The Local Food System symposium served as a basis for initiating future discussions on issues identified by campus and community participants that will lead to creating solutions through collaboration. Over 60 participants from campus and community attended the symposium. The community participants included produce, dairy and grain farmers from Illinois and representatives from different organizations, namely The Land Connection, Illinois Stewardship Alliance, Illinois Environmental Council, Illinois Farm Bureau, Quad Cities Food Hub, Spence Farm Foundation, Commerce and Economic Development, Farm Bureau, United States Department of Agriculture, Common Ground Food Co-op, Farmer’s Market in Urbana, Unit 4 School District, and Central Illinois Produce. Participants from the University of Illinois included faculty, staff and students from various units, namely Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, Crop Sciences, Extension, Food Sciences and Human Nutrition, Hendrick House, the Institute for Sustainability, Energy & Environment, Sustainable Student Farm, University Dining, and Urban and Regional Planning.
Some University participants shared information about their projects in the area of local foods. This included Richard Weinzierl (Crop Sciences) on New Illinois Fruit and Vegetable Farmer training program, Zachary Grant of Sustainable Student Farm, David Emmons (Architecture) on design and construction of equipment and infrastructure for Sustainable Student Farm, Todd Rusk (Urban and Regional Planning) on local foods economic development initiative in Rantoul, graduate student from Jeremy Guest’s group (Civil and Environmental Engineering) on managing wastewater as a renewable resource on local farms and Samuel Wortman (Crop Sciences) on Urban Agriculture Research Lab.
All participants took part in a design process activity to identify gaps in the local food system. First part of the activity involved small groups of participants who worked to identify different kinds of producers, market makers and consumers. Each group of participants was pre-selected to represent a multi-disciplinary group of people. The participants filled worksheets and discussed the assets of each kind of producer/consumer/market maker, their needs, availability of what is needed and what needs to change if not available. From the resulting topics few were selected based on a vote by participants. This was followed by discussion in groups of interest with focus on what needs to change, what are the barriers that need to be modified, what new systems or processes need to be developed, who will be able to provide the labor and capital to bring the change and who would champion the change.
The activity resulted in identifying issues of interest to the local food community. Several gaps have been identified and approaches to developing ideas to fill the gaps will be addressed in future meetings of people interested in the area. The issues identified by participants were:
- Aggregation of producers to deal with large buyers
- Food hub – a balance of supply and demand
- Infrastructure for institutional buyers
- Processing – value-added – Follow-up meeting in January, 2015
- Market making – educating a new generation of consumers
- Availability and affordability for consumers
- Lobbying, Policy, Market making
The design activity was led by Ronald Duncan from Illinois Extension and suggested by Professor Madhu Viswanathan from College of Business.
Hosted by the Office of Public Engagement, 330 Illini Union Bookstore, 807 S. Wright Street, MC-319, Champaign, IL 61820, (217)333 9525