Abstract:Over the last decades, the economic, social and environmental sustainability of the conventional agri-food system has and continues to be contested within both academic and public institutions. For small farms, the unsustainability of the food system is even more serious; farms' declining share of profit and the cost-price squeeze of commodity production has increased barriers to market access with the inevitable effect of agricultural abandonment. One way forward to respond to the existing conventional agri-food systems and to create a competitive or survival strategy for small family farms is the re-construction of regional and local agri-food systems, aligning with Kramer and Porter's concept of shared value strategy. Through a critical literature review, this paper presents "regional and local food hubs" as innovative organizational arrangements capable of bridging structural holes in the agri-food markets between small producers and the consumers-individuals and families as well as big buyers. Food hubs respond to a supply chain (or supply network) organizational strategy aiming at re-territorialising the agri-food systems through the construction of what in the economic literature are defined as values-based food supply chains.

We describe a new colorimetric method for measuring creatinine in serum and urine. Creatinine hydrolysis is catalyzed by creatinine amidohydrolase, and the creatine so produced is assayed in reactions catalyzed sequentially by creatine amidinohydrolase and sarcosine oxidase in a system that generates hydrogen peroxide. The hydrogen peroxide is measured at 510 nm in a reaction catalyzed by horseradish peroxidase, with 3,5-dichloro-2-hydroxybenzenesulfonic acid/4-aminophenazone as the chromogen. This series of reactions is complete in 30 min at room temperature. A blank sample measurement corrects for endogenous creatine. The standard curve is linear for creatinine concentrations as great as 2.21 mmol/L. Analytical recovery of creatinine in human sera and urine averaged 99.8%. Within-run and between-run precision studies gave CVs of less than or equal to 3.3 and less than or equal to 4.3% for a serum with a creatinine concentration of 69 mumol/L. Results by this method agree well (r greater than 0.99) with those by both the enzymic ultraviolet method of Wahlefeld and the fuller's earth/Jaffé method.

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