Becca B.R. Jablonski

Assessing the Economic Impacts of Food Hubs on Regional Economies: A Framework that Includes Opportunity Cost

The number of food hubs—businesses that aggregate and distribute local food—in the United States is growing, fueled in part by increasing public support. However, there have been few data-driven assessments of the economic impacts of these ventures. Using an input-output-based methodology and a unique data set from a successful food hub, we measure net and gross impacts of a policy supporting their development. We estimate a gross output multiplier of 1.75 and an employment multiplier of 2.14. Using customer surveys, we estimate that every

Assessing the Economic Impacts of Local Food System Producers by Scale

1 increase in final demand for food hub products generates a

Differential expenditure patterns of local food system participants

0.11 reduction in purchases in other sectors.

Analyzing the Role of Community and Individual Factors in Food Insecurity: Identifying Diverse Barriers Across Clustered Community Members.

Policy makers and economic developers are increasingly interested in the impacts of local food systems, yet attempts to obtain accurate estimates are often complicated by a lack of available data. Utilizing a unique data set from producers in New York, the authors examine the extent of differential purchasing and sales patterns for small-scale direct agriculture (SDA) producers. The supplemental data are integrated into a regional input–output model to assess the total effects and distributional implications of equivalent policies targeted to agriculture sectors. The authors demonstrate that SDA producers have different expenditure patterns than other agricultural producers and, for equivalent policy shocks targeted toward agriculture industry expansion, have lower total employment and output impacts but higher effects on labor income and total value added than non-SDA producers. The results underscore the importance of collecting appropriate data for analysis and outline the local economic benefits of small-scale local food system participants.

Rural wealth creation of intellectual capital from urban local food system initiatives: Developing indicators to assess change

Since 2009 the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has funded over 2600 local food initiatives. However, the economic impacts of these policies remain unclear largely due to data deficiencies that preclude the understanding of differential expenditure patterns of farms participating in these local market channels (both in terms of what inputs they require, and where the inputs are purchased—local or not). This paper utilizes two unique data sets from samples of producers in New York State (NYS) to build expenditure profiles for local food system participants. We employ USDA Agricultural Resource Management Survey data as a robustness check on our results. The primary contribution of this paper is to provide preliminary evidence that local food system participants in NYS have different expenditure patterns than farmers who do not sell through local food markets. We show that farmers with local food sales have higher reliance on local labor and other variable expenses as primary inputs than farms without local food sales, and that local food producers spend a higher percentage of total expenditure in the local economy. Based on our results, we recommend that future economic impact assessments utilize revised expenditure profiles that more accurately reflect inter-industry linkages of the local food sector.

Meta-analysis of US intermediated food markets: measuring what matters

This paper uses the results from a community food security assessment survey of 684 residents and three focus groups in Pueblo County, Colorado to examine the question: what community and individual factors contribute to or alleviate food insecurity, and are these factors consistent throughout a sub-county population. Importantly, we use a technique called cluster analysis to endogenously determine the key factors pertinent to food access and fruit and vegetable consumption. Our results show significant heterogeneity among sub-population clusters in terms of the community and individual factors that would make it easier to get access to fruits and vegetables. We find two distinct clusters of food insecure populations: the first was significantly less likely to identify increased access to fruits and vegetables proximate to where they live or work as a way to improve their household’s healthy food consumption despite being significantly less likely to utilize a personal vehicle to get to the store; the second group did not report significant challenges with access, rather with affordability. We conclude that though interventions focused on improving the local food retail environment may be important for some subsamples of the food insecure population, it is unclear that proximity to a store with healthy food will support enhanced food security for all. We recommend that future research recognizes that determinants of food insecurity may vary within county or zip code level regions, and that multiple interventions that target sub-population clusters may elicit better improvements in access to and consumption of fruits and vegetables.

The Financial Performance Implications of Differential Marketing Strategies: Exploring Farms that Pursue Local Markets as a Core Competitive Advantage

Abstract With growing interest in wealth creation in rural areas from farmer participation in urban local food markets, defining empirical measures is crucial. However, data limitations and a lack of agreement on what serves as reasonable proxies for alternative capital measures makes the process challenging. Using the Delphi Method and considering a large urban farmers market system, this study prioritizes impacts on eight forms of community capital and estimates empirically flows of intellectual capital to rural areas using primary data from market vendors and customers. Results indicate that sufficient engagement between farmers and urban consumers, combined with educational programming by the farmers market, can increase the transmission of intellectual capital flows to rural areas. For the large urban-based farmers market evaluated, we find that such participation is associated with higher human capital stocks in the counties in which the farmers reside.

Evaluating scale and technical efficiency among farms and ranches with a local market orientation

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a body of literature and case studies as part of the reporting, outreach, and evaluation of the local and regional food system projects supported by grants and other funders. There is concern that food value chains are promoted without adequately evaluating the viability of these businesses, or how these markets affect the performance and welfare of key stakeholders: farm vendors and local communities/economies. Design/methodology/approach – This paper reviews and summarizes a comprehensive set of US-based case studies focussed on food value chains. The authors conduct a meta-analysis to systematically capture what available case studies find about: first, trends in the viability of food value chain businesses; second, the impact of these businesses on participating farm vendors; and third, the associated community economic development outcomes (framed in terms of “wealth creation”). Findings – In addition to sharing findings from the meta-analysis, the au...

The Role of Urban Agriculture in a Secure, Healthy, and Sustainable Food System

This study explores how participation in direct and intermediated marketing channels and key operational factors influence agricultural producers’ financial performance. Accordingly, we divide the sample of local and regional food marketers into quartiles segmented by profitability performance as an initial exploration of how strong and weak performance may vary across scale, location, and choice of direct and intermediated channels. Moreover, other financial metrics that vary across types of producers and performance-based quartiles are analyzed. This paper provides initial evidence that participation in direct and intermediated markets may allow farms of any scale of sales volume to be financially viable.

School districts and their local food supply chains

In recent years, the growth in local food marketing channels has been significant. Most of the research in this field examining the economic implication of these trends has focused post-farmgate including supply chain analysis (e.g., Hardesty et al. , 2014; King et al. , 2010), regional economic impacts (e.g., Brown et al. , 2014; Hughes et al. , 2008; Jablonski et al. , 2016) and consumer values and motivations that have driven demand (e.g., Costanigro, 2014; Lusk and Briggeman, 2009). To date, with the exception of a few case studies examining expenses and sales by channel assessment (LeRoux et al. , 2010; Hardesty and Leff, 2010; Jablonski and Schmit, 2016) there has been little research that examines the impact on financial viability among farms selling through these markets. The goal of this paper is twofold: first, to identify the factors that have the greatest influence on the efficiency of farmers and ranchers that participate in local food systems, and second, to estimate the relationship between marketing strategy and farm financial efficiency, with a particular focus on variations across farm size. Our estimation of the stochastic production frontier suggests that scale, production enterprise specialty, market outlet choices, land ownership, and management of expenses have the greatest influence on producer financial efficiency. Our model suggests that scale has the largest impact on financial efficiency, providing evidence that, all else constant, the most important factor in the efficiency of direct market producers is scale. When profit is defined as operating profit, results indicate that marketing channel is not an important indicator of efficiency. But when profit is defined as return on assets, marketing channel is an important indicator of efficiency, albeit less than is scale. Results from this analysis indicate there are economies of scale associated with farms and ranches that sell through local and regional markets, and that scale rather than marketing channel has the largest influence on efficiency.