Mapping the USDA’s Local Food Work

I’m a big fan of map­ping as a visu­al­iza­tion tool and the Compass cer­tainly pro­vides lots of data. That said, it’s not really much of a consumer-focused tool com­pared with pri­vate efforts like RealTimeFarms.com, which not only maps farm­ers mar­kets and farms, but also shows the links between par­tic­u­lar restau­rants and their local arti­sanal and farm suppliers.

Instead, the KYF Compass is a way to illus­trate what Merrigan and her team are accom­plish­ing. The Compass demon­strates the national reach of USDA-funded local food prod­ucts; there are lit­tle dots all over the coun­try and in every state. Similarly, the KYF web­site has new local food “case stud­ies” that spell out the department’s recent work. Here are some examples:

• Calling Local Meat Processors: USDA is Here to Help
• In Remote Sections of Rural Nevada, Healthy Food Grows Locally
• Local Food Drives Small Business Growth in Southwest Wisconsin
• A New Business Model Proves Lucrative for Grass-Based Dairies
• Building a regional food sys­tem in Wyoming, a “value-added desert”

The Compass also proves that local food isn’t just a coastal phe­nom­e­non; it’s thriv­ing in Nevada, Wisconsin, and Wyoming, too (and also, you know, Micronesia).

The sto­ries them­selves are pretty cool, but it’s also worth con­sid­er­ing the Compass as a very con­scious effort to paint a pic­ture of KYF as ben­e­fit­ing a broad range of regions and businesses.

For exam­ple, the local-meat case study in Seattle fea­tures a librarian-turned-sausage-maker who wanted to open a USDA-inspected sausage fac­tory in his garage. And, with the help of the right folks at USDA, he suc­ceeded. The Wisconsin story describes a vir­tu­ous cir­cle that begins with hoop houses on small farms to extend grow­ing sea­sons, which led to an increase in so-called “value-added food busi­ness” (i.e. arti­sanal prod­ucts like jam and pick­les), which led to jobs and higher incomes.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Grist.org.