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Beyond Local: Building Urban-Rural Solidarity Through Food Relationships

Last Updated on June 5th, 2009
 

Project Title: Beyond Local: Building Urban-Rural Solidarity Through Food Relationships

Project Number: CL1-24-MB

Term of Project: May 2008 to April 2009

Status: In progress

Academic Researchers:

Student Researchers:

Community Researchers:

Community Partner:

Technical Crew:

Project Summary:

Canadian farm families are facing increasing adversity related to rising input costs, fluctuating commodity prices, disease, drought and declines in rural infrastructure and services. However, farmers have been long accustomed to adversity and are finding ways to adapt to a changing rural and farm landscape. Across Canada, local food marketing collectives are emerging and finding increased social, economic and environmental value as an alternative to the global export-oriented agro-food system. At the same time, a growing demand by consumers for locally produced food is prompting and supporting these initiatives. In Phase I of this project (below) we followed one such farmer group, the Harvest Moon Society Local Food Initiative, through the development phase of their marketing collective. Through interviews with farmers, consumers and retailers, we found that priorities regarding local food differed greatly within and among these stakeholder groups. However, all found the concept of “local food” to be attractive. Indeed, local food has the potential to connect multiple stakeholders around a common set of values and to build greater awareness regarding differences in their values. It is important to better understand the role of local food initiatives in the social economy and to create accessible educational and informational material as a tool to bridge gaps in understanding between participants in local food systems.

Specific Project-Level Research Objectives:

Expected Deliverables:

  1. Video documentary
  2. Journal Article (Journal of Agriculture and Human Values)
  3. Website
  4. Research brochures
  5. Conference presentations (Local – Manitoba Food Charter Food Security Conference 2009 and National – Congress 2009: Canadian Association of Food Studies Annual Conference)
  6. Report
  7. PhD Thesis

Findings:

Project Poster:

Final Report:

Projected Expenditures: $25,140 (including 1 $5,000 internship)

In-Kind Contributions:

Publicity:

Dissemination Activities:

Additional Notes:

This project is Phase II of an earlier project, Harvest Moon Society Marketing Co-operative: Building Social Capital through an Alternative Food Economy (CL1-12-MB).

Transitioning from Phase I – Moving Beyond the Harvest Moon Society Local Food Initiative
In Phase I of this project, The Harvest Moon Society (HMS) and the University of Manitoba Environmental Conservation Laboratory (ECL) were funded in 2007/2008 by the Linking, Learning, Leveraging Project. Working collaboratively, HMS and ECL brought together a group of 17 farmers in South-western Manitoba and helped develop a farmer-driven collective marketing collective. The Harvest Moon Local Food Initiative (HMSLFI) is now in the final business planning stages and is starting to sell healthy, ethical food in local markets. In Phase I, data collection included a combination of 45 individual interviews, one group interview, and 165 questionnaires with retailers, farmers and consumers.  Twenty-two of these interviews were captured with video equating to approximately 45 hours of in-depth recording.  This Manitoba-based data (video) will provide a starting point for Phase II, which will extend the research to explore similar initiatives across Western Canada.

Colin has take some people with him, this summer of 2008, to do a photo and video gathering tour that will result in a film about alternative food initiatives in Western Canada.  He manages a blog (Farm to Fork Research) that allows people to tour with him on this journey of discovery.  We anticipate some very useful and important insights as well as some tangible results that will be far-reaching. — blurb composed by Heather Acton

Update from Colin, April 2009:

We had initially planned (in our application) to have the 45 minute documentary video completed sometime this spring however have had to push it back for a number of reasons - one of them being that we need to capture more “visual evidence”. Despite having conducted over 28 interviews across Western Canada, we are planing to go back and visit the farms of the key characters in the video to get a more in-depth visual picture of their story and to fill in any gaps in content. All interviews have been transcribed and preliminary coding is underway. Our participatory video committee will be meeting later this month to reevaluate the timeline for the production of the video.