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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