Best Practices for Community Food System Projects

Communities with robust local food systems are more resilient - better able to adapt to change - because they can maintain influence over their resources and reduce their dependence on factors out of their control. This resilience is even more critical in times of crisis, as we've seen during the COVID-19 pandemic

Preparing for Cooking Matters

This toolkit was created by Indy Hunger Network (IHN) to be a supplement to the provided guidelines from Cooking Matters. The toolkit specifically focuses on ways IHN has successfully implemented and expanded the Cooking Matters program. IHN has been a partner with Cooking Matters since 2015. Throughout the time working with Cooking Matters, IHN has found ways to adapt the Cooking Matters program to best fit the needs of the IHN community while still adhering to Cooking Matters’ standards. All entities offering Cooking Matters programming through their organization must be approved by Cooking Matters at a national level before implementing any programming

Revitalizing Rural Indiana: Lone Pine Farms Moody Meats Inc.

Lone Pine Farms Moody Meats Inc. (Moody Meats) is a vertically-integrated farm-to-retail business operating in the central Indiana local food system. Adam Moody, a farmer turned serial entrepreneur, is highly responsive to place-based market dynamics. He employs common sense and tested business strategies with social capital to expand operations—a formula which has made him a recognized leader, with a successful model for improving Indiana agriculture and rural revitalization

“There’s No Place Like Home”: Inquiry into Preferences for Local Foods

Using a nationally representative survey of U.S. consumers, we analyze demographics, food shopping behaviors, and stated preferences and use logistic regressions to further explore local food preferences and perceptions of farmers’ markets. When asked the definition of “local,” the largest percentage of respondents (28%) selected that local meant “in their county of residence.” Respondents assigned various qualities to farmers’ markets, including freshness, healthiness, tastiness, and locally produced. Having higher income, the presence of a child in the household, reading packaging information, shopping for local food at the supermarket, and closer definitions of local all increased the probability of shopping at the farmers’ market

Indiana Christmas trees: growers' perspectives.

Christmas tree farms across the USA are experiencing a decline in sales, as consumers have increasingly turned to artificial trees that are mostly imported from China. The National Christmas Tree Association reports that U.S. consumers have been choosing artificial trees over real trees by 2 to 1 margin (NCTA 2015). The national decline in live tree market share has had a significant impact on Indiana Christmas tree growers. The number of Indiana Christmas tree farms with sales declined by 40% between 2002 and the last Census in 2012, and the number of Christmas trees harvested in Indiana has declined by 55% since 2007. Thus, Indiana Christmas tree growers are challenged by an increasingly competitive marketplace on two fronts: 1) consumers have increasingly turned to artificial Christmas trees instead of real ones, and 2) consumers are buying live trees from large retail chains that import trees from other states. To address this problem, we partnered with the Indiana Christmas Tree Growers Association to better understand Indiana consumer decision-making and trends in order to fill knowledge gaps between prospective buyers and growers. We collected data from Indiana Christmas tree growers to develop producers' capacity and expand the long-term viability for Christmas tree growers in Indiana, as well as data from Indiana consumers to better understand trends in Christmas tree purchasing. This report was one of several produced as part of this research, and focused specifically on the perspectives of the tree growers