Welcome to the blog for Colgate University's interdisciplinary course on food. This is the place to keep up with what students in the course are experiencing in their work at Common Thread Community Farm and through their everyday encounters with food.

Thursday, December 11, 2014

If you were to start a farm in West Virginia...

... where would it be? In my GIS class this semester I was inspired by our class and by Common Thread to do a project about CSAs! I decided to do a spatial analysis to find ideal locations for building a CSA in West Virginia. I chose that state because they are tied for the most obese in the nation, yet they have a lot of arable land that could be (and possibly should be) farmed on. These people could use some local veggies!

A spatial analysis means taking a lot of variables into consideration and picking the areas that fit all of your criteria. The variables I analyzed including social factors (such as poverty rate, education level, unemployment rate and the number of people on food stamps) as well as locational factors. Was the area near a farmer's market? Was it near a large enough town or city to have customers? Were there vegetable farms in the area and how many?

I created criteria for area I wanted based off what I thought would work, which included information from Asher and from Sarah and Professor Henke (and their colleagues) research. I wanted to be in a place where farming was going on, where there was a community to join as Asher indicated as very useful when starting to farm in a new region. His ideas also convinced me that being near a farmer's market would also be a good idea. For the social factors, I decided to use counties that had a low enough poverty rate and unemployment rate that people would be able to purchase produce, but was not concerned with a high level of income as CSA veggies are no more expensive than grocery store veggies.

At the end of of the day, I found 67 plots that would be viable candidates as locations for a new CSA in West Virginia. It was a very interesting analysis as it required me to take into consideration a number of factors associated with current efforts to provide local produce to communities, and it got me thinking of how we might pursue a potential future in civic agriculture.

Here is my final poster if anyone is interested in the methods or mapping:

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