Thursday, November 8, 2007 - 8:50 AM
332-4
Mapping Potential Local Foodsheds in New York State by Food Group.
Analogous to a watershed, a foodshed demarcates the area which feeds a population center. This concept provides a useful framework for evaluating the potential contribution of “local” food to food system sustainability. Building on previous research, potential local foodsheds were mapped for the 16 largest New York State population centers using a hybrid spatial-optimization model that employed an economic arbiter for determining which foods would most likely be produced locally. Using a mixture of spatial and non-spatial data as input, this model maximized the agricultural land use value (LUV) derived from supplying local food needs. The model differentiated between six different classes of food (grains, vegetables, fruit, dairy, eggs, and meat) based on their agronomic and economic similarity. Three scenarios were examined representing different assumptions about the proportion of the diet that comes from local foods. Depending on the scenario, the model satisfied 36 to 71% of total food needs (on a weight basis) within an average distance of 231 to 267km using less than half of the state’s 3.2 million ha of agricultural land cover. The model allocated land to agricultural classes with higher land use values (dairy, eggs, fruit, and vegetables), and large areas were unused by the model because they could not produce positive returns. Among individual foodsheds, large (one order of magnitude) differences were observed in the distance food traveled but little difference was observed in the proportion of food needs satisfied. These findings suggest that New York State has the resources to supply a large share of its food needs within a distance one order of magnitude shorter than the thousands of kilometers traveled in the modern food system. Future work should apply the model over a larger geographic area and estimate more direct environmental indicators than food miles traveled.
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