Breaking Ground in Urban Food Systems: Novel Data and Analysis of Direct-to-Consumer Farms that Serve Cities

Abstract

At every scale, escalating demands are being placed on the agricultural sector to simultaneously meet the needs of a growing urban population and navigate the consequences of environmental degradation. Local agriculture is elevated in literature, policy, and consumer preferences for perceived environmental benefits and ability to increase city-wide access to fresh, healthy food. While small, direct-to-consumer (DTC) farms in the United States have strong sustainability-based models of production, they are vastly understudied (often due to scarcity of data). Precedent for this work has been set on the national level, yet very few researchers have employed a site-specific approach that is necessary for regionally specific concerns and transboundary considerations. In an entirely novel approach, this thesis creates an original database of over one-hundred farms that market directly to consumers in a major US city to address this gap in data and inform urban food system policy. New methodology for characterizing farms of the DTC type is developed and employed through the fusion of web scraping, directory data, and visual inspection of aerial imagery. Based on a literature review, hypotheses regarding farms in this dataset are developed, and tested with statistical methods. This research determines that, in Minnesota, direct-to-consumer farms tend to be significantly smaller than farms that do not market direct. Farm size (measured in acres) of DTC farms increases with distance from the city. Neither farm size nor distance to the urban center are correlated with diversified agricultural methods (proxied by presence of greenhouse infrastructure). These findings serve as an initial investigation into this important sector of the Minnesota agricultural landscape, motivate for future work via integration with USDA Census data, and define strong potential for this methodology to be replicated in other regions.