Collaboration Around Local Food Systems
Right now, over 100 people in Ohio, USA are carrying out an experiment to collaborate around creating and evolving local food systems infrastructure at http://socialsynergyweb.org/oardc/
This is a collaboration between myself, Steve Bosserman, Casey Hoy, and of course, all of the diverse people participating at the site.
The participants met at a summit at the end of February ‘08, and collectively created a set of working groups and project proposals at this workshop/summit.
The next step will be to create collaborative processes that will help these groups pool knowledge, and collectively make decisions about how resources will be used to build local food growing, distribution, and retailing systems.
This project is also exploring urban/suburban bio-shelter systems as another way to localize food production. People who raise food in Rural areas could expand operations into “bio-shelter” operations in suburbs and cities. This could be at least in part community funded, with technology based at least in part on open designs. A working example in the Ohio area is Rain Fresh Harvests, an off-the-grid, self-contained, self-sustaining, zero emissions, micro-carbon footprint, organic fresh food production facility outside Plain City, Ohio.
This type of operation would reduce the need for costly transport of foods, would bring energy efficiency to food production, could provide air and waste treating services, provides potential green spaces for human enjoyment via for example rooftop greenhouses on office buildings and factories. Most importantly, this collaborative system is a first step in putting control of local food production back in the hands of local people, and helping them create economies based around commons,and collaboration, instead of infinite exapnsion and competition.