Regional food data will help groups
Initiative compiles information, maps
For Dawn Plummer, executive director of the Pittsburgh Food Policy Council, efforts to promote sustainable food access require a key ingredient: comprehensive facts and figures about the regional food system.
“One of the big challenges we face as a community organization is a lack of data,” she said. “We have experiential understanding of the challenges but for the last several years have been working hard to identify any data sets to help inform the situation.”
That’s why the completion of a recent initiative by The Center for Regional Agriculture, Food and Transformation at Chatham University to compile and display all regional food producers and processors in user- friendly maps and data sets could prove so beneficial, potentially helping not only Ms. Plummer but also hundreds of other participants across the food system make more informed decisions.
The data cover a roughly 200mile radius around Pittsburgh, including Central and Western Pennsylvania and much of West Virginia.
A local restaurant attempting to source fresh cucumbers, for instance, would discover they are sold commercially at Harvest Valley Farms in Butler County or Kistaco Farm in Armstrong County, while those looking for a more household name could find the Kraft Heinz Co. noted with a blue diamond in Pittsburgh.
“We all have to engage with it at one point or another in the day, whether you’re really cognizant of where the food came from and the labor behind it or whether it’s just something you
have to do to get by,” said Alice Julier, the director of the regional center also known as CRAFT and an associate professor at Chatham.
After all, she noted, “Everybody eats.”
The data and maps, available on the center’s website, could appeal to a broad audience, said Ms. Julier, from farm- to- table companies to retailers to policymakers.
Ms. Plummer said the Food Policy Council has used the data as part of its efforts to develop the Greater Pittsburgh Food Action Plan, which aims to reduce inefficiencies in the local food system by promoting coordination between growers, distributors and retailers.
“The data that CRAFT has been able to collect helps connect more dots in our food system, know one another, and know whether inefficiencies and redundancies are present and what the assets are,” she said.
The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture provided funding for the work as part of $ 1.2 million in grants that Gov. Tom Wolf doled out for agricultural research in the 2017- 18 budget.
“These data are important in knowing where to make investments in the area infrastructure — where resources and gaps exist like food deserts, where there is no access to fresh, nutritious foods, or where processing infrastructure makes it costprohibitive to start food businesses and create jobs,” Ms. Powers, a department spokeswoman, wrote in an email.
Ms. Powers also pointed to the Pennsylvania Farm Bill and the “Blueprint for a Hunger- Free PA,” recent initiatives spearheaded by Mr. Wolf promoting agricultural accessibility, as projects that could incorporate the maps and data.
Ms. Julier said that CRAFT compiled the data by reaching out directly to producers and processors, as well as collating existing data from the Department of Agriculture. She acknowledged, though, that some small farms could have been overlooked.
The center’s venture is not a novel idea, but rather a more comprehensive version of past efforts, according to Ms. Julier. For instance, Jeralyn Beach, a former Chatham University graduate student and now the general manager at Penn’s Corner Farm Alliance, created a regional asset map of the local food system nearly a decade ago.
Organizations in other states have also attempted to aggregate data about regional food systems. Ms. Julier said some have contacted her directly to inquire about the data that the center has published.
She added that her group hopes to add restaurants and convenience stores to the data set in the future in order to provide a more complete picture of the region’s food ecosystem.
“You really want to go all the way from seed to waste when you’re looking at a system like this,” she said.