and analyses of energy use in the food system, discusses where the most significant and feasible energy savings might be achieved, and suggests areas for future research. Read the full report (pdf file) [...more]