Enhancing Food Security in the Northeast
Enhancing Food Security in the Northeast through Regional Food Systems (EFSNE) seeks to determine whether greater reliance on regionally produced food could improve food access in disadvantaged communities, while also benefiting farmers, food supply chain firms and others in the food system.
A USDA-funded Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) project, EFSNE brings together researchers, educators, entrepreneurs, and community leaders from a twelve-state region in the Northeast, engaging the entire food chain from production to consumption in a collaborative effort.
Food Security Research News
Doctoral candidate gains valuable experience teaching Penn State undergraduates about food security, food systems issues
July 10, 2014If the Education Team needed an ambassador, it could be Lauren Chenarides. A doctoral candidate in Agricultural Economics at Penn State, she is one of a number of students benefiting from the team’s efforts to train future food system scientists. But she’s also done some of that training herself, teaching a course that immersed 40 Penn State undergraduate students in the concepts of food access, food security, and regional food systems.
How best to engage communities? Meet them where they are
July 10, 2014As the Outreach Team makes plans to extend the work of the EFSNE Project into its eight project sites, there is one thing team members know for sure: each of the communities is different. A one-size-fits-all approach simply won’t work. To help determine the best approaches for engaging with project communities, the team first wanted to find out how ready each community is to enhance access to healthier foods.
Geospatial crop-modeling tool evolves to include corn, climate change scenarios
July 9, 2014In an earlier newsletter, we reported on the Production Team’s development of a new geospatial crop-modeling tool called the Geospatial Agricultural Management and Crop Assessment Framework (GAMCAF), which was used initially to quantify the region’s production capacity for a single crop: the potato. But that was just the beginning for GAMCAF. Now the researchers have incorporated a corn-crop model and climate data into the platform, allowing them to examine even more production scenarios for the region.