A Regional Imperative: The Case for Regional Food Systems

Abstract

‘Regional food systems’ appears with increasing frequency in scholarly works and among food system practitioners. Yet regional food systems are understudied and undervalued. Much more attention to regionalism and regional food systems is necessary to create more sustainable, equitable, and resilient food systems for all. Building from the authors’ 2010 paper, “It takes a region… Exploring a regional food systems approach: A working paper,” this greatly expanded report explores the concepts, practices, challenges, and promise of regional food systems. The report’s focus is on the Northeast U.S., a laboratory for regional food systems thinking and action, but it also describes and gives examples of regional food systems development across the country. The arguments in favor of regional approaches and explorations apply to all regions and embracing them could not be more imperative to address contemporary conditions.

Financial feasibility of selling frozen produce in local and regional markets

“…Food systems infrastructure Investments in regional food systems infrastructure could support 'local food' systems to expand to a regional scale (Hinrichs, 2013;Hardesty et al, 2014;McLaughlin et al, 2014;Fleury et al, 2016;Ruhf and Clancy, 2022), allowing farmers to meet consumer demand (Low et al, 2021) and provide more resilient food supply chains (Lengnick et al, 2015;Ruhf and Clancy, 2022). One approach to expanding food systems is for regional stakeholders to invest in food processing facilities that support regional markets for value-added products.…”

“…Federal programs could help counteract the trend in food systems toward fewer, larger farms and firms in supply chains with fewer up and downstream sellers and buyers. In the Northeast food manufacturing sector, food processing firms declined 60% between 1954and 1981(Blair, 1991in Ruhf and Clancy 2022. Consolidation and concentration in food supply chains can provide economies of scale that can serve to reduce overall production costs and provide more affordable products for consumers (MacDonald, 2017), but recent events suggest that the costs savings from eliminating supply chain redundancies may have unintended consequences for food system resiliency (Ruhf and Clancy, 2022).…”

“…In the Northeast food manufacturing sector, food processing firms declined 60% between 1954and 1981(Blair, 1991in Ruhf and Clancy 2022. Consolidation and concentration in food supply chains can provide economies of scale that can serve to reduce overall production costs and provide more affordable products for consumers (MacDonald, 2017), but recent events suggest that the costs savings from eliminating supply chain redundancies may have unintended consequences for food system resiliency (Ruhf and Clancy, 2022). In addition to the loss of physical infrastructure, consolidation and concentration trends have contributed to a loss of localized workforce skills required to successfully bring safe, highquality products to market in a cost-effective way (Danovich, 2016;Forgrieve, 2019).…”

“…Research that illuminates direct-marketing opportunities for farmers has flourished in the last three decades, but information regarding intermediated regional supply chains has been less available (Ruhf and Clancy, 2022). At the same time, recent events such as the COVID pandemic (Ali et al, 2021), extreme weather (Bullock et al, 2017) and geo-political (Ben Hassen and El Bilali, 2022) events have disrupted global supply chains, leading to calls for more regional food systems infrastructure that could improve resilience (Lengnick et al, 2015;Ruhf and Clancy, 2022). While a systems-perspective suggests that regional food system stability benefits when enough farmers enter regional value-added supply chains, individual farmers, reasonably, may not be inclined to shoulder the risk of these unproven markets on their own.…”

Envisioning the manureshed: Toward comprehensive integration of modern crop and animal production

“…Regional manuresheds (i.e., those manuresheds that transcend local scales and are large enough to connect animal production operations with croplands with little historical use of livestock manure as an amendment) emerge as the key spatial scale for understanding and transforming management approaches to realize the manureshed vision. In agri‐food systems, “regional” is considered to be larger than “local” and also larger in terms of functions: volume, variety, supply chains, markets, food needs, land use, governance, and policy (Ruhf & Clancy, 2022). During the past 60 yr of specialization and intensification of agriculture, certain animal industries have become concentrated in particular regions (MacDonald & McBride, 2009; Svanbäck et al., 2019), with notable examples being poultry in the Southeastern United States, swine in the Southeast and the Upper Midwest, and a belt of beef feeding concentrated in the Southern Plains (Spiegal et al., 2020b).…”