Farm viability poses a grave challenge to the sustainability of agriculture and food systems: the number of acres in production continues to decline as the majority of farms earn negative net income. Two related and often overlapping marketing strategies, (i) locally grown foods and (ii) distribution at farmers markets, can directly enhance food system sustainability by improving farm profitability and long-term viability, as well as contributing to an array of ancillary benefits. We present results of a representative Michigan telephone survey, which measured consumers’ perceptions and behaviors around local foods and farmers markets. We discuss the implications of our findings on greater farm profitability. We conclude with suggestions for future research to enhance the contributions of locally grown foods and farmers markets to overall food system sustainability

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"Rapid technological innovation and globalization have led to increasingly complex agri-food supply chains and networks, and uncertain agri-food markets. Given this type of competitive environment, management scholars have argued that agri-food firms that adopt capabilities for entrepreneurship will outperform firms that do not. We use agent-based simulation methods to explore this hypothesis. Agent-based models are particularly relevant in this study as they allow for the explicit simulation of the entrepreneurial behaviors and firm interactions that lead to wealth creation. In our analysis, we find that entrepreneurial capabilities of alertness, risk-taking, and efficiency vary in their effect on firm performance given alternative agri-food strategic landscape configurations." Copyright (c) 2009 Canadian Agricultural Economics Society.

This study investigates factors influencing coordination of winegrape procurement in emerging wine regions in Michigan, Missouri, and New York. Wineries in these emerging regions face different vertical coordination challenges than in well‐established regions, which may affect procurement choices. Results corroborate prior findings that quality considerations and the need to safeguard investments in specialized assets, respectively, increase usage of more formal coordination mechanisms like written contracts and vertical integration or ownership. Consistent with prior findings of studies of wineries in established wine regions, we find that perceived difficulty in measuring grape quality attributes leads to tighter coordination; a point previously undocumented for emerging regions. [EconLit citation: Q130]